The Not-So-Nice Un-Living, Part XIII

I remember how excited I was to buy The Evil Dead on VHS back in the day. It was all cleaned up and remastered and packaged in a spiffy new clamshell case, courtesy of Anchor Bay, a company that gave a shit about its product once upon a time. I had seen it once before on a battered old cassette tape years back, and it had stuck with me when so many other movies had faded from memory. There was something about The Evil Dead... I just couldn't shake it off.

I was 12 years old, sitting in my tiny bedroom one sweltering summer, popping tape after tape into my old TV/VCR during those too-short nights. I'd seen this particular tape before, when I was younger, but I never even bothered to ask my parents if I could watch it. Like Frankenhooker, there's no way any competent parent would allow their seven year-old son to watch a film called The Evil Dead. Over the years, this tape became something of a legend for me. I would occasionally glance at it in its dusty corner of the VHS cabinet, and I'd wonder what the hell was on that roll of magnetic tape.

I had no idea what The Evil Dead was. None of my friends knew. The internet was just a glimmer in Al Gore's eye, so that couldn't help me. What was The Evil Dead? I suppose I could have crept out of my bedroom one night and popped that tape in the VCR in the living room while everyone else was asleep. I did that all the time with a lot of different movies, so what stopped me in this case? I think I was honeestly just scared. I didn't know what The Evil Dead was, but that was a hardcore title, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to handle it.

The family eventually moved into a new house and I forgot about the old forbidden videotape (now banished to the basement in an old box filled with unwatched movies) until that particular summer when I decided to burn through the old VHS collection with my copious spare time. I found that old tape in the box sometime after midnight, recognizing the title and remembering its taboo status. But I was 12 years-old now. My balls had dropped and I had two wispy hairs on my chin. I was practically a man, and I was going to watch this damned movie in the still of the night, all by myself, with the lights off, and I was going to show The Evil Dead what's what. But in the end, The Evil Dead showed me what was what.

Sure, it was made on a shoestring budget by a bunch of first-time filmmakers with a cast of non-actors, but it worked. Goddammit, the movie worked. There are hokey moments when the scares don't quite work for one reason or another. The makeup effects aren't always exactly seamless. Watching Bruce Campbell pretend to be pinned under a particle board bookcase is hilarious. But the film has a certain quality... it just got under my skin.

I was thoroughly unnerved by The Evil Dead that first time I watched it. I was taken in by this perfect storm of elements that just heightened the experience. It was late at night, and I was alone, watching this taboo movie on an old videotape with a hand-written label. Perfect! You couldn't ask for a better way to expose yourself to a movie like The Evil Dead. Thus began a love affair that will likely end only when I am dead and buried.

I bought The Evil Dead on VHS twice, the original Elite Entertainment DVD, the first Anchor Bay DVD release, the Anchor Bay "Book Of The Dead" DVD, the "Ultimate Edition" DVD, and the Anchor Bay "Limited Edition" Blu Ray. Altogether, I've bought 14 separate editions of the Evil Dead trilogy on various home video formats, and I still own most of them. I've watched these movies a lot. I love them. Seeing the original The Evil Dead on the big screen in 2011 was a fantastic experience that I never thought I would be lucky enough to have.

This is starting to read like one of those long-winded "reviews" by Harry Knowles that I hate reading because they feel like a supreme waste of time. I don't need to know all this pointless backstory, dammit! Just get to the fucking review, you self-indulgent asshole! Stop setting the stage! Now I have become the self-indulgent asshole. I am now that wretched thing I despise. What has become of me?! I was trying to tell you how I don't particularly care for this new Evil Dead movie, and look what I went and did. I've gone and invalidated my opinion by revealing that I'm too close to the original film to be objective regarding any remake.

I'm not necessarily against remakes, as long as they have something new to say. Just don't re-tread the exact same territory as the original film, attempt to do something different, and I'll give your remake an honest shot. I like the Marcus Nispel-helmed remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, after all.

And I wasn't nay-saying the Evil Dead remake from the beginning. I had an open mind. I enjoyed the red-band trailers. I had nothing against this movie when I sat down in a darkened auditorium with my dear cousin Ky, waiting for the curtain to rise. I wanted to like Evil Dead. But it didn't want me to like it.

This poster is a LIE!

The movie began with a completely pointless prologue featuring an oily daddy sporting child molester spectacles setting his possessed daughter on fire then blasting her head off with a shotgun "to save her soul" in a cellar surrounded by dead cats suspended from the ceiling and an old Mexican lady flipping through a nameless evil book while mumbling about something or other. The possessed daughter (before her head was separated from her flaming body) spouted off a stream of uninspired vulgarity that's been a cinematic cliche since Linda Blair shocked the world back in the 1970's. This is how the deadites talk now. They just yell "fucker" and "cunt" because it's so frightening.

Then the title pops up on screen in huge red letters, accompanied by an annoyingly loud, screeching musical sting. This is just the first instance of this movie's truly intrusive and insipid score trying desperately to add atmosphere and terror to the film through loud scary scary noise noise like every other boring fucking horror movie that quickly disappears from theaters without fanfare. The movie maroons us in the woods with five boring actors portraying five boring characters that never begin to feel like anything more than pretty young people repeating lines they memorized from their dog-eared scripts.

They find the charred cellar with the dead cats and no headless body and the nameless evil book, now wrapped in a garbage bag and barbed wire. Why is it still there? Why did the old Mexican lady leave the book there? She obviously went through the trouble of putting it in a garbage bag and wrapping it in barbed wire, but then she just left it there with all the dead cats. Why didn't they bury it with that possessed girl's corpse, which I must assume they buried because it's not in the cellar.

In the original film, the evil book is still there because the forces summoned by the evil book left no survivors to dispose of the evil book. This film has no excuse. They just left it behind because otherwise there would be no movie. If this fucking prologue didn't exist, I wouldn't be asking this fucking question! I'd just assume some bad shit went down in the cabin, and that would be that.

The one with the beard breaks through the evil book's fool-proof security system with his hands and a pair of pliers, then thumbs through the evil book, marveling at the amateurish full-page illustrations and shaking his head dismissively at the handwritten notes that deface nearly every page. Notes like "don't read this book" and "motherfucker", an element sorely missing from the original film. 

Then he reads aloud from the evil book, and evil shit comes out of the woods and pukes oily branches into one dumb girl's nether-region, and she gets all pale and orange-eyed and spouts vulgarity and pukes cherry Kool-Aid in another dumb girl's mouth and takes a boiling hot shower and gets locked in the cellar. Throughout the next thirty minutes, whenever something particularly horrific happens upstairs, the film cuts to the dumb possessed girl in the cellar, having an orgasm and spewing black bile from her mouth while scary scary noise noise blares in my ears.

After everybody else dies, the dumb possessed girl's brother knocks her out, ties her up, and buries her alive while she spews vulgarity at him. Because buring her alive, according to the evil book, is one method of breaking the evil curse and preventing the terrifying ultra-evil dude from rising and doing horrible things to the whole world. Yeah, the remake adds this odd wrinkle to the plot, being that if five souls are taken by the deadites, then some kind of ultimate evil will claw its way out of some horrifying netherrealm and lay waste to the land of the living. I don't understand why the creative parties thought this was necessary.

Anyway, not-Ash buries his sister alive, then waits thirty seconds and digs her up, shocking her back to life with a makeshift defibrillator he Macgyvered together a few minutes before. Surprisingly, this dumb-as-rocks plan actually works, as his sister is miraculously alive and well, not possessed and not sporting any of the heinous injuries she had received earlier in the movie. Then not-Ash goes back inside the cabin to grab his car keys and is attacked by the one with the beard, who is now possessed. The one with the beard says "he is coming", then not-Ash shoots a gasoline can and blows them both up in order to save his sister, who is stuck outside.

Who is coming? The ultimate evil guy? How? The deadites don't have five souls. Not-Ash burned to death, which is a method of cleansing one of any demonic influence according to the evil book, so how did the evil forces claim his soul? And his sister is outside the cabin, perfectly fine and not possessed, so they don't have her soul, either. Not-Ash saved his sister from the clutches of the deadites, using another evil book-approved method of exorcism by burying her alive. So how is "he" coming? At best, this mother fucker has three souls. That's two short of his "unleash ultimate evil on the world" quota.

But no, it starts raining blood and some unspeakable nightmare rises from the mud... and it's Marilyn Manson, walking right off the cover to his Mechanical Animals album, only he has the dumb girl's face. And this ultimate evil just spews vulgarity and gets face-fucked with a chainsaw and sinks back into the mud, thoroughly defeated by a dumb girl with one hand (she has one hand now). She even has the cojones to knock off a not-so-clever one-liner before she shoves the chainsaw into the evil androgynous one's gaping maw. Then the bloody skies clear up, the sun peeks out of the bloody clouds, and the bloody title pops back up on the screen, accompanied by scary scary noise noise.

Credits roll, and I get the fuck out of that theater, because fuck that movie. I was informed beforehand that Bruce Campbell shows up as a post-credits nod to the fans, but I couldn't be motivated enough to stick around that long just to be reminded of better movies.

I really don't like this Evil Dead movie. It's superior to the original film on a technical level, being more polished and professional, but that doesn't matter because it has none of the original's creativeness or unsettling imagery and dialogue.

In the original film, after Scotty pulls a possessed Shelly out of the burning fireplace, she writhes on the floor and speaks in a halting, childish tone. She says "thank you. I don't know what I would have done if I had remained on those hot coals, burning my pretty flesh", before attacking him with renewed vigor. That moment is creepier and more effective than anything in the remake. Linda sitting cross-legged on the floor, all bone-white eyes and a crooked grin, singing "we're gonna get you, not another peep, time to go to sleep" is a genuinely disturbing moment in the original film, and there is absolutely nothing in the remake that comes anywhere close to that.

This movie tries to drown you in a sea of blood in an effort to distract you from the fact that has absolutely nothing else to offer. It's no better than the Paranormal Activity movies or the insufferable Hatchet movies or any chapter of the Saw saga. It's nothing special. The Evil Dead is special. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn is special. Army Of Darkness is special. Evil Dead is an unimaginative waste of 90 minutes.

Now that I'm finished with all that, it's time for the next exciting episode of Lies My Podcast Told Me! Entitled The Streaming Lush, this chapter is actually part two of a five-part series subtitled A Barrel-Aged Odyssey, which chronicles the five stages of whiskey-induced drunkenness and incoherence over one long night spent sitting in front of an old television broadcasting unintelligible spanish-language video signals.

It's also about David Bowie. But not really.

What happened to chapter one? I haven't posted it yet, and I probably never will. I'll probably never post chapters three-five, either, so don't hold your breath. Yes, this means you're coming in at the middle of a story in-progress, but that doesn't matter. Nothing matters. We're all just dust motes floating on a celestial current, drifting through infinity on the sweaty back of some strange phantom named Jiff  Heyward.

Don't Play This:

Chapter 27: The Streaming Lush



Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch Repo Man again, because

TIME MARCHES ON!

She's wearing opera gloves! It's classy!