[Official Thread] The Evil Dead Remake - Mark your spoilers!

Swofty link said:
[quote author=Elise41 link=topic=835.msg7406#msg7406 date=1369616460]
I'm quite surprised to say that a month and a half later, the movie is no longer in theaters in my city.
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A month and a half run in your theaters?! .... Is that typical of the U.S. and Canada run times? no doubt that would go some way to explaining the 80 million $'s ... so far, I'm only aware of two week runs in the UK.
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It's not atypical for a film to run 8+ weeks here. I live in the second biggest city in Canada so it has nothing to do with our small population. ;)
 
To be truthfull, I try to avoid multiplex cinemas so maybe some UK showings run longer.
 
Re how quickly the movie left theatres stateside: they were already reducing show times over in my neck of the woods by week two; by week three it was down to three showings a night or less, and by week 4 it was playing in just one theatre at 10 at night twenty minutes from here, with it generally being entirely gone from my area by week five.  I guess you could argue it was front-loaded, but it also that word of mouth might have been a bit lukewarm.  According to Box Office Mojo, it was already falling off by 30 percent by the Sunday night of its release.

You can compare that (perhaps unfairly) to Oz or GI Joe, both of which are still playing in my area, albeit only twice a day in one theatre.  Some movies can indeed hold on forever theatrically - I once saw Brave four months after it was released in a half-packed theatre, for instance. Anyway, we'll see if it does anything when it hits the second-run release market.

Is anyone else eyebrowing over the fact that the commentary is blu-ray exclusive and there's no alternate commentary for the standard release?  I still haven't upgraded yet, and the featurette I'm most interested in watching (the one about Jane's experience making the movie) is cross-platform, so I'm not too worried about it, yet I'm still disappointed, and I bet I'm not alone in feeling that way.

RE: unrated/extended: Fede's been saying constantly on his Twitter that the theatrical is his director's cut.  I think he said there's something like ten to fifteen minutes left of extra footage, which means they probably shot everything Fede scripted, meaning

the David/Nat dialogue and the Mia/Nat conversation probably exists somewhere on the cutting room floor, along with David chopping someone up with a chainsaw, which is the only really big gore shot they previewed and never used in the flick, and "We're gonna get you".  Also, the TV spots showed that scene of Mia staggering down a paved road, which is a pretty big hint that they filmed the scripted post-credit scene of her going Deadite again.  They apparently only had to chop out two frames to achieve an r, which means any gore that was rejected from the final print exists as an alternate take or in a blink-or-you'll miss it moment. I think all of it would work better if they were simply alternate/deleted scenes (especially the David scene, if my gut feeling's right and that's Natalie he's chopping up), but that's a YMMV situation.

Will come back with my own review when I rent this sometime in July!

Meanwhile, Canada is getting an exclusive steelbook release:

M2206192.jpg
 
Jake Maverick link said:
i saw it last night, was pretty disapointed actually.....worse than i was expecting.....guess it was semi decent horror movie of the generic type, pretty hammy acting though....'cept Eric seemed to know what he was doing.....they could have called it anything, the only Evil dead connection was people constantly chopping their hands off, which i thought was a bit ridicuous and it didn't actually achieve anything.....

and who said there was no CGI? there was loads of it! but right blend i thought.....mainly just the bits you simply can not do with other methods of effects.....!

it was hardly worth Bruce getting all tarted up for that final scene....;-)
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Only one person chopped their hand off the other had to rip hers off. They are to two different scenes, and served totally different purposes. If you thought that was the only thing tying it to The Evil Dead you must have been watching something entirely different.  }:]\-<
 
Did anyone pick up the blu-ray from Best Buy? Apparently they have a bonus disk with a 30 minute Bruce Campbell interview on it.  :angryfist
 
Yeap bough the Best Buy exclusive and ordered from ebay the target steelbook exclusive, which I'm probably not going to open.
 
The Japanese always have great packaging for everything:
evildead_2013_blu-ray_japan.jpg
 
SO!  I finally saw it several plus weeks ago, and after giving it a heavy rewatch about two weeks hence for a pro review.

My honest opinion?  A four out of ten.  Some reasons:

PLOT & Character Motivation:

* I didn't really begrudge the whole 'Mia's a junkie' plot until they dropped it twenty minutes into the movie.  Once Olivia's infected, there's no longer a question of it being Just Mia's Horse Delusions.  So the most original element immediately goes out the window only for it to be brought back to light when The Abomination calls her a 'pathetic junkie'.  They could've done so much more with that idea.

* Taking the tape recorder out of the plot forces Eric into an unfortunate position; it makes him simultaneously wise enough to read the transcriptions within the book for a solution yet dumb enough to make a rubbing of the words and recite them out loud; his negative, Deadpan Snarker personality doesn't help.  Scott was much the same in the original movie, with one crucial difference; none of the kids have any clue what the book says.  They're doomed by accident after playing the recording.  Having Eric know more and then anyone else, then trying to force us to root for him, was a bad move. They piled on another cardinal sin by editing out the fact that he was a professor wannabe in the original script.  Without that detail, his obsession with the book makes no sense.

* If you came home to your beloved family cabin to stage a monitored detox for your junkie sister, and you find out that the place has been both broken into and apparently violated by devil-worshipping locals, would you stay and continue the detox?  Or would you call the local sheriff and then go take care of business in another setting?

* And for that matter, how is it Mia's 'super sensitivity' and Grandpa's extra-sharp nose were the only ones able to pick out the scent of hundreds of cats rotting away under their feet? 

* The whole 'the infected cannot leave the cabin' thing Olivia goes through plays better in text than on screen, and Natalie actually DOES leave the house successfully while possessed.  So did Mia. 

* Mia did next to nothing by way of actually taunting the group for the majority of the movie; she's much, much less of a force than Cheryl was, and never escapes the cellar to go on a rampage.  People literally have to go into the cellar to be menaced by her!

* Mia solves literally nothing for herself.  Even in the original movie, Ash grows enough courage to battle back against Cheryl and Scott and even the cabin itself.  True, he survives only by accident.  But Mia's got all of the character development of a football; she doesn't even get to consciously decide to put aside her addiction.  At least Ash's own human sentimentality saved him from the Deadite's clutches - for Mia, it's David's literally forcing her to live that does the job.

* Switching protags from Eric and David to Mia at the last minute as a 'shocking twist' is lame and feels like a rip-off.  We should have been following Mia throughout the entire movie (which, shock of shocks, is what we do with Ash in the original) to build proper rooting value for her.

* David is treated as an evil, evil person for his cowardice; in the original, Ash's a coward...but he's also not a jackass who abandoned his dying mom and junkie sister by turns.  Then again, the movie's events hinge on an event we never witnessed, so who knows; maybe David and Mia's mom was an addict?  Maybe he was trying to distance himself from his toxic family? 

* The last half hour disintegrates into Evil Dead 2 style camp, after maintaining a serious facade for most of the movie's running time. 

* Imagine you're the devil.  Imagine that you've been waiting for centuries to rise to the surface of the earth and bring down a rain of fire and death.  And when you do...you rise as your last victim's worst version of herself, because psychology?  And artistic values?  You get to have super strength, but golly - your gangly legs are ripe for chainsawing!  It's so easily killed, and the fact that the Abomination sounds exactly like ET does not help it become scarier.  Like, at all.

* How the hell did David look at the hammer and immediately come to the conclusion that Mia killed their dog?  Why would Mia have had any interest in the toolshed in the first place?  Anyone on that trip, even maybe oh, I don't know, THE PERSON WHO BROKE INTO YOUR HOUSE, STRUNG UP A BUNCH OF DEAD CATS, AND BURNED SOMETHING THAT SMELLS LIKE HAIR IN YOUR BASEMENT could have killed Grandpa.

* Mirrors in the evil dead verse, much like "the book", don't work that way.  Fede really loves foreshadowing, doesn't he?

* The tone is all over the place.  Is this camp or is it trying to be serious horror; am I supposed to care about David and Mia's plight or am I supposed to be chuckling at Eric? The original was straight horror - no chuckles except for teeny nervous ones.  I've had people repeatedly misconstrue this movie as tongue-in-cheek to my face; I'm pretty sure Fede would disagree with that point.

* How did David look at a tree being struck by lightning and come to the conclusion that he could shock Mia back to life?  Does he know what happens to the brain when you've been suffocated?  And how does he know that the demon in Mia won't simply fake its exorcism?

* Oh, and to state what nearly everyone has stated about the plot, but to do it with even firmer evidence: the devil never got his five souls.  With Eric, David and Girl In The Beginning all cleansed pre-death by fire, that leaves only Olivia, Natalie and Grandpa (if satan has any interest in dog's souls).  And since Mia has all of her soul, that means he only got three.


Performances:

* Lou Taylor Puccci pretty much owns the movie, in that he's the only actor who's consistently good.  He also pretty much walks Shiloh Fernandez through the entire picture.

* Jane Levy's been praised to high heavens for this movie, but she gives several weak line readings that ruin what should be several 'fuck yeah' moments. She's at her best when she's being menaced, and gives several good moments as a Deadite but went far, far into the Linda Blair realm with it - Alvarez should've told her to tone it down, because with all of that Deadite makeup caked on her face she looks way too much like Reagan.  The sad part is you can tell they were going for a stylized version of the Deadite Cheryl makeup when you put the stills side-by-side.

* Shiloh Fernandez is uniformly terrible.  Let's just be honest and admit that now.  Between his inappropriate use of facial expressions, his bizarre and unbrotherly chemistry with Levy, his dead eyes and terrible fake crying and shitty line readings, I resented being stuck with him for ninety minutes.

* Elizabeth Blackmore's role was edited down to nothing, but her dead eyes and flat line readings are pretty awful.  She has two great moments; when she spits out her own blood during her amputation scene and when she breaks down crying before dying.  Otherwise she's given nothing to work with.

* Jessica Lucas (who got flipped billing with Blackmore for the DVD release - good on her agent) was decent as a Deadite but awful the rest of the movie.


Direction

* The best thing about the movie?  How they shot the woods.  It felt like we were stuck in an aquarium, and was at least interesting.

* The bad?  Ugh.  Alvarez can't frame or edit worth a damn.  He's so obsessed with camera tricks that he loses utter track of his story.  Whenever he wasn't trying to top Sam's shot list, he was employing jittercam.  This movie wants me to care about David, Mia and Eric, Eric and David's friendship, Mia and David's relationship, Mia's sobriety, etc....and would rather give me spinny camera angles, jittercam, and full-on video game bs.  If it had been lighter on the plot, I would not be complaining.

* I think the movie' most egregious mythology changes are definitely his choice to deliver Force POV shots...with absolutely no force chasing anybody down.  Between that, the decision to use the book as a soothsaying device and the decision to depersonalize the cabin and the movie nearly felt as if it could have been set anywhere with a basement and a ficus bush.

* And holy shit, you do not do a build scene like that.  Historically, they're supposed to be "took a level in badass" moments for Ash; recontextualizing them as David being very very sad and timorous because his sister might be dying is a bad, bad move.

SFX

* Eh, all right.  Too many rubber appliances, to many obvious 'actor squeezes bladder filled with red liquid under severed arm prosthetic' moments. There is, at least, variety in the original movie. It TRIES to be nasty and shocking and brutal, but most of it scares are relentlessly manipulative (when in doubt, kill the dog and the kid!). (on another note, did this movie need three scenes featuring severed arms?)

* Am I the only one who noticed the obvious dummy effect when Eric was lit ablaze?  And the fact that Natalie's lower arm was twice the size of her upper arm?  After the endless bragging about magic tricks and post effects, they might've gotten better use out of CGI.  And when you watch it on a smaller screen, you can tell what's been sweetened and what hasn't to an embarrassing degree.

The only question I'm left with is: what happened, guys?  This was supposed to be a "gamechanger" in the horror world; it was praised to heaven and back by the horror media as a huge event in the genre - and we ended up with what amounted to a three week run that got outgrossed two months later by "the Conjuring" and "The Purge".
 
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