Critics reviews

Evil Dead isn't consistently funny (even in the sick way of, say, Peter Jackson's early films). Nor is it particularly thrilling, let alone scary. Gross effects only take you so far, and there's not much else going on here; the plotting is functional, the demon generic and our heroes monumentally stupid...

Our sad, but perhaps inevitable report is that this remake is a pale shadow of the original. Where you really felt that Raimi was taking great pains to show and do things that had never been see on cinema screens before, Alvarez seems content to just ratchet up the gore quotient without ever attempting to give us something new.

This uneasy combination of slavish homage and one-upmanship is precisely what's wrong with ED 2013. When the camera goes roaring through the woods in homage to the hockey stick-assisted tracking shots of the original, or Bruce Campbell and Raimi's 1973 Delta Oldsmobile crop up for rib-nudging cameos, it feels like little more than fan service, dutifully ticking off boxes so as not to tick off the diehards in the audience.

Is it the most terrifying film you will ever see (as per the ads created by the studio)? No. That would be the "Up" documentaries. But it's effective, despite the inevitable fan service, including a post-credits gag that isn't quite in keeping with the grueling tone.

An ode to classic horror with its campy dialogue and hyper-tropes, Alvarez's film is genuinely horrifying. Eschewing the sadistic trend seen in the Saw franchise, here the violence is macabre and truly grotesque.

The new "Evil Dead" has none of the first movie's handmade charm or hilarity, intentional or otherwise. (It also lost its "The.") The director, Fede Alvarez, approaches the creaky material with a surprisingly straight face and a fair amount of throat clearing.

The mayhem reaches a comic pitch with a hastily executed arm-severing, and the pace rarely flags from then on. Still, the ultra-low-budget original's appeal stemmed from its tongue-in-cheek resourcefulness. The more expensive overkill here is a sight to behold, but buckets of blood can't drown out a nagging sense of purposelessness.

...This Evil Dead, while collapsing certain elements of the first two films in the same way that Evil Dead 2 summarily restaged the beats of the original in its prologue, never makes the mistake of remaking Raimi's in light of its present-day standing within the broader cultural memory as an irreverent genre-bender. Instead, it resurrects the original as it was: an inventive horror picture defined as much by its rickety backwoods chamber drama as its paroxysms of hyper-sticky arterial spray.

It's kind of big news, for me at least, that the new "Evil Dead," adapted from the ultra-low budget 1981 Sam Raimi-directed gorefest, is not just not bad, but actually a pretty good horror movie in precisely the sensationalist sense of the original. Scary? Well, I'm old, and I've seen a lot, so I may be too jaded to judge that. But the movie is packed with jump-out-of-your seat moments, and beyond that, it has no problem with being completely disgusting.

What really matters is seeing these pretty people get put through the gory wringer, and once the unholy spirit comes calling, Evil Dead more than delivers: Blood, piss and vomit flow copiously; bodies get hacked with electric slicers and chainsaws; our possessed antiheroine even does the Showgirls pole lick on the sharp side of an X-Acto knife.