A group of friends go to an isolated family cabin in the woods to help one of their number, Mia (Jane Levy), go cold turkey.
When they arrive they discover the cabin has been broken into and a foul stench - that only Mia can smell - leads them to the fruit cellar where it appears a black magic ritual has been performed in the recent past.
They also discover an ancient book down there, secured with barbed wire, bound in human flesh and written in blood.
When inquisitive school teacher Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) tries to read the book, he unknowingly unleashes demonic forces from Hell...
Evil Dead is a reworking of Sam Raimi's original 1981 "spam-in-a-cabin", horror masterpiece, The Evil Dead (and is produced by the three men at the heart of this undying franchise: Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell).
By the end of the pre-credits, scene-setting, opening I knew I was going to like this film.
While it may take visual and stylistic cues from the original (and Evil Dead II and, even The Exorcist), this "parallel universe" Evil Dead - as Bruce Campbell calls it in the extras - mixes things up nicely to keep fans on their toes. There is no analogue of the Ash character, for instance (this was one of the things in the script that sealed Campbell's involvement).
Dressed up in modern sensibilities, the movie delivers a pretty unrelenting cavalcade of carnage, only sagging momentarily as it takes a breather at the end of the second act before kicking things up a gear again for a blood-drenched finale.
Grand Guignol writ large, this is not a film for the faint of heart and while it has some moments of darkest black humour, it plays its horror straight and with conviction.
Except for the slight "cheat" on defeating the demon (the film's one major weak point in my view, in its need to conform to the "last girl" trope), the screenplay by director Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues is unforgetably brutal, gruesome and inventive.
It manages to play merry havoc with the everyday household items found in the cabin (Stanley knife, electric meat carver, nail gun and... er... chainsaw) in wince-inducing ways without resorting to stale torture porn.
By no stretch is this Evil Dead better than the original - or its sequel (which itself was pretty much a remake) - but it is a wild reinvention that both honours the '80s version and takes it in new directions.
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