Evil Dead

Few 80s horrors have escaped the unflinching gaze of the ruthless Hollywood remake machine. But some thought The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi’s scrappy, much-loved debut, too sacred a cow to receive such treatment –especially since Raimi effectively remade it himself six years later with Evil Dead II. And yet here we are.

Fede Alvarez’s re-imagining, flat and witless, doffs a deferential cap in all the wrong places. Present and correct is the bloody chainsaw, and that aggressively libidinous tree. But gone is the innovative camerawork and B-movie charm; instead we get slick, dull production values and glossy over-lighting. Gone, too, is the cheeky sense of humour; in its place, a peculiarly po-faced script. And most conspicuously of all, gone is Bruce Campbell.

A bland cast of expendable twenty-somethings are scant substitute for Campbell’s angular jaw, arched eyebrow and groovy one-liners. Like most remakes, Evil Dead makes a miserably weak argument for its own existence – especially when stacked against a superior original.

Tuesday Trailer: Carrie

Pity poor Chloë Grace Moretz. In her fleeting fifteen years she’s been a lonely teenage vampire, offered her shoulder on which Joseph Gordon-Levitt cried, and watched as her dad Nicolas Cage died of severe burns. And now the unfortunate Ms Moretz must suffer the indignity of not only of being drenched in fake blood, but of appearing in a pointless and unwelcome remake of a much loved classic.

The forthcoming Carrie, a remake of Brian DePalma’s Carrie, itself an adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, swells with pointlessless.  This being a teaser, we don’t have much to go on, and so arguments for the film’s non-pointlessness remain clouded, but we can apparently expect plenty of fire and blood and things, so, you know, a fresh new direction!

It’s pre-emptive to start appraising a film not out until March, of course, but the omens do not look good. Pros include Moretz herself, who has a ridiculously impressive CV considering most children her age have yet to write out a CV, and has spent plenty of time in her brief career outshining her legal-drinking-age co-stars. Cons include the fact that Lindsay Lohan was almost cast in the lead (no, seriously) which does not suggest toweringly good judgement from the filmmakers, and the fact that, like most of the remakes flung our way by a lazy Hollywood, it seems an exercise in extreme futility. Or, as Stephen King himself put it: “The real question is why, when the original was so good?”