So, about the Evil Dead remake…

Spoilers contained herein, you are warned.

 

 

Ok, so I’ve seen the remake.  I wanted to like it.  I really, really did.  It’s Evil Dead.  I love Evil Dead.  So why did I not like this movie?  Why did I leave feeling let down?

It certainly wasn’t the effects, which are gory, over the top and definitely in keeping with the original’s oceans of arterial spray.  It wasn’t the story, which is similar to the original with a group of friends going to a cabin in the woods for a weekend.  It certainly wasn’t the little elements that were throwbacks to the original, such as the “tree rape”, the invisible force running through the woods, the rusted out car, even keeping the book named the same (even though we all know it’s the Necronomicon).  And the chainsaw…and the…well, you get the idea.

No, the movie was just lacking something that has always made Evil Dead the kind of movie you can just pop in and enjoy any time.  The movie is lacking charm.

Charm is a hard thing to quantify.  The original movie had it because of the low budget, the genius of the director, and the powerful jaw-line of the leading man.  Let’s focus in on that last one.  I had heard this movie didn’t have an Ash, or that there was a female Ash, but it wasn’t Ash exactly.  Well, that was correct.  None of the characters was Ash.  None of them had a tenth of his charm.  And a big chunk of the movie seemed to be the plot trying to decide who was going to be the Ash in this film.  First the brother is the protagonist, and then for a short time you think it might be his girlfriend, and then it’s the sister…but none of them are Ash.

So does there have to be an Ash?  No, not really.  But there does have to be a hero.  See, Evil Dead is not a horror film about a bunch of victims.  That’s Halloween or Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but Evil Dead is a story about a transformation from man to superman, from victim to hero.  Ash begins as a normal guy, but by the end of the movie, and certainly in the sequels, he becomes a true hero (albeit a bumbling one).  It’s not dissimilar to Aliens – Ripley starts as a victim and becomes a hero, and that’s why Aliens is a great movie and its followups were all horrible.

The movie also lacked just about any humor at all.  I chuckled a tiny bit during the “deadite lesbian scene”, but it clearly wasn’t meant to be funny.  There could have been humor in the movie, and there SHOULD have been considering the source, but it was deadpan all the way through.  And here’s where we come to the inevitable conclusion and comparison that I had hoped wouldn’t need to be made, but clearly does:

Cabin in the Woods is a better Evil Dead remake than this.

Why?  Cabin in the Woods had charm.  It had humor, but was still serious.  It had a victim become a hero.  It has practically the same premise (and it should…that was the point of Cabin in the Woods), and pulled off the story ten times better than the Evil Dead remake.  Cabin in the Woods had an Ash.

In the end, I think this film will not be well remembered, and deservedly so.  It simply isn’t Evil Dead.  Here’s to hoping Raimi and Campbell can pull off the rumored Army of Darkness II.

P.S., for those who have seen the remake, who in the hell was the girl supposed to be?  I mean, seriously…who was it?  It didn’t make any sense to show this big imposing guy in the Necronomicon and then have the big bad be a woman who looks like she needs to eat a sammich or two before the wind blows her away.  This is just one of those things that logically didn’t make sense to me, and I think it jarred me almost as much as the lack of humor and charm did.  I had no reason to care, whatsoever, who that witch was.

 

Grave Encounters 2 – A good follow-up

SPOILERS FOR GRAVE ENCOUNTERS 2 INCLUDED!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

I’m a fan of the original Grave Encounters.  The movie, if you’ve never seen it, is a “found footage” horror flick ala Paranormal Activity, only centering around one of those “real life ghost busters” type shows.  The five man crew goes into a haunted asylum for the night to film an episode of the show and find they can never leave.  The camera work is spot on, and while it takes a little bit to get going (to get past the awful tv show aspect), it really starts firing on all cylinders when they realize they are trapped in the building with angry, violent ghosts.  None of them escape, and the film is presented as footage found after the fact.

The sequel moves the timeframe to the present (the original was set in 2003, though the movie was released in 2011).  A film student who reviewed the Grave Encounters movie is sucked into the story of how the movie was made, and discovers it might be more real that he thought.  At first he dismissed the movie as having bad effects and only being “one skull out of four”.  However, after being contacted by the mysterious “Death Awaits” on YouTube (the words “death awaits” was spray painted on the asylum doors in the original film), he begins to investigate the origins of the movie.

His search takes him to LA where he meets the producer of the original (and the writers, the Vicious Brothers, have a cameo), and learns that it is indeed real and the actors have never been seen since.  He finds out where the real asylum is courtesy of Death Awaits, and he and his friends head there to film a documentary about Grave Encounters.  They sneak past a security guard and enter the building.  Much like the original crew, they are soon trapped in the building and attacked by sinister supernatural forces who pick them off one by one.

Eventually the kid and his remaining friends find “Lance Preston”, the host from the original movie, alive after ten years in the building.  The insane Preston (going by the actor’s real name), helps them retrieve a bag of tools so they can unlock a freestanding arched doorway in the basement, which Lance claims will lead outside.  However, it’s a trick, and the doors will only work if someone is taking the film to the outside world; the ghosts want people to see the film and come to the asylum (the longitude and latitude are conspicuously given in the film, even though the name of the place is bleeped).  Preston is killed in a weird ghost vortex, and the kid kills his girlfriend so he can be the one person to leave with the tapes.

The movie then ends with him and the producer claiming the movie was just a work of fiction.

As a sequel, the movie hits the right notes.  The ghosts are scary, and the bit where the kids think they have escaped only to find themselves right back in the asylum, while expected, was still well done.  The movie’s main problem is that the opening, which mostly shows the kids in college drinking and making a crappy horror film, drags the story down.  It’s like they only had 45 minutes of scary asylum story, and padded out the rest of the time.  I understand you can’t jump right into the scary parts, but it really went on too long and could have had 10 minutes or more trimmed to give us another 10 minutes of asylum time.

Additionally, the characters in this movie aren’t as sympathetic as they ones in the first.  You never really root for them, mostly because they all are, in their own ways, terrible people or never developed enough to make you care.  Spending five minutes showing one of the characters “teabagging” the main character after he passed out at a Halloween party really isn’t my idea of good film making and again smacks of filler.

The scares, though, do make up for all of this some.  We get to see the children’s ward, with the first ghost to really talk to them.  She goes all “smeared Kiss makeup”, but it’s still interesting.  We also get a thermal cam, though they have to make a joke of seeing an “aura” around one of the guys, which ends up being a fart.  It’s not, unfortunately, used as well as the thermal cams in Gacy House.  The albino giant is suitably scary again in this film, and the chase through the asylum to the exterior is nice, especially when you know that the kids have not at all escaped.

All in all, the movie is an ok sequel.  It’s not as good as the original, but it has its moments.

 

Big Stompy Robots vs. Godzilla-like Monsters

I love big stompy robots.  I also love giant monsters.  I am enamored with Guillermo Del Toro.  I had fond feelings for the voice of GLaDOS. Therefore, I love the new movie Pacific Rim.

Watch the trailer for yourself:

My only question…will there be cake?

 

Another Graphic – The Kills of Vorhees

Another article from The National Post – this time counting the kills of Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees.  Note this is only through Jason X, not the remake(s).

 

Zombie Speed Factor

If you’ve watched the trailer for World War Z, you’ve no doubt seen that the zombies move with incredible, even supernatural, speed.  Let’s forget for the moment that this is entirely wrong compared to the book (I think we all know this movie is going to have about as much to do with the source it came from as The Lawnmower Man did).  This is a new zombie paradigm, and I thought it might be fun to look at some of the classics.

Here we have a handy chart I produced in Excel (I’m an Excel monkey in real life). It’s a scale from one to ten of zombie speeds.  Five is average human speed (including running).  Anything lower than five would be a “shambler”, while above five is a “fast zombie”.

We start with Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead.  These are the true shamblers that defined zombies for decades.  Zombieland mostly had a similar speed, with the characters often outrunning or ducking the zombies.

At three, we have an odd couple.  Shaun of the Dead is mostly the same as the Romero version, but we see several times where the z-words make lunges and chase Shaun, though they aren’t very quick.  The Walking Dead…well, they walk.  They are called ”walkers”.  They don’t shamble much, but they also don’t run very often.

At average human speed (including running), we have The Living Dead, which are actually the most dangerous of all the zombies since you really can’t kill them.  Cabin in the Woods introduces us to the inbred cannibal hillbilly zombies, which seem to move at a normal pace.

Both Resident Evil and Rec (or the English language version, Quarantine) feature zombies that are generally slightly faster than humans.  In Resident Evil, the standard zombie is mostly a shambler, but I’ve put it at a seven because of the special zombies, like the Licker or Nemesis who are very quick and/or can leap long distances.  With Rec, you have zombies that no longer have human limitations on muscles and pain, and can therefore run and climb much faster than a real person would.

Coming in at an eight is the movie that really first gave us the “fast zombie”, 28 Days Later.  These zombies (or “infected” since they aren’t really dead) move fast because of the Rage virus that amps their adrenaline to superhuman levels.  You don’t get a great sense of how fast they are, but again, they were genre defining, so I’ve given them the second to highest rating.

And finally, you have World War Z at ten.  From the trailer we see a wave of zombies climbing over each other, surging forward.  Or at least they might be zombies.  I can’t entirely tell, and after seeing it, I might reclassify them.  This is also the point that I reiterate that this movie looks like it has almost zero in common with the book, so I can’t make estimates that way either.  For now we’ll keep it at ten.

I’d love to expand this list, so if anyone has zombie films or shows they’d like to see added, please drop a comment.  Movies and TV only – no books or I’d be updating this forever.

 

The Kasdan Strikes Back

Deadline Hollywood says that Lawrence Kasdan is one of the writers being tapped for the Star Wars sequels, specifically episodes 8 and 9.  Kasdan was the script writer for The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  He’s reportedly working with Simon Kinberg, who wrote X-Men First Class and Sherlock Holmes.

So all the panty-wetting by fan boys about these movies can just end, ok?

In other news, Lucasfilm is hoping to release 2-3 Star Wars films a year once they are up and running.  Does this scare you?  It shouldn’t.  They’re planning to follow the Marvel model with stories that link in to each other with the main movies coming out every few years.

Tell me you wouldn’t love to see, say, a bounty hunter movie, with a character who’s only minor in the primary films, but has their own role in their series.  Or a Jedi who almost falls to darkness.  Or hell, some Knights of the Old Republic movies that fit in with the new movies by being about the big bad that’s rediscovered in the present, sort of like Captain America’s cosmic cube being the MacGuffin in Avengers.

Star Wars has a VERY bright future ahead of it.  Anyone who thought it was dying or that selling to Disney was a mistake can just go to hell.  I have every confidence that, after three disappointing movies and a lot of missteps, we’re finally going to see some good Star Wars stories.

 

Evil Dead Remake/Reboot Trailer

You may have seen this already, but yesterday the official trailer for the new Evil Dead movie came out.  This is a reboot/remake of the original series – specifically it seems to take parts from Evil Dead and Evil Dead II.  There is no Ash in this reboot, though from the trailer, some of the same things happen to the various characters that happened to Ash in the original.

I’ve heard two things from people who have seen the trailer – first, it looks like Cabin in the Woods.  To this I say, DUHHHHH.  Cabin in the Woods specifically was meant to look like Evil Dead.  It was a reference to Raimi’s classic.

Second, people have noted that this movie seems to emphasize the horror and downplay the comedy.  I’m of two minds on that.  First, the original Evil Dead wasn’t terribly funny, or wasn’t meant to be.  It wasn’t until Evil Dead II that the movie became more of a dark comedy.  The original Evil Dead did have it’s funny points, but it’s more of a straight horror flick.  Second, even the Evil Dead II trailer was cut to look like a straight horror movie.

The thing I remember most about the original Evil Dead from when I was a kid wasn’t that people ever said it was funny.  It was supposed to be one of the scariest movies ever made, and kids dared each other to watch it all the way through.  Evil Dead came out in 1981 – Jason was just hatcheting his first co-ed and only half of Michael Myer’s story had made it to the silver screen.  Freddy was still a gleam in the eye of Wes Craven.  Most of what makes Evil Dead funny isn’t the story, but the low budget and, of course, the awesome power of Bruce Campbell.

I agree that the movie looks to up the gross out factor, but both of the original Evil Dead movies did that in their day.  Eyeballs popping out, heads being bitten, it was all very gory for the time.  Evil Dead II had gallons and gallons of blood, so while this looks super-gory, so did the originals when they came out.

This movie has the full blessing of both Raimi and Campbell, something rare in these days of constant reboots and remakes.  It looks worth watching, at the very least, and certainly has to be better than “watching someone else’s furniture for an hour and a half”.  (ahem…Paranormal Activity)

Now if they just make a sequel that’s a remake of Army of Darkness….

 

ComicsAlliance – The Bloodrayne Review

One of my favorite things to read every week is Matt Wilson and Chris Sims reviewing movies on ComicsAlliance.com.  They have reviewed the Batman movie series, the Superman movie series, Blade…and they are very, very funny in their reviews.

Today they began a dark journey.  They began to review…Bloodrayne.  For those of you who haven’t seen this Uwe Boll masterpiece, I will just say that it is the worst movie ever made.  It is worse than The Castle of Fu Manchu.  No, seriously, it is.

Reading the review, I realized I had consciously blocked out the fact that Billy Zane was in the movie.  I must have done that because, as Matt and Chris point out, Billy Zane is wonderful in every movie he has ever been in.  If you disagree, I will fight you.  It’s bad enough Ben Kingsley is in this blight on our society.  There are, in fact, no less that four “real” actors in this crappy film.

Go read the review, but here’s a warning – do not, under any circumstances, watch this movie.  It’s really only useful as a torture device for prying information out of uncooperative prisoners.

 

Creepy movie – The Screen at Kamchanod

I spent most of this weekend working for my day job, but I managed to sneak in time to watch a new to Netflix horror film, 2007′s The Screen at Kamchanod. This is a Thai horror film.  I’ve written about Thai horror before – it’s quite a bit different from J-Horror or K-Horror.  It’s more subtle, and the ghosts appear quite different than other Asian spirits.

The Screen at Kamchanod is a hell of a scary movie.  Spoilers below.

 

 

First, this film is supposedly based on a true story.  That’s actually impossible given the ending of the film, but we’ll write it off as poetic license.  The plot reminded me of another great recent horror flick, Yellow Brick Road.  The story goes like this – in 1987, a film crew was hired to show a movie in a clearing in Kamchanod, a rural part of Thailand.  They showed up and set up, but no one came – they showed the movie anyway, since that’s what they were paid to do.  Near the end of the film, people mysteriously appeared from the forest and stood watching the movie.  The film broke and the people vanished into thin air.

The movie follows Dr. Yut (or Yuth – my subtitles had Yut but IMDB lists him as Yuth), his girlfriend/wife Orn, and their friend Roj as they investigate the legend.  This movie has a lot of hidden subplot, things hinted at but not fully explained.  Orn, for instance, tries to kill herself early on.  You don’t understand why until much later.  Yut and Roj also have an animosity that isn’t explained explicitly.  Roj appears to be somewhat heroic until the very end, when it becomes clear he’s just as bad as the abusive Yut.

The ghosts are suitably creepy, with the best scene coming when the group first watches the film in a regular theater.  Hands appearing, feet under seats, hair, it’s all very freaky.  The hauntings become more pronounced as the film goes on, driving the characters to the brink of sanity.  In the end, the events from 1987 repeat themselves, and  you are left to wonder if it’s an unending cycle.

I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the movie.  It had a decent premise anyway, but for there to be the wealth of character development on top of a good amount of scares was refreshing.  The movie will definitely leave you looking behind doors and over your shoulder for a while, but there’s a lot of characterization work that is very well executed.  The movie never felt slow or boring, and the effects were actually quite good, on a par with The Grudge or The Ring.

The only drawback to the film was that it seemed to be going for a meta-story near the end, which would have been an awesome ending, but then it jumped back into the regular story and ended with a typical horror-cycle ending.  They should have gone full blown meta and made the ending that YOU the viewer were watching ghosts.  That would have been a great ending.

The film is available on Netflix and it’s not terribly long.  It’s great for a spooky October evening, so long as you can stand to read subtitles.

 

Dark Tower movie project dead again (but only mostly dead)

The story of Ron Howard’s attempts to get Stephen King’s masterpiece, The Dark Tower, onto the big screen (and small screen) could be a King-sized novel of its own.  Now, however, a new chapter has been written, as Warner Brothers has officially passed on the project.

Only “mostly dead”

Normally that would mean that a project is dead.  In this case, however, it means Howard and his partner, Akiva Goldsman, can now pitch the project to other studios.  This could, in fact, be a good thing.  Let me explain:

Hollywood runs by rules that defy conventional logic.  Sometimes properties are bought up by studios who only have the most casual interest in actually producing them just to stop other studios from potentially having a hit.  Did you wonder why they made a second Fantastic Four movie after how badly the first bombed?  Or why there was a Spider-Man reboot so soon after the Raimi/Maguire trilogy?  It’s to keep the rights to those properties from reverting to Marvel (who, you know, made a kinda big movie this year).  The Dark Tower has been tied up with Warner Brothers like this for years.

Now it’s free, which means the team pushing for it can now go elsewhere.  They could get locked into another multi-year ordeal, but hopefully they’ll get a studio that actually wants to make the project happen and not one that’s more interested in just keeping the property out of the hands of competitors.