It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Talks about bringing the Evil Dead franchise back for a new installment had been simmering for a while, with Bruce Campbell mentioning it in interviews as far back as 2004 (already over a decade having passed since the release of Army of Darkness). Then, in 2011 Ghost House Pictures officially announced the new film was in production, with a screenplay by newcomer Fede Alvarez and his writing partner Rodo Sayagues with Diablo Cody doing a pass since English wasn’t Alvarez and Sayagues’ first language. Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Rob Tapert were all back from the original trilogy as producers this time around.
From the start this was an idea I dreaded. Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 are two of my favorite horror films of all time, and Army of Darkness ranks up there pretty close. I fell in line with a lot of the more vocal fanboys at the time, worrying about handing the franchise over to an untested director (Alvarez had only directed short films to this point), with no Bruce Campbell to reprise his iconic hero, Ash J. Williams.
Without Ash, was it even an Evil Dead movie?
Of course it was.
Alvarez crafted a brutal, no-holds barred schlockfest that lives up the memory of the original and also serves to effectively reboot the series for a new generation. Or it would have if we could have stopped whining and simply sat back and let Alvarez cook. While the film made a respectable $97.5 million worldwide off of a $17 million budget, fan unrest killed plans for sequels, despite suggestions of a potential return of Ash (check out the post-credit scene for a taste).
After a brutal and unnerving cold open that has as much in common with The Evil Dead (1981) as perhaps The Hills Have Eyes, we move on to our main storyline. Vaguely echoing the plotline of Benson and Moorhead’s 2012 film Resolution, Evil Dead follows Mia (Jane Levy), her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), and their friends as they go out to their run-down family cabin to help Mia kick her heroin addiction. Once there we move to more familiar ground as The Book of the Dead is discovered, evil is awakened, and massive amounts of bodily damage is inflicted to everybody.
Nobody gets out of this one unscathed.
While some viewers decried the lack of humor, I feel that the conceit of kicking heroin is a brilliant move that forces the other characters to question the horrors Mia is witness to, before they all get a face full of horror. It also provides motivation for sticking around once she starts getting weird. Using their loyalty and friendship as the chains that keep them in the cabin until it’s too late adds to the psychological brutality in play here.
I loved that.
And a lot of people forget that The Evil Dead didn’t have a lot of jokes. It was gory and over-the-top for the time (and still holds up), shocking audiences in ways they hadn’t experienced before. There’s a reason Stephen King went to bat for it. It wasn’t until Evil Dead II that Raimi went full on splatterstick humor.
And I wouldn’t say that there’s a lack of humor here. Alvarez and Sayagues’ script just shows a ton of restraint, amping up the gore to traditional Evil Dead levels by the time we get to the blood-drenched finale. Plus, Alvarez does a nice job dropping in Easter eggs and echoing elements of both The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. I’m a sucker for projectile vomiting and/or firehose blasts of blood and gore. I’ll laugh every time.
In a horror film landscape where remakes are a dime-a-dozen and usually aren’t even a shadow of the originals, Evil Dead does the near-impossible and not only lives up what came before but carries the franchise forward into newer, gorier, more brutal areas. It would just take a while to get back into this flow.