THR wrote:SXSW: 'Evil Dead' Rises, and the Crowd Goes Wild
Producer Bruce Campbell tells a packed Paramount Theatre at the world premiere that the graphic remake is the first in a planned trilogy -- and "Evil Dead 2" is already being written.
The gates of Hell were opened to a new generation of filmgoers in Austin on Friday, as South by Southwest hosted the world premiere of Evil Dead -- Sony's slick, shockingly graphic remake of Sam Raimi's 1981 no-budget horror masterpiece. And judging by the cheers, screams and assorted gagging sounds coming from the packed house at the Paramount Theatre, the effort was a worthwhile one.
"We're like proud uncles of this young man," said Bruce Campbell, star of the original and a producer on the remake, of director Fede Alverez. The 35-year-old Uruguayan was hand-selected by Raimi to resurrect his signature film on the strength of Alverez's 2009 short, Panic Attack!. "We're glad we got him because we won't be able to afford him much [longer]," Campbell added.
Raimi wasn't able to attend the screening, being otherwise preoccupied with the opening of a "tiny, little independent film" known as Oz the Great and Powerful, Alvarez joked.
In theaters April 5, Evil Dead stars Jane Levy (Suburgatory), Shiloh Fernandez (Red Riding Hood), Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore as the film's requisite cabin-in-the-woods bait. Like in the original, the discovery of a Book of the Dead leads to an orgy of demonic possessions and dismemberment -- plus enough blood to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. But the film's R-rating was not hard to come by, according to producer Rob Tapert.
"It really wasn't a fight to get it through," Tapert said. "That was really shocking and a blessing."
During the late-night Q&A session, Alvarez revealed that he and co-writer Rodo Sayagues have already begun work on the script for Evil Dead 2, with Campbell later adding that the team envisions the films existing as another standalone trilogy.
Campbell, a lantern-jawed fan favorite, kept the crowd in stitches with a string of off-the-cuff one-liners (at one point he described the remake as "The Big Chill with carnage and mayhem"). But most of all he wanted to dispel any notions that a remake of the beloved original was tantamount to blasphemy.
"We were a little embarrassed seeing the green garden hose shooting s--t out," he said of one particularly sloppy FX sequence from the 1981 version. "But are we going to go back like George Lucas and fix it? No."
The line drew some of the loudest cheers of the night.
THR wrote:Evil Dead: SXSW Review
AUSTIN — "Blood-drenched" barely begins to describe Fede Alvarez's remake of Evil Dead, a gore-for-broke affair that strips the flesh off Sam Raimi's cult-beloved comic-horror franchise and exposes the demons at its core. The presence of Raimi, original collaborator Rob Tapert, and star Bruce Campbell as producers should give the faithful permission to attend what would otherwise smell like a shameless exploitation of the 1981 film, but the high production values and nonstop action offered here should also please younger genre fans who've never bothered to rent it.
True to the essence of its predecessor but reinventing some particulars (precedent is set by Raimi's Evil Dead II, which practically remade the story from scratch), this film retains the five-youths-in-a-cabin premise, but renames the characters and changes some relationships to ensure we don't expect a beat-by-beat remake. That's good news for Shiloh Fernandez, who has none of the humor or panache of Campbell -- Fernandez's David fills the slot of Campbell's Ash, in that he's the brother of the first young woman to be possessed by evil forces (Jane Levy's Mia), but David is, wisely, never offered as an Ash-like hero.
And while the original had a conventional slasher-flick set-up -- a co-ed spring break trip to the woods -- this one offers more justification for the remote setting and the characters' reluctance to leave when things start to go south: Mia is a drug addict, and her brother and their friends have come to the family cabin to nurse her through a cold-turkey withdrawal. Having already steeled themselves to ignore her inevitable pleas to go home, Mia's friends at first mistake the evidence of her possession for drug-sick desperation.
Not that this misinterpretation can last for long -- what with Mia's flesh bubbling up into a scarier version of Linda Blair's Exorcist visage, and her new habit of trying to kill her pals and spouting demon-voiced promises that none will live until dawn, it's pretty clear heroin isn't her only problem. Lou Taylor Pucci's Eric, having discovered a mysterious book full of supernatural lore -- fans recognize it as the Necronomicon, bound in human skin and full of "never repeat these magic words"-type warnings, destined to be ignored -- diagnoses Mia's condition after having unwittingly (read: stupidly) set demons loose in the first place. But he's too late to keep her from biting some of their friends, allowing spirits to overtake them as well. (The distinction between zombie-style biological infection and demonic possession was always a little hazy in Raimi's series.)
Pucci is this Evil Dead's most charismatic cast member, but Alvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues give him only one wisecrack in the whole film. Jokes are almost non-existent here; Alvarez comes closest to trying to make us laugh (and it works) when his camera casually shows us a prop -- a shotgun, a chainsaw -- whose importance we remember from Raimi's trilogy.
Instead he and his crack effects team work to make our stomachs turn. From the initial attack on Mia -- the infamous "tree rape" scene -- to the literal rainstorm of blood that accompanies the climax, Evil Dead delivers satisfyingly disgusting effects that serve an ever-accelerating action pace. The only respite from the gore comes in those treacherous moments when one of the possessed stops spitting threats and blood to speak in the wounded, innocent voice of the human who used to inhabit its body. The flip-flopping between "why are you hurting me?" and "I will rape your soul in Hell!" is one of the original film's gags -- like Raimi's camera, dodging trees as it offers a breakneck POV shot of demons swooping in to inhabit unwitting mortal shells -- that Alvarez executes perfectly in this unasked-for but entirely welcome remake.