Evil Dead (2013)

Evil Dead (2013): based on the original film written by Sam Raimi, written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues; directed by Fede Alvarez; starring Jane Levy (Mia), Shiloh Fernandez (David), Lou Taylor Pucci (Eric), Jessica Lucas (Olivia) and Elizabeth Blackmore (Natalie): 

Made with the participation of original [The] Evil Dead (1981) writer/director Sam Raimi, this Evil Dead makes some smart changes to the low-budget 1980's horror film that launched the careers of Raimi, his brother Ted, and star Bruce Campbell.

The first is to come up with a weirdly plausible new reason for the inevitable trip to a cabin in the woods: four of the five characters are staging an Intervention/Drug DeTox for the fifth, Mia, who appears to have a heroin problem. 

The second is to alter the tone to one of more seriousness, or at least more angst, for the first two-thirds of the film. The Evil Dead is far less loopy than sequels Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, but next to this Evil Dead, it looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Are there problems? Of course. The addition of a dog to the cast of probably doomed characters goes nowhere, possibly because the filmmakers shied away from graphic violence involving a dog as either victim or perpetrator. The characters are a little shrill at points, though this may be intentional -- certainly, the issues of the various characters are intentional, as is at least one resolution to those issues. The angst tends to overwhelm any attempts at witty or blackly comic dialogue, though. Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer's Body) was brought on as a script doctor to add such wit, but it isn't all that apparent what her contributions are.

Gore and violence come in increasingly rapid, escalating waves as the film progresses. Nail guns (an homage to Raimi's Darkman?) and electric knives do some terrible stuff. Several characters take levels of physical punishment that would have made Bruce Campbell's Ash proud. If you're going to be a character in an Evil Dead movie, you've got to be able to take a beating and keep on punching back. The film bounces ideas from all three previous installments around, sometimes in newly effective ways, though I wish they'd worked the overwrought tape recording of the archaeologist into something other than the closing credits. I love that guy.

Through it all, the Book of the Dead remains indestructible and weirdly attractive to otherwise intelligent characters in search of bathroom reading. Even barbed-wire wrapping and annotated warnings from some previous reader of the tome can't stop the high-school teacher from reading an incantation out loud. Stupid teachers! 

The filmmakers finally jettison most of the serious dramatic tone for the final twenty minutes, cutting loose in a manner more consistent with the series as a whole. Frankly, it's a relief. And the identity of the survivor or survivors comes as something of a surprise. Recommended.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002): written and directed by Don Coscarelli; adapted from the story by Joe R. Lansdale; starring Bruce Campbell (Elvis Presley/ Sebastian Happ) and Ossie Davis (John F. "Jack" Kennedy): Texas horror, Western, and suspense legend Joe R. Lansdale's classic story gets a solid adaptation from writer/director Don "Phantasm" Coscarelli. It's fun, raunchy, melancholy, meditative stuff. 

In an East Texas nursing home, Elvis Presley lies in bed most of the time thanks to a hip badly broken in a stage tumble. That tumble happened some time after Presley switched places with the world's best Elvis impersonality in the mid-1970's. Or is "Elvis" just deluded or demented? In any case, he spent years in a coma and now languishes in bed for the most part, feeling sorry for himself.

In that same nursing home resides President John F. Kennedy, as portrayed by Ossie Davis, who is African-American. The assassination was staged to depose Kennedy, who was then.... dyed? that's what JFK thinks, anyway, along with having part of his brain removed and replaced with a bag of sand .... and placed in a nursing home to live out his life in some terrible purgatory. Or is "JFK" just deluded or demented? He sure does have a swell room to himself and a disabled-person scooter that will be a pivotal part of The War To Come.

There will be a call to arms for Elvis and JFK because an ancient Egyptian soul-sucker Mummy has begun eating the souls of the nursing-home residents, and only Elvis and JFK can stop it!

There's a certain amount of the Evil-Dead-style rock'em, sock'em action-horror that made Bruce Campbell's reputation in the original three Evil Dead movies. There's also humour both low and clever. And moments of unexplained silliness. The Mummy "disguises" itself by wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. It's a jarring, funny visual.

But there are moments of rumination on the inequities and sadness of old age, especially old age for those abandoned by the world. But if Elvis has been abandoned (partially because no one believes he's Elvis and still alive), perhaps he can still summon the gumption needed to take a stand against the forces of darkness.

Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis are superb as Elvis and JFK -- funny, winning, and poignant. By the end, their sanity is irrelevant -- it could only be hoped that the last stand of JFK and Elvis could be this heroic, if it were the last stand, which it may not be. Though the promised sequel, Bubba Nosferatu: Curse Of the She-Vampires, has yet to materialize. Come on, guys! Highly recommended.

Evil. Dead, Too!

You're Next: Written by Simon Barrett; directed by Adam Wingard; starring Sharni Vinson (Erin), Nicholas Tucci (Felix), Wendy Glenn (Zee), AJ Bowen (Crispian) and Joe Swanberg (Drake) (2011): The extremely well-off Davison family gathers at their parents' new country house to celebrate their mother and father's wedding anniversary. They really don't get along. And someone is watching them.

In an old-school sense, I guess this is the reliable Ten Little Indians set-up: characters will be picked off, one by one or in groups, with the major mystery throughout being the question of who and why this is happening. But the whole thing is made and acted with a fairly high level of skill. The gore, when it comes, often shocks; the characterization, when it comes, also shocks at a couple of key moments.

A lot rests on the likeability of Sharni Vinson as Erin, the girlfriend who's a guest of one of the Davison children. And she is quite likeable as an English literature M.A. student from Australia with a surprising skill set. The other actors do what they can with the cinematic shorthand required to quickly set up and then knock down a pretty large cast of victims and murderers.

The movie itself homages the first couple of Evil Dead movies as much as it does films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not in terms of including the supernatural but in terms of staging some fairly punishment-heavy battles between antagonists and protagonists. By the end, at least one character has moved pretty firmly into the Never-Say-Die territory occupied by Bruce Campbell's Ash in the Evil Dead movies. One bad guy gets fatally lobotomized by a blender. Another falls to a meat-tenderizing mallet. A third is lured to his doom by what seems to be a camera-flash homage to Rear Window. Need I say more?

There are flaws -- a bit more character development at the beginning would have more firmly set the stakes for the audience, and a couple of the deaths could use more finesse at both the writing and directorial ends. But most of the film works beautifully, including an increasingly ominous Chekov's Gun introduced about two-thirds of the way through the movie that generates a surprising amount of partially comic dread as one waits for it to go off. Recommended.

Raimi-fications

Oz the Great and Powerful: based on characters created by L. Frank Baum, written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire; directed by Sam Raimi; starring James Franco (Oz), Mila Kunis (Theodora), Rachel Weisz (Evanora), Michelle Williams (Annie/Glinda), Zach Braff (Frank/Finley), and Joey King (Girl in Wheelchair/China Girl) (2013): With Seth Rogen or even Jack Black as the titular con-man-magician-turned-Wizard-of-Oz, this film would have been much more entertaining for all its stretches of limp dialogue and simplistic sermonizing. Instead, we get James Franco as an earnest vacuum. His lack of affect (and effect) makes Keanu Reeves look like George C. Scott.

There are a lot of lovely visual effects. And once the film actually makes it to the Land of Oz, things do get moving, though a molasses-slow epilogue ruins some of that. Boy, though, Franco is a terrible leading man for this sort of movie. Why, Sam Raimi, why? Bruce Campbell, who has a minor speaking role, would actually make a funny Wizard. And as Raimi restages the climax of Army of Darkness (aka Evil Dead 3), which starred Bruce Campbell, for the climax of this picture, it would make things even funnier. But Franco can't even act in the middle of a battle-preparation montage.

And oh, the psychology. We learn the paper-thin motivations of the Wicked Witches, of Glinda the Good, of the Wizard of Oz. Truly this is a dark time for blockbusters now that everyone has to have a personal motivation for everything they do.

Applied to real life, imagine that every janitor was a janitor because dirt killed his father, every auto worker an auto worker because a car saved his life. It's all 21st-century Hollywood screenwriting crap, and the sooner we escape the terrible gravity well of simplistic personal motivation, the better. No wonder video games outgross blockbusters. Still, nice visual effects. Lightly recommended.

Evil Dead: based on the original film written by Sam Raimi, written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues; directed by Fede Alvarez; starring Jane Levy (Mia), Shiloh Fernandez (David), Lou Taylor Pucci (Eric), Jessica Lucas (Olivia) and Elizabeth Blackmore (Natalie) (2013): Made with the participation of original (The) Evil Dead writer/director Sam Raimi, this Evil Dead makes some smart changes to the low-budget 1980's horror film that launched the careers of Raimi, his brother Ted, and star Bruce Campbell.

The first is to come up with a weirdly plausible new reason for the inevitable trip to a cabin in the woods: four of the five characters are staging an Intervention/Drug DeTox for the fifth, Mia, who appears to have a heroin problem. The second is to alter the tone to one of more seriousness, or at least more angst, for the first two-thirds of the film. The Evil Dead is far less loopy than sequels Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, but next to this Evil Dead, it looks like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Are there problems? Of course. The addition of a dog to the cast of probably doomed characters goes nowhere, possibly because the filmmakers shied away from graphic violence involving a dog as either victim or perpetrator. The characters are a little shrill at points, though this may be intentional -- certainly, the issues of the various characters are intentional, as is at least one resolution to those issues. The angst tends to overwhelm any attempts at witty or blackly comic dialogue, though. Diablo Cody (Juno) was apparently brought on as a script doctor to add such wit, but it isn't all that apparent what her contributions are.

Gore and violence come in increasingly rapid, escalating waves as the film progresses. Nail guns (an homage to Raimi's Darkman?) and electric meat cutters do some terrible stuff. Several characters take levels of physical punishment that would have made Bruce Campbell's Ash proud. If you're going to be a character in an Evil Dead movie, you've got to be able to take a beating and keep on punching back. The film bounces ideas from all three previous installments around, sometimes in newly effective ways, though I wish they'd worked the overwrought tape recording of the archaeologist into something other than the closing credits. I love that guy.

Through it all, the Book of the Dead remains indestructible and weirdly attractive to otherwise intelligent characters in search of bathroom reading. Even barbed-wire wrapping and annotated warnings from some previous reader of the tome can't stop the high-school teacher from reading an incantation out loud. Stupid teachers! The filmmakers finally jettison most of the serious dramatic tone for the final twenty minutes, cutting loose in a manner more consistent with the series as a whole. Frankly, it's a relief. And the identity of the survivor or survivors comes as something of a surprise. Recommended.