Don't Watch This Movie: Movie 43
Rating: Good gods, don't watch this movie.
I want to read off a list of Hollywood names that are in this movie. Tell me if you recognize any of them.
Elizabeth Banks
Halle Berry
Kate Bosworth
Gerard Butler
Richard Gere
Hugh Jackman
Johnny Knoxville
Liev Schreiber
Seann William Scott
Emma Stone
Uma Thurman
Naomi Watts
Kate Winslet
These are only a few of the Holly wood names attached to this film. Now, let me break down the movie for you. It's framed as a crazed man pitching movie ideas to a studio director, in the hope of getting a deal signed. These are the pitches:
1.) A blind date goes awry when the man removes his scarf and reveals his scrotum is actually hanging from his neck.
2.) A homeschooling couple try to get their child to have the full high school experience. This involves his dad trying to come out as homosexual to his son, his mother trying to get a first awkward kiss from him before asking if he has protection, and holding huge school parties in which his dad makes out with the son's crush.
3.) A couple finally decides to become physically intimate when she asks if he'll poop on her, which leads to him eating tons of Mexican food for the big night.
4.) Halle Barry goes on a blind date that escalates into a bizarre truth or dare, in which she shoots hot sauce into her privates, and he gets offensive surgery to look 'Chinese'. Also, she makes guacamole with her breast.
5.) Robin goes to a speed dating night where Batman insults him as he tries to get dates and spends half the time describing Supergirl's privates to him from beneath a table.
6.) A black basketball team is rallied to defeat their white opponents, because this is basketball, they're black, the other team's white, so the outcome is obvious.
7.) A cat in love with its master self pleasures itself furiously to images of him, then tries to kill the woman he's in love with.
W T F!!!
There are a few others but I think I hit most of them. They're a series of about ten to fifteen minute skits set within the narrative frame of a series of movie pitches. Many are just unfunny. The problem is that there's no setup. You can have askew, gross humor, but there has to be a buildup, a setup. Because all of the jokes are just skits it's like the writers jumped straight to the punchline, forgetting that what makes a movie memorable is everything around the punchline. The setup of the joke is important, and there's no setup, just a shotgun blast of absurd and often times unfunny skits.
I mean, what else can I criticize? There's no camera work worth nothing, no dramatics, no real need for acting to be done, no actual soundtrack that I can even remember. It's as if they took Family Guy, with its series of cutaway skits and jokes, and extended the episode over an hour and a half. The final product is really, really terrible. I can see all the Yes Men that surrounded these actors, telling them they were doing fantastic jobs, when the final product was actually just garbage. The funniest skit is probably one involving a girl getting her first period because, at least for that skit, it's grounded in something identifiable. All the men involved with the situation come across as men often do, uncomfortable with the topic. My friend argues the scrotum skit that opens the movie is the funniest, and I guess she might be right, if you think Kate Winslet with a pair of scrotum set aside her head is funny.
There are funny parts, don't get me wrong, but I found myself checking my watch multiple times waiting for the movie to end, and that's never a good sign. Do yourself a favor and just, please, avoid this movie. Don't give money to the studio and people that thought this was a good idea. Because they are robbing you of cash. You will walk out, poorer not only financially, but poorer in spirit. There's nothing like sending you off on a Friday night than realizing you paid to see a cat masturbate.
Rating: Dears gods, just don't. Don't watch it. Don't rent it. Don't.
I think this is now one of my favorite movies. There's your rating.
It was chock full of ridiculous dark humor, it kept surprising me, and it managed to weave it all around a fun murder mystery that was all over the place.
I think this is now one of my favorite movies. There's your rating.
Well deserved. Shane Black has not written a better movie, and that's saying something. KKBB should have been a trilogy, in my opinion. Well... I guess Robert Downey has other roles these days.
But what about that Michelle Monaghan, eh? I believed every single one of her emotions. Wonderful actress. As in, ACTRESS.
Django Unchained - 10/10
Dredd - 9/10
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (real score) - 8/10
The Avengers - 8/10
Paranorman - 7/10
The Cabin in the Woods - 7/10
Chronicle - 7/10
John Carter - 6/10
The Dark Knight Rises - 6/10
Prometheus - 6/10
The Three Stooges - 6/10
Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part 2 - 5/10
The Lorax - 3/10
The Amazing Spider-Man - 2/10
I don't care about Looper or Skyfall, and have yet to see Beasts of the Southern Wild and the Raid.
So it finally arrived in Danish cinemas, and after the hunt for a cinema that would actually show it in its original language I could finally go and see it.
And I loved it to bits, the movie is so adorable. The story is amazing, it has a consistent theme throughout the whole thing.
All of the characters are memorable, I loved the connections between the various characters especially the connection between Vanellope and Ralph.
I laughed many times over, and even cried a little one time.
It was great to try and spot all the game cameos and references, and as I am an avid gamer I could spot a few of them.
The moment Fix-it Felix Jr. started to talk I just knew I had heard the voice somewhere, but I just couldn't place it. The name in the credits did not help much. It was not until I came home and did a google search I could slap my self in the face. It was of course Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock, the show I watch a bit of every morning, duh.
I watched this movie last week too (finally). And yeah, it's the closest that any piece of media has ever brought me to tears. I can't even put my finger on the reason for it's profound effect; all I know is that it touched me in a way that was really unique. I don't know if it elicits the same response from everyone, but damn, it had one hell of an effect on me.
Finally went and saw Parker. Statham was great as he always is, it's just that the writing for the other characters is sub-par. Jennifer Lopez's character got introduced so late into the movie, it made absolutely no sense for her to be included in the love triangle.
I watched this movie last week too (finally). And yeah, it's the closest that any piece of media has ever brought me to tears. I can't even put my finger on the reason for it's profound effect; all I know is that it touched me in a way that was really unique. I don't know if it elicits the same response from everyone, but damn, it had one hell of an effect on me.
Scorsese is obviously a great director. He lets his actors act. That moment when the camera pans out from Milieu's bedroom, with him cradling his head in his arms, crying, his wife beside him... damn.
The Vicious Kind - Indie family drama starring Adam Scott and J.K. Simmons. Heavy stuff. 7/10
Slacker - One of the indie trailblazers. Interesting in that we don't spend more than a few minutes with any one character. We just go around Austin, following one character into a vignette and then generally following another character out of that vignette and into another. 7.5/10 (This has potential for me to increase my rating as time passes and it sits with me).
The Conversation - Only weakened by the middle section where there are some cheesy '70s characters and a party. The other parts were incredible and it would have Top 5 potential for me if the whole thing was more quiet like those parts. Loved the music (I also loved the music for HBO's Recount, which sounds like it almost blatantly plagiarized this!). Anyway, still might wind up a Top 5-10 of mine when all is said and done. 9/10
Sherlock Jr. - Buster Keaton silent. Amazing stunts. The first 15 minutes drag a bit but once it heats up it's great. Only 44 minutes total. Comes off Netflix on 2/15 so you might want to check it out now.
-This had the potential to become a great movie. The villain scared the hell out of me, which is probably the only think this movie does right. Bad acting, even more horrible writing. The entire movie's premise is how internet trolling screws with people in real life. With that, the ending is very cliche. And then a post-credits scene shows promise of a sequel. Really?
I guess this is what happens when I miss slasher films.
The movie was not great but it was not awful, it did have it's cool moments and funny parts but no enough to keep it in the good movie category.
Looper - 4/10
One of those movies that from the trailers had a really cool set up, but just fell out flat.
No real action, no real suspense and the whole TK thing just ruined it completely.
I'm glad to see this, it's been thrashed by critics so I've been worried about it, and I wanted to see it (I really liked Live Free and Die Hard). Although, Die Hard With a Vengence was also trampled by critics, and that's my current favorite in the series, so I probably shouldn't have been worried.
I watched them all too close together (the second one on Sunday and the other 3 last night) and I'm now a paranoid wreck. Every creak and shadow is scaring the shit out of me.
I did like them a lot though and enjoyed that I can still be really scared by films.
I like the director's cut of PA1 better than the theatrical or alternate-ending versions.
I'm referring to the version with the cops at the end. You can't buy it on DVD, unfortunately. I bought the DVD and then got the director's cut via torrent.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Stupid Name - 6/10
The RiffTrax made it much more watchable, but I could say the same of anything, TBH. It's still not very good. There's moments where you see that it COULD work, but it's just so unfocused and unfunny it's hard to care.
I would like to quote you some big name sites trying to get you to throw away your cash next week when the Evil Dead remake comes out.
Bloody Disgusting gave it 4 out of 5 stars.
Horror Talk said it was "the most unrelenting and bloody horror film to come out of a major studio in a very long time".
IGN gave it 9 out of 10 stars and said it was "terrifying, exhilarating and relentlessly entertaining new chapter in the Evil Dead story".
So apparently nobody has seen the SAW franchise recently.
First of all, in the last decade, SAW and a few other films and franchises have defined how to make people uncomfortable in their seats. This movie, this iteration of Evil Dead, does nothing new in that regard. Gruesome dismemberment, loss of fingers, scarring of faces, we've seen it all before. Which is fine, as Solomon said 4,00 years ago, there's nothing new under the sun (Quote: The Bible).
It's how you do something that matters, and whatever Evil Dead that was fresh almost forty years ago is now business as usual in the horror business. Not only are the gruesome scenes never anything new, especially considering the course of the horror genre over the last few years, but it fails to be truly scary. Now, if you're a gore fiend, I'm sure you'll find plenty to enjoy about the film. There's undoubtedly plenty there for people who like seeing human beings ripped to shreds.
I have a term, a "torture box". It's a movie scene explicitly set up in which a horror movie can do unspeakable things to an individual in order to invoke the maximum pain upon the individual in the scene, in order to produce the maximum discomfort among those in the audience. SAW almost defined this, since people were literally set in rooms where these events would occur. Many horror movies do this, and Evil Dead makes it explicit, by actually locking the doors of the protagonists when they step inside a room. They enter the torture box, gruesome pain is inflicted, audience is grossed out.
Fairly predictable set up. So, how do you distance your film from its peers? How do you make a predictable setup intriguing, or at least worth investing in? For one, good writing would be a start. Evil Dead falls apart at every corner. Some will say it's just trying to follow in the cheesy source film it's based on, but there's a reason that doesn't work, and I'll get to that. Just follow me on this point for a second. The writing is just bad. Characters recite rhymes or poems invoking the coming mayhem and death. It's foreshadowing, but foreshadowing should have some subtlety. In Evil Dead, there is none. It's just laid out, as if to say hey, we're all going to die.
The writing extends to the characters. I'm not sure what era this movie is supposed to be taking place in, but the high school teacher is written and portrayed almost as a hippy. Having once been a high school teacher, I know none that act like this one does. Not that they don't exist, but the writers went for the cheesiest portrayal of a nerdish teacher they could have. Worse than the characterization, the characters all die from stupidty. As people are being scalded alive, carving their faces off, driving needles into one another and carving off their arms, the main protagonist argues this may all be a virus.
Nobody in real life would act like these people do in circumstances like this.
So look, you've got a good setup for continual terror boxes. A cabin in the woods, secluded from the world, partially by an unexplainable flood, but whatever. You can induce your terror boxes in each individual at this point. However, from the outset, the audience knows the protagonist is too stupid to make smart choices. The audience knows every is going to die because of his stupidity. There's no suspense, no surprise, only the gruesome moment when the terror box is activated and somebody is mangled.
Speaking of that high school teacher, it's sad that he's the closest to a real character that we ever actually get in the film. While everyone else is busy being one dimensional, people acted upon rather than acting, the high school teacher actually has diverse sets of loyalties. First he has loyalty to his friend, the girl possessed in the film. He has ongoing tension with the protagonist, who he resents for leaving their circle years before. In the end, his love for said protagonist drives him to do things that aren't in his best interest, despite the repeated stupidity of the protagonist that constantly endangers their lives. Yet in the end, the writers are content to leave these threads dangling, or at best only touch upon them for the briefest instance. That's understandable considering the screenwriters for this film are terrible with dialogue and anything remotely approaching subtlety.
So before I really get into why this film doesn't work as an over-the-top descendent of its predecessor, let's recap. Stupid writing, leading to unnecessary death. Cliched characterization. Obvious setups with no sense of surprise or real tension. That there is no suspense building, sense of surprise or tension owes entirely to the lack of setup. The writers never bother challenging your expectations of what's about to happen, or allowing a scene to unfold in a way that's scary and genuinely disturbing. Just throw as much piss, blood and vomit onto the screen as possible and hope to gross people out.
Okay, so why doesn't it just work out as an over-the-top horror film? Because there's nobody you can like in the movie. The final survivor? Barely a player until the end. The majority of the cast? One note stereotypes that are acted upon by outside forces and that never act. While the whole film is busy going over the top, you never have one guy that really does the same and pulls it altogether. This is where the movie could have used a Bruce Campbell, because they fail to find anyone to remotely root for or enjoy. Without someone to pull the film together, to cheer on, it's just a subpar retreading of the source material, except without any of the shock factor given what we've seen in the last decade, and without any real attempt to build tension or suspense. It's sad, really.
Evil Dead is a film trapped in the past, trying to be over-the-top when we've already seen all this before. Even the "rape tree" has been imitated, except by barbed-wire things, in the original Silent Hill film. It gives us an uninteresting cast with nobody to root for, a series of expected murders, and little else. It's gruesome, not scary, so take that as you will. If you enjoy true fear, this isn't your film. If you like gore, you might enjoy it. Just know this genre of horror has been beaten to death over the last few years and Evil Dead does nothing new in that regard.
I can understand that. But nothing is wrong with a shit load of blood in a horror movie. What ruins horror movies for me isn’t blood, but relentless tits and bad acting. This movie looks like it’ll be scary as hell.
I can understand that. But nothing is wrong with a shit load of blood in a horror movie. What ruins horror movies for me isn’t blood, but relentless tits and bad acting. This movie looks like it’ll be scary as hell.
Comments
Writing it up today.
Rating: Good gods, don't watch this movie.
I want to read off a list of Hollywood names that are in this movie. Tell me if you recognize any of them.
Elizabeth Banks
Halle Berry
Kate Bosworth
Gerard Butler
Richard Gere
Hugh Jackman
Johnny Knoxville
Liev Schreiber
Seann William Scott
Emma Stone
Uma Thurman
Naomi Watts
Kate Winslet
These are only a few of the Holly wood names attached to this film. Now, let me break down the movie for you. It's framed as a crazed man pitching movie ideas to a studio director, in the hope of getting a deal signed. These are the pitches:
1.) A blind date goes awry when the man removes his scarf and reveals his scrotum is actually hanging from his neck.
2.) A homeschooling couple try to get their child to have the full high school experience. This involves his dad trying to come out as homosexual to his son, his mother trying to get a first awkward kiss from him before asking if he has protection, and holding huge school parties in which his dad makes out with the son's crush.
3.) A couple finally decides to become physically intimate when she asks if he'll poop on her, which leads to him eating tons of Mexican food for the big night.
4.) Halle Barry goes on a blind date that escalates into a bizarre truth or dare, in which she shoots hot sauce into her privates, and he gets offensive surgery to look 'Chinese'. Also, she makes guacamole with her breast.
5.) Robin goes to a speed dating night where Batman insults him as he tries to get dates and spends half the time describing Supergirl's privates to him from beneath a table.
6.) A black basketball team is rallied to defeat their white opponents, because this is basketball, they're black, the other team's white, so the outcome is obvious.
7.) A cat in love with its master self pleasures itself furiously to images of him, then tries to kill the woman he's in love with.
W T F!!!
There are a few others but I think I hit most of them. They're a series of about ten to fifteen minute skits set within the narrative frame of a series of movie pitches. Many are just unfunny. The problem is that there's no setup. You can have askew, gross humor, but there has to be a buildup, a setup. Because all of the jokes are just skits it's like the writers jumped straight to the punchline, forgetting that what makes a movie memorable is everything around the punchline. The setup of the joke is important, and there's no setup, just a shotgun blast of absurd and often times unfunny skits.
I mean, what else can I criticize? There's no camera work worth nothing, no dramatics, no real need for acting to be done, no actual soundtrack that I can even remember. It's as if they took Family Guy, with its series of cutaway skits and jokes, and extended the episode over an hour and a half. The final product is really, really terrible. I can see all the Yes Men that surrounded these actors, telling them they were doing fantastic jobs, when the final product was actually just garbage. The funniest skit is probably one involving a girl getting her first period because, at least for that skit, it's grounded in something identifiable. All the men involved with the situation come across as men often do, uncomfortable with the topic. My friend argues the scrotum skit that opens the movie is the funniest, and I guess she might be right, if you think Kate Winslet with a pair of scrotum set aside her head is funny.
There are funny parts, don't get me wrong, but I found myself checking my watch multiple times waiting for the movie to end, and that's never a good sign. Do yourself a favor and just, please, avoid this movie. Don't give money to the studio and people that thought this was a good idea. Because they are robbing you of cash. You will walk out, poorer not only financially, but poorer in spirit. There's nothing like sending you off on a Friday night than realizing you paid to see a cat masturbate.
Rating: Dears gods, just don't. Don't watch it. Don't rent it. Don't.
@JL_TheProfessor
http://callatimeout.blogspot.com/2013/01/dont-watch-this-movie-movie-43.html
I think this is now one of my favorite movies. There's your rating.
It was chock full of ridiculous dark humor, it kept surprising me, and it managed to weave it all around a fun murder mystery that was all over the place.
Well deserved. Shane Black has not written a better movie, and that's saying something. KKBB should have been a trilogy, in my opinion. Well... I guess Robert Downey has other roles these days.
But what about that Michelle Monaghan, eh? I believed every single one of her emotions. Wonderful actress. As in, ACTRESS.
9/10
My gods I cried about five times in the movie.
Django Unchained - 10/10
Dredd - 9/10
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (real score) - 8/10
The Avengers - 8/10
Paranorman - 7/10
The Cabin in the Woods - 7/10
Chronicle - 7/10
John Carter - 6/10
The Dark Knight Rises - 6/10
Prometheus - 6/10
The Three Stooges - 6/10
Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part 2 - 5/10
The Lorax - 3/10
The Amazing Spider-Man - 2/10
I don't care about Looper or Skyfall, and have yet to see Beasts of the Southern Wild and the Raid.
So it finally arrived in Danish cinemas, and after the hunt for a cinema that would actually show it in its original language I could finally go and see it.
And I loved it to bits, the movie is so adorable. The story is amazing, it has a consistent theme throughout the whole thing.
All of the characters are memorable, I loved the connections between the various characters especially the connection between Vanellope and Ralph.
I laughed many times over, and even cried a little one time.
It was great to try and spot all the game cameos and references, and as I am an avid gamer I could spot a few of them.
The moment Fix-it Felix Jr. started to talk I just knew I had heard the voice somewhere, but I just couldn't place it. The name in the credits did not help much. It was not until I came home and did a google search I could slap my self in the face. It was of course Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock, the show I watch a bit of every morning, duh.
+9 for pure badassery, -1 for Jennifer Lopez’s shitty acting.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter 8/10
Kind of corny, yet a decent action-horror flick.
I watched this movie last week too (finally). And yeah, it's the closest that any piece of media has ever brought me to tears. I can't even put my finger on the reason for it's profound effect; all I know is that it touched me in a way that was really unique. I don't know if it elicits the same response from everyone, but damn, it had one hell of an effect on me.
7/10, just for Statham.
Scorsese is obviously a great director. He lets his actors act. That moment when the camera pans out from Milieu's bedroom, with him cradling his head in his arms, crying, his wife beside him... damn.
The Vicious Kind - Indie family drama starring Adam Scott and J.K. Simmons. Heavy stuff. 7/10
Slacker - One of the indie trailblazers. Interesting in that we don't spend more than a few minutes with any one character. We just go around Austin, following one character into a vignette and then generally following another character out of that vignette and into another. 7.5/10 (This has potential for me to increase my rating as time passes and it sits with me).
The Conversation - Only weakened by the middle section where there are some cheesy '70s characters and a party. The other parts were incredible and it would have Top 5 potential for me if the whole thing was more quiet like those parts. Loved the music (I also loved the music for HBO's Recount, which sounds like it almost blatantly plagiarized this!). Anyway, still might wind up a Top 5-10 of mine when all is said and done. 9/10
Sherlock Jr. - Buster Keaton silent. Amazing stunts. The first 15 minutes drag a bit but once it heats up it's great. Only 44 minutes total. Comes off Netflix on 2/15 so you might want to check it out now.
-This had the potential to become a great movie. The villain scared the hell out of me, which is probably the only think this movie does right. Bad acting, even more horrible writing. The entire movie's premise is how internet trolling screws with people in real life. With that, the ending is very cliche. And then a post-credits scene shows promise of a sequel. Really?
I guess this is what happens when I miss slasher films.
Yippie-ki-yay, Motherfucker!!!
The movie was not great but it was not awful, it did have it's cool moments and funny parts but no enough to keep it in the good movie category.
Looper - 4/10
One of those movies that from the trailers had a really cool set up, but just fell out flat.
No real action, no real suspense and the whole TK thing just ruined it completely.
Review.
Fantastic.
God I'd forgotten how completely insane this film was. You can tell it had 5 different directors.
I can’t watch this movie without falling asleep. It’s kinda lame.
Snitch 7/10
Good action, but poor acting from Dwayne Johnson. Worth it just for Jon Bernthal and Barry Pepper.
The Last Exorcism Part II 3/10
Creepy, yet repetative.
Jack and the Giant Slayer 6/10
Good movie, yet I’m beginning to hate CGI.
Les Miserables 10/10
Good show, bloody good show!
21 And Over 8/10
I didn’t know what the hell was going on in this movie.
Containing as much action as you would expect a Die Hard movie to have.
Paranormal Activity 2 - 9/10
Paranormal Activity 3 - 8.5/10
Paranormal Activity 4 - 5/10
I watched them all too close together (the second one on Sunday and the other 3 last night) and I'm now a paranoid wreck. Every creak and shadow is scaring the shit out of me.
I did like them a lot though and enjoyed that I can still be really scared by films.
I'm referring to the version with the cops at the end. You can't buy it on DVD, unfortunately. I bought the DVD and then got the director's cut via torrent.
The RiffTrax made it much more watchable, but I could say the same of anything, TBH. It's still not very good. There's moments where you see that it COULD work, but it's just so unfocused and unfunny it's hard to care.
I'm not a NC fanboy. I just got quickly annoyed at others where he was not present.
I liked Jurassic Park with Weird Al.
Which Limits you to The Lion King and Batman Forever.
I feel bad for you.
Great movie, again Jason performs superbly.
Entertaining, yet corny as hell. Also, It feels too much like a different version of Army of Darkness, only without the zombies and Necronomicon.
Gee, could that have anything to do with the fact that they HAVE THE SAME DIRECTOR?
I knew that. The story is just too damn similar. Even Raimi probably figured that out.
I would like to quote you some big name sites trying to get you to throw away your cash next week when the Evil Dead remake comes out.
Bloody Disgusting gave it 4 out of 5 stars.
Horror Talk said it was "the most unrelenting and bloody horror film to come out of a major studio in a very long time".
IGN gave it 9 out of 10 stars and said it was "terrifying, exhilarating and relentlessly entertaining new chapter in the Evil Dead story".
So apparently nobody has seen the SAW franchise recently.
First of all, in the last decade, SAW and a few other films and franchises have defined how to make people uncomfortable in their seats. This movie, this iteration of Evil Dead, does nothing new in that regard. Gruesome dismemberment, loss of fingers, scarring of faces, we've seen it all before. Which is fine, as Solomon said 4,00 years ago, there's nothing new under the sun (Quote: The Bible).
It's how you do something that matters, and whatever Evil Dead that was fresh almost forty years ago is now business as usual in the horror business. Not only are the gruesome scenes never anything new, especially considering the course of the horror genre over the last few years, but it fails to be truly scary. Now, if you're a gore fiend, I'm sure you'll find plenty to enjoy about the film. There's undoubtedly plenty there for people who like seeing human beings ripped to shreds.
I have a term, a "torture box". It's a movie scene explicitly set up in which a horror movie can do unspeakable things to an individual in order to invoke the maximum pain upon the individual in the scene, in order to produce the maximum discomfort among those in the audience. SAW almost defined this, since people were literally set in rooms where these events would occur. Many horror movies do this, and Evil Dead makes it explicit, by actually locking the doors of the protagonists when they step inside a room. They enter the torture box, gruesome pain is inflicted, audience is grossed out.
Fairly predictable set up. So, how do you distance your film from its peers? How do you make a predictable setup intriguing, or at least worth investing in? For one, good writing would be a start. Evil Dead falls apart at every corner. Some will say it's just trying to follow in the cheesy source film it's based on, but there's a reason that doesn't work, and I'll get to that. Just follow me on this point for a second. The writing is just bad. Characters recite rhymes or poems invoking the coming mayhem and death. It's foreshadowing, but foreshadowing should have some subtlety. In Evil Dead, there is none. It's just laid out, as if to say hey, we're all going to die.
The writing extends to the characters. I'm not sure what era this movie is supposed to be taking place in, but the high school teacher is written and portrayed almost as a hippy. Having once been a high school teacher, I know none that act like this one does. Not that they don't exist, but the writers went for the cheesiest portrayal of a nerdish teacher they could have. Worse than the characterization, the characters all die from stupidty. As people are being scalded alive, carving their faces off, driving needles into one another and carving off their arms, the main protagonist argues this may all be a virus.
Nobody in real life would act like these people do in circumstances like this.
So look, you've got a good setup for continual terror boxes. A cabin in the woods, secluded from the world, partially by an unexplainable flood, but whatever. You can induce your terror boxes in each individual at this point. However, from the outset, the audience knows the protagonist is too stupid to make smart choices. The audience knows every is going to die because of his stupidity. There's no suspense, no surprise, only the gruesome moment when the terror box is activated and somebody is mangled.
Speaking of that high school teacher, it's sad that he's the closest to a real character that we ever actually get in the film. While everyone else is busy being one dimensional, people acted upon rather than acting, the high school teacher actually has diverse sets of loyalties. First he has loyalty to his friend, the girl possessed in the film. He has ongoing tension with the protagonist, who he resents for leaving their circle years before. In the end, his love for said protagonist drives him to do things that aren't in his best interest, despite the repeated stupidity of the protagonist that constantly endangers their lives. Yet in the end, the writers are content to leave these threads dangling, or at best only touch upon them for the briefest instance. That's understandable considering the screenwriters for this film are terrible with dialogue and anything remotely approaching subtlety.
So before I really get into why this film doesn't work as an over-the-top descendent of its predecessor, let's recap. Stupid writing, leading to unnecessary death. Cliched characterization. Obvious setups with no sense of surprise or real tension. That there is no suspense building, sense of surprise or tension owes entirely to the lack of setup. The writers never bother challenging your expectations of what's about to happen, or allowing a scene to unfold in a way that's scary and genuinely disturbing. Just throw as much piss, blood and vomit onto the screen as possible and hope to gross people out.
Okay, so why doesn't it just work out as an over-the-top horror film? Because there's nobody you can like in the movie. The final survivor? Barely a player until the end. The majority of the cast? One note stereotypes that are acted upon by outside forces and that never act. While the whole film is busy going over the top, you never have one guy that really does the same and pulls it altogether. This is where the movie could have used a Bruce Campbell, because they fail to find anyone to remotely root for or enjoy. Without someone to pull the film together, to cheer on, it's just a subpar retreading of the source material, except without any of the shock factor given what we've seen in the last decade, and without any real attempt to build tension or suspense. It's sad, really.
Evil Dead is a film trapped in the past, trying to be over-the-top when we've already seen all this before. Even the "rape tree" has been imitated, except by barbed-wire things, in the original Silent Hill film. It gives us an uninteresting cast with nobody to root for, a series of expected murders, and little else. It's gruesome, not scary, so take that as you will. If you enjoy true fear, this isn't your film. If you like gore, you might enjoy it. Just know this genre of horror has been beaten to death over the last few years and Evil Dead does nothing new in that regard.
Rating: Don't Watch It!
@JL_TheProfessor
callatimeout.blogspot.com
I can understand that. But nothing is wrong with a shit load of blood in a horror movie. What ruins horror movies for me isn’t blood, but relentless tits and bad acting. This movie looks like it’ll be scary as hell.
Better than perfect. Harmy reconstructed and remastered (in HD!) the original 1977 theatrical version of Star Wars (known later as "A New Hope")
It's Star Wars. Without the SE crap. At 720p (AVCHD).
Win.
it's on the spleen if anyone goes looking for it.
It's not. It's predictable and boring,
Beat that.
I can't wait for this now. Hopefully I'll be able to watch it before the DVD release without having to go to the cinema. *cough*