Really Awful Movies

Our buddy Chris Alexander warned against nostalgia when reviewing Evil Dead (2013), a film which could very well be a younger generation’s touchstone for horror, especially given Hollywood’s propensity to “churn out pedestrian PG-13 horror like a sausage factory.”

When Alexander discussed this film, his qualifiers had qualifiers and his comments were specifically in relation to the bête noire of film critics everywhere: being able to partition one’s nostalgia-driven prejudices and accept the new.

This can be very difficult, as childhood reminiscences invariably creep in like some many tentacled creature ripped from the pages of Lovecraft.

This review is an attempt to approach Evil Dead unfettered by such things (This reviewer came to the series late, enjoyed them all a lot, but wouldn’t place any of them in his Top 10).

The prospect of reviewing the reboot was met more with a meh shrug and “here comes another sub-par remake” rather than a fanboy expecting to administer last rites to the series, potentially ruined by the imprimatur of Sam Raimi’s hand-picked Johnny Come Lately director (an obscure Uruguayan, Fede Alvarez). No biases here, rest assured.

But that being said, this is more of an Evil Dud.

Without so much getting into whether it captures the essence of the earlier films (when it comes to the haphazardness and the humor unequivocally NOT) Evil Dead suffers the same fate as the reworking given to that stinker Prom Night: a cast of extremely good looking people as two-dimensional as a Greek fresco. Say what you will about Prom Night (and we did, getting in a few shots well after being separated by the ref) but even if the plot was stupid, the killer terrible and the setting worse, at least the cast had good rapport.

Evil Dead’s cast comprises a bunch of bloody irritants, especially busybody Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) who sports a hairstyle like an apprentice squire from Medieval Times (see, below).

A dynamite idea gets these people together and isolated though: some tough love for Mia (Jane Levy) via a heroin intervention. Unfortunately, taking someone out to what is the creepiest cabin in the woods imaginable can’t be good for one’s psyche or prospects for a recovery.

EVIL_DEAD_2013_Eric — Put the book out with the recycling, you idiot!

Soon — but not nearly soon enough as the smell could’ve knocked a vulture off a compost heap — their noses lead them to a bunch of rotting carcasses in the basement. Instead of having the place condemned and selling off the property to the highest bidder, they read passages from a book found nearby: Naturom Demonto. Not good. Nasty ghouls are unleashed and well, you know the rest.

The movie looks great, and the practical effects are incredible (one character gets her arm gloriously severed with an electric carving knife. Really? THAT is a device you take with you to a cottage where the diet usually consists of mac and cheese and re-fried beans?) And to Chris Alexander’s comment, it’s a relief to see a mainstream horror go for the gore gusto when producers are usually content to mine the supernatural vein a la the tepid The Forest.

From cabins to another type of dwelling…Evil Dead is a bit like a prefab housing development. Sure, the homes are large, new and nice but there’s just no personality or way to distinguish it from any others.

Best to stick with the groundbreaking original.

**1/2 (out of 5)

[WIN TICKETS TO EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL. CHECK OUT THE REALLY AWFUL MOVIES PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS BOND, CO-CREATOR AND DIRECTOR OF EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL]

The Nightmare_movie — Beware the shadow creatures who look like 1940s newspaper men.

The Simpsons’ resident legal counsel Lionel Hutz once approached the bench saying, “we’ve got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.”

The Nightmare is a purportedly some kind of documentary. However, it focuses exclusively on anecdotal accounts of a phenomenon called “sleep paralysis,” or “the transient inability to move or speak during the transition between sleep and wakefulness…”

As documentary film fodder, that’s undoubtedly scary subject matter.

While anecdote-based documentaries can work in some circumstances (say, survivors of the Cambodian genocide or other instances for which there’s a bulk of historical evidence), a film about a biological phenomenon needs talking heads to weigh in.

One subject reports he was met with “dismissal” when it took his problem to a medical professional. Another was told his nocturnal issues were stress-related.

But imagine for a moment a documentary about Elvis being alive (not to equate sufferers of sleep paralysis with that, it’s just an example). Imagine interviewing people from different countries who swear they’ve seen him. Then imagine not asking Presley’s next of kin or the coroner who signed the death certificate. Exactly what kind of documentary would that be?

In The Nightmare, the filmmakers focus on accounts of terrifying dreams and recreating them in as scary a way as possible. This is compelling for about 40 minutes, then tedium sets in as the sameness of the stories begins to take hold. (Dreams are second only to hearing about how drunk someone got the night before in terms of monotony).

The subjects include a guy raised in Vermont, who reports re: a terrifying incident he had, “I was a year and a half old probably.” It’s widely acknowledged in “childhood amnesia” that people cannot recall events before they were three and a half years old. This alone would likely disqualify one of the eight people in this documentary as being credible. One man claimed his friend started getting it when he explained the symptoms to her, while another reports saying “Jesus” proved efficacious. Make of that what you will.

A reviewer in The Times (UK) said The Nightmare was “an interesting if ethically dubious documentary.” That’s accurate save for the “interesting.”

What would’ve been interesting is cross-cultural folkloric traditions regarding sleep paralysis and the latest sleep science research in the field. The Nightmare is a not-very-good horror film masquerading as a documentary.

** (out of 5)