Anyone who knows me or reads my reviews will know I’m not the “how dare they?” type that some are when it comes to remakes, especially horror ones – heck, I even have a place in my heart for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake (I have a review of that but not Hitchcock’s original; just like I’m posting this while there’s only one of my old “barely a” reviews from 2004 of the original on the site, which I guess says it all…). So I’ve been pretty excited about this one for as long as it’s been rumoured, to say nothing of more recently as the buzz started coming in.

For a movie that’s been hyped as the “most terrifying film you will ever experience”, Evil Dead starts boldly slow. After a kind of unnecessary flashback (which sort of reminded me of the opening scene of Exorcist II now I think about it) establishing the “history” of the book that will cause all the trouble (surely just the sight of the flesh-bound tome is enough to tell you all you need to know?), there’s even more kind of unnecessary contrivance to get to the meat we’re all here for. Though a girl going cold turkey is a pretty good excuse for her and a bunch of her friends to hole up in an old cabin in the woods for a while – no matter what condition it’s in upon arrival – it’s evident from the start here how thin the characters are. The brains (brainy enough to have a good stab at interpreting the contents of the evil book, but not strong enough to resist the many warnings scrawled within its pages), the brawn, the blond, etc – I actually found myself wondering how many, shall we say, less informed viewers will see this and think it’s maybe somehow ripped off or at least related to last year’s Cabin in the Woods.

Much has been said of this movie’s more “serious” approach compared to the original which people remember as being as funny as it was scary and I’ve found myself agreeing with the bemused likes of Robert Florence on Twitter who wrote, “I don’t get these reviews that criticise the new Evil Dead for not being as ‘fun’ or ‘funny’ as the original. They’re thinking of ED2 right?” In an interview on Mark Kermode’s Radio 5 film show, the film’s director Fede Alvarez claimed that Sam Raimi had said he always intended for the original to be plain scary while Kermode countered quoting Raimi from an earlier interview of his where Raimi said he always intended for it to be “the three stooges with blood and guts for custard pies”. I think what we need to do is wonder why Raimi made the much more genuinely funny Evil Dead 2 more of a remake itself than a sequel and I believe it’s likely, like any artist, Raimi was striving for a very particular tone that was an exact degree to one side of the line between comedy and horror – two genres that have always been intertwined (another horror legend Wes Craven has often stated he directs “scares” with much the same attention to timing as the greatest comedy minds) – and he felt after the first movie and given more resources that it was worth another shot.

None of this changes the fact that the first movie, on its surface, is more scary and nasty than it is funny. The laughs come (for me, at least – and I’ve watched it twice in the past couple of years – and again, tonight, just to check – with no diminishment of its impact) because its pace, the sheer barrage of horror, is just so relentless, particularly in the last half hour, and that’s the one thing that this new rendition is frequently lacking. There are so many places where the action slows or stops completely for more discussion and explanation of what’s going on – enough, at least, that my mind wandered, and I began mentally composing this review. Which is great because I didn’t want this to be another movie I fail to write about, but of course doesn’t speak well for the movie.

But I’ll be honest, what I really wanted from this movie was what I’d heard about in recent weeks – a number of horror directors/fans on Twitter have raved about how gory the movie is, and when those people are raving about such things, it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up. On this count, at least, and it’s really the only count that matters, Evil Dead does not disappoint. Almost all varieties of squeamishness are catered for, including my own which is pretty niche in the genre. My personal squirm inducer? Needles, craft knives, small, seemingly innocuous things. One of the horror films that always gets to me is the original 1981 Halloween II – in that movie, set in a hospital, people are variously killed by syringes, scalpels, one person simply slips in blood on the floor and bangs his head badly on the floor (oddly the worst one for me, completely non-violent, just awfully unfortunate and sad). Here, you get almost all those things (the scalpel replaced with the aforementioned craft knife) in just one scene – with a girl cutting her own face off as an aperitif. All of this, as has been mentioned often in promotional interviews, is done with practical effects, not computer effects, and this is probably this movie’s killer move. To make one of my wild comparisons, the practical gore here works in a similar way as the live singing did in Les Misérables (whatever my personal feelings about that movie are). Though live singing – especially as thorough as they did on Les Mis – had rarely been done before, practical effects are almost as rare these days so they come as just as pleasant a surprise. Couple this with some fantastically claustrophobic set and sound design and it’s really hard not to recommend this one despite its relative emptiness, and it’s one I’ll probably watch again more often than needed. There’s plenty of homage to the original to keep the fans happy (and stick around till after the credits to be real happy) and it bodes well for the future of mainstream horror.

While some people go into fits of “childhood raped!” when all these remakes get announced, I tend usually to remain a little calmer – it’s not like they’re starting by burning the original. When it comes to the Nightmare on Elm Street series, they can just about do whatever they want by me… more Freddy is always a good thing in my opinion. I flinched when it came out that Robert Englund would not be reprising the role, but when the casting of Jackie Earle Haley was announced, I kinda relaxed. He’s been great in his recent roles and looked like he’d fit the part nicely (though I did wonder if he feared typecasting after playing a child molester in Little Children also).

If there’s one thing that worried me most about this remake it was the enormous shift in the way Freddy’s past crimes are portrayed. Everybody speaks of the fact that Freddy is explicitly a child molester here and defends it, saying “he was always a child molester in the other movies, it just wasn’t talked about” but this is simply not true. The huge difference between “classic” Freddy and “new” Freddy is; the old Freddy killed children, he was a child killer – the new Freddy touched them; and for me it introduces a partially welcome yet cinematically not so welcome complexity to the fact that the parents of those children still burned him alive for this. In both cases the story becomes about “the sins of the father” being revisited on the young, vigilante violence never being the best answer… but in the remake one kinda sees where Freddy is coming from… and interesting though it may be, I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

It’s always nice to see Freddy returned to the darker place he began – the earthier, entirely serious version of the character in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is a case in point. But I have to admit, I have a monumental soft spot for just about all of the sequels in this franchise, a spot that’s been seriously rekindled by recently watching the epic Never Sleep Again documentary. There was some serious imagination going on in all those sequels, and most of them touched on something deeper too (even if, like in Freddy’s Revenge, it wasn’t always intentional). I came to this remake, unlike those who were unfairly planning to compare it directly to the original, thinking, if it’s only as good as the least of the sequels, then that’s about as good as we can hope for.

The problem is, then, that it’s ultimately neither here nor there. The seriousness of Freddy’s crime and the questionable response of the parents to that crime introduces (at least, I believe it should introduce to any rational mind) too much grey to the proceedings of the main plot, while at the same time it just goes about business as usual in offing its teenage cast in new and unusual ways. We shouldn’t be thinking while Freddy slices and dices his victims, “wait, doesn’t he kinda deserve this kind of vengeance in a way?” especially when the kids concerned aren’t even as interesting as the likes of Nancy, Rod, Glenn, and even going into the sequels, Kristin, Alice, etc. The movie actually has one of the kids at one point suggest that in fact Freddy might never have even touched them in the first place, that the whole thing could just be hysteria gone out of control. This is all very interesting, but an Elm Street movie is so not the place for it, and if it is, then I think you have to be simultaneously a lot more simple and subtle about it.

But I feared as much about this aspect of the story. I figured if nothing else worked, then Haley’s Freddy just might. And on this I’m sad to say, I was wrong again. As with the makeover of Freddy’s backstory, there’s been an effort here to make Freddy’s very look darker and more “realistic”. Again, I feel this is a bad idea to begin with – the guy is operating in the dream world, making any sense of “realism” as literally unimaginative as most of Inception‘s production design – and, in any case, it doesn’t even come across as more realistic anyway. Haley puts on a Christian Bale Batman-like voice and the rest is down to the filmmaking, which at best is only as good as any of the old sequels.

Having said that, Freddy’s actually the only character that seems to be fully written here. In fact, at times I felt so affronted by the mehness of this version’s Nancy that I wondered why – since they changed a few other characters’ names from the original – they couldn’t have changed hers too. Perhaps the blandness of her character was deliberate, a reflection of the fact she has repressed memories of what Freddy did… it wouldn’t surprise me, and again it’d be interesting… but give me the simplicity of Heather Langenkamp as the resourceful girl next door any day over this.

As in the recent Karate Kid remake, there are direct nods to the original presumably in hopes of appeasing genuine fans of the series (honestly? I’d prefer you just make a good Freddy movie). We get Freddy’s head coming through Nancy’s wall (albeit in obvious CG), we get Tina’s bedroom death (which is actually quite terrifyingly done), we get Freddy’s claws coming up through the bathtub (but blink and you’ll miss it, it’s a much shorter scene than the original) and the girl in the school hallway… we even get what I’m sure is the power plant that featured in Nightmare 2… and the references branch out to other series: there’s a cleverly twisted version of the closet scene at the end of Halloween (Nancy hides from Freddy like Laurie did from Michael; Freddy of course, being transdimensional, simply manifests right next to her…) The little girls that were so haunting at the very end of the original (and appeared in places throughout the sequels) are here multiplied, appearing all over the place, further enhancing the new backstory. Of all the nods to the original series however, I think the best may be the score, which does its homage delicately whilst still being its own work.

In all honesty, this isn’t a terrible movie despite all that I’ve said. Like I said, more Freddy is always a good thing and I’ll gladly watch what anybody wants to do with the guy. There are standalone scenes here that are impressive – a great scene in a pharmacy, for instance, where the line between dreams and reality blurs in the way some of my favourite moments in the original series managed; or the ending which, though very similar to the cheesy “last shock” of the original, is frankly played much better here (it doesn’t look like a Tampax commercial for a start) – but the attempt to darken Freddy’s backstory is just way too overwrought and begs far too many questions for one to truly relish what ultimately plays out as the typical good versus evil of any slasher. I can’t wait for the sequel.