THN’s collective heart was shattered when we heard yet another sacred cult classic from our youth was possibly being plundered for financial gain. This time, it’s the holy grail of horror, THE EVIL DEAD. Fede Alvarez’s re-make will take the eighties classic and modernise it, with a new story (though this is arguable) and protagonist too. Bruce Campbell – Ash from the original trilogy, B-movie icon, and Lord of the Chins – has acknowledged the anger of hardcore fans, but has been quick to assure us he has seen the film, and that it is ‘definitely fabulous’. Although Campbell, who we love no matter what, is a producer on the film, so has to promote it, even if he thinks it’s mindless hogwash.
He states:
‘We’re really excited and really behind it, [but] it’s going to take a bit to get the EVIL DEAD fans behind it. We know we’ve pissed a lot of them off. We appreciate that and we appreciate their anger and their zeal, but the only thing we want to impress upon them is that we didn’t screw it up. This is going to be just as memorable as [the original] EVIL DEAD without being the same movie.’
He also describes the aesthetics of the film:
‘The nice thing is the film looks beautiful. The effects are 10 times better than we ever had access to and the actors are all better than we were in 1979. Though granted Sam Raimi is a mad genius, so we got a crazy result like Evil Dead out of this amateur enthusiasm sort of thing.’
This is where our skepticism begins to seep in. The greatness of the original EVIL DEAD was, as Campbell so succinctly puts it, the ‘amateur enthusiasm’. A film should not be deemed a success because the budget allowed for polished special effects. I AM LEGEND had pristine effects, but it was still a stomach-churningly awful debacle that pissed from a great height onto its original source material.
However, encouragingly, Campbell does go on to promise us that the project is not being manifested in order to make money from the popularity of the first film. He says:
‘It’s going to wind up being a very handmade movie, Fede Alvarez is so far from being a hack – we didn’t get some 18-year-old director who just wants to make his movie look cool. We got a guy who is an adult. I think people will be pleasantly surprised that it’s not something that was cranked out, where no-one gives a crap. We were involved in casting, we were involved in everything. We’re all over that movie like a cheap suit, so if it blows it’s our responsibility.’
This admission of responsibility is refreshing, but Campbell also says ‘our only obligation to the viewer is that we don’t give them a piece of s**t.’ This is genuinely worrying, because if the only thing you can say about a film after you’ve seen it is ‘it wasn’t a piece of s**t,’ then it’s safe to assume it wasn’t exactly mind-blowing either.
Nevertheless, Alvarez must have some directorial chops as he is Raimi’s hand-picked protege, and we should remain open-minded and give spruce Bruce the benefit of the doubt. After all, he rarely disappoints, unlike so many mainstream actors, who earn fifty times as much as him, and infuriate us on a regular basis.
The new main character for THE EVIL DEAD is intriguingly different to Campbell’s Ash. Mia (Jane Levy), who is involved in her own inner conflict with sobriety, goes to a cabin in the woods with her brother and some friends in order to detox. Whilst there, they discover the book of the dead, and events soon turn sour.
EVIL DEAD fans: what do you make of this ambivalent news?
THE EVIL DEAD is due for release in the UK April 12th 2013.
Source: Digitalspy
