The Cabin in the Woods

Sorry for the delayed update but I’ve been having problems with the computer I’m using. Before I reveal this week’s movie, I’d like to describe my reaction to it. I liked it and I disliked it. I found it twee and affectated. I liked the characters and was interested by the ideas the movie offered. So it’s kind of a mess but in a good way. I’m referring to 2012′s Cabin in the Woods.

There’s a huge elephant in the room. The movie features a twist, kind of, that’s also omnipresent. What I mean is that things aren’t what they seem in this movie and while the movie is up front about this, it’s not until the end when the reason for the whole situation is revealed. So now my dilemma is, do I tell everything that happens? I mean, the movie’s been out for a year. Get with it! But, it’s only been out for a year! So I’m going to dance around the subject and not refer directly to what’s going on. I’d avoid the comments if you want things to remain unspoiled because I’m sure the commentators have seen the movie.
Spoilers(ish) Below . . .
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Ok. The movie follows a group of five college students looking to get away to the eponymous cabin in the woods. Dana (Kristen Connolly) is the Final Girl, Curt (Chris Hemsworth) is the brain, Jules (Anna Hutchison) is the beauty, Marty (Fran Kranz) is the stoner, and Holden (Jesse Williams) is the new guy.
It becomes clear from the beginning that something is weird. People from a vague bureaucracy are deeply interested in the outcome of this trip and may be manipulating what happens. Still, they pass the obligatory threatening hillbilly and find that the cabin is like every horror movie cabin. Awful.


In the basement, they find the creepiest treasure trove ever. It’s like eleventy horror movies collided with creepy dolls, old necklaces, puzzle boxes, and an old diary. Dana recites the Latin in the diary, after Marty dares everyone to go back upstairs, and BOOM. It’s an invasion by a zombie redneck torture family. So that’s it, right? No, because there’s still the fate of that weird bureaucracy. What do they want and what do they have to do with this?

That’s pretty much all I can say without giving everything away.
The movie was written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, directed by Drew Goddard, and produced by Joss Whedon. I’m–I don’t want to say a fan, because I think he’s a smug bastard but I respect his work–familiar with Joss Whedon since I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I looked Drew Goddard up and saw that he wrote the two episodes of season seven Buffy that I like, “Lies my Parents Told me” and “Conversations with Dead People.” So we’re on solid, if supercilious, ground. The intent of the movie was to make a statement on slasher films. Scream it ain’t and I feel so passionately about this that I used the word “ain’t.” But it’s still fun. It definitely subverts the genre in its own way.
I personally like the aforementioned nod to the creepy warning hillbilly that’s in about 75% of slasher films. There’s also one moment in the cabin when Curt says that they should stick together. Then, within thirty seconds he changes his mind and says “We should split up.” I love that moment and I love Marty’s reaction even more. I also love references to Deadites and Evil Molesting Trees, if you have a sharp eye.
But then the movie goes and basically reinforces the genre. The main issue that is the sticking point for me is referring to Jules’ character as “the whore.” Without giving up too much (This is such a difficult entry to write), I get that they were trying to stick to certain archetypes, like the Fool, the Scholar, the Virgin, etc. I just really hate the conflating of a sexually active woman with a whore because the two terms aren’t interchangeable. Also, this may sound like I’m contradicting myself based on my sexually active=/=whore argument, but I hate that we live in a society where whore is an insult instead of a profession. Being a whore should be a job, it should be safe, and it should be sane (I mean, entered to of your own free will and in a state of good mental health as opposed to acting out past issues.) We live in a society where women are punished for their sexuality and elected officials spend time debating what’s legitimate rape. I can deal with this being reflected in the genre that I love and I can even celebrate some well-made movies that deal with the issue but seeing a self-described feminist like Joss Whedon repeat the tired canard but then act like he’s making some big statement about the genre is more than I can stomach. How about killing the virgin but letting the “whore” live? And Jules is killed just before she’s about to have sex with Curt. That’s a pretty strong statement.
Clearly. I have issues with Joss Whedon. He reminds me of the guy that shows up in every women’s studies class and says, “I think I’m a feminist but…” and then comes out with the most offensive shit ever. This is the guy that once said, “I don’t give fans what they want, I give them what they need.” Hey, maybe instead of reenacting your daddy issues, why don’t you stop and listen to women instead of telling them what they want?
Ugh, this entry is coming out so much more bitter than I mean it to. The movie is good, ok? But it’s not perfect. Fine but flawed, I guess would be how to describe it. For fan’s of Whedon’s other work, there are definitely callbacks. I haven’t watched Firefly yet but I can sure point out the Buffy-isms. This mysterious bureaucracy monitoring the cabin resembles The Initiative from season four. Also, in a scene with many monsters, look out for what looks like Glory’s snake demon and Xander’s evil clown.
Despite the way this post sounded, I actually enjoyed this movie. I liked the characters and was sad to see them die. Compare this with the jerks from Cabin Fever. I really liked the direction the story took and thought that it was a fun movie to watch. So there, I guess. Keep an eye out for Sigourney Weaver!

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 The Dream Master

Nightmare on Elm Street 3 ended ambiguously, suggesting that Freddy may not be as dead as the dream warriors think he is. Scientists estimate that there are approximately thirty Elm Street sequels and that there are fifteen more in preproduction. So, yes, Freddy’s back…

Again!
The movie opens with a quote that I was quite glad to screencap because I couldn’t read it at all. Damn old age, consarn it.

Kristen is back in high school, after being released from the hospital though she’s now played by Tuesday Knight (Patricia Arquette couldn’t play the part because she was pregnant.)

She’s still friends with Kincaid (Ken Sagoe, returning for the part) and Joe (Rodney Eastman, also returning), and she now has a boyfriend and her own group of friends.

Alice (Lisa Wilcox), Alice’s brother & Kristen’s boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones), and Kristen

Debbie (Brooke Theiss) and Sheila (Toy Newkirk)

Kristen has a nightmare about Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund, as always) and pulls Joe and Kincaid into her dream. They’re less than pleased and point out that Freddy is dead and his furnace is cold.
Kincaid goes to sleep and dreams about the junkyard where Freddy’s remains are buried. His dog, Jason (Voorhees?), accidentally awakens Freddy, who is indeed back and warns that they shouldn’t have buried him since he’s not dead. Freddy kills Kincaid, despite Kincaid’s strength.
Joe falls asleep and dreams that the sexy bikini model from his poster is in his water-bed. It’s like he learned absolutely nothing from his prior experiences with the sexy nurse that was really Freddy Kreuger. Or, he’s just pubertying really hard.
Kristen goes to school and when she realizes that Joe and Kincaid are dead, she blacks out and dreams of Freddy. Freddy in drag as a nurse. When Kristen gets home, her mom secretly drugs her with sleeping pills. Oh, those Elm Street parents! I really like the way this sequence is filmed because it looks loopy and conveys well how out of it Kristen must have felt. She tries to call Alice but falls asleep so she pulls Alice into her dreams as a last resort. Freddy throws Kristen into a furnace but not before she passes her gift on to Alice wakes up and runs with Rick to Kristen’s house but they’re too late. Kristen is burnt to death in her bed.
Alice begins to realize the nature of her gift as she accidentally pulls her friends into her dreams and they’re killed by Freddy. She provides him with new victims, since he killed the last of the Elm Street children whose parents were involved in his death. This high school’s mortality rate has to rival Sunnydale’s. It’s finally up to Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel), the cute guy she never dreamed would notice her, to fight Freddy. Alice gains her friends’ powers and traits with each death. Also, as each friend dies, she takes their picture off of her mirror that was initially so crowded that she couldn’t see her reflection. It’s like Alice is discovering herself and that she’s the sum total of her friendships. Freddy himself has grown more powerful, as he possesses the souls of those he’s killed.
Alice defeats Freddy by remembering part of a poem, the “Dream Master” and it’s very Sarah versus Jareth in Labyrinth only gross, not sexy. When the parents of Elm Street killed Fred Krueger, they made him more powerful than they could imagine, like a pervy Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s like he became some kind of archetypical dream reaper. I barely remember the series, just specific scenes, so I wonder if Freddy’s powers are discussed in more mystical terms. I mean, how did a dead child molester get all this power?
So, I’ve sat through the first movies in the series and with each movie it gets clearer that sex is an issue in each one. Or, maybe not sex but puberty. Nancy faces Freddy and comes out with a grown-up gray streak. Jesse wrestles with his secret gay side. Kristen is almost eaten by a Freddy-shaped snake that also looked like a dong. And now Alice transforms herself from a shy daydreamer into a mature young woman. Plus, the fact that the victims are high-school aged just reinforces the notion that high school is literally hell.

There is the issue of sex being dangerous throughout the movies. Look at poor Joey. In the third movie, he’s seduced by Nurse Freddy and tied up over an open hell pit with Freddy’s tongues. That is a sentence I never thought I would write. In the Nightmare on Elm Street universe, sex kills, whether it’s Tina dying after having sex with her boyfriend or Joey being attacked by the girl in the water-bed.

This isn’t exactly a progressive stance but it can also reflect the era when the movies came out, when AIDS was becoming a legitimate threat.
I do like the fact that Robert Englund’s performance is not just menacing and creepy, it’s also sexual. That just adds to the creep factor.

I’d like to point out that the parents in this series just keep getting shittier and shittier. Alice and Rick Johnson’s dad wins the prize for worst dad on Elm Street and that’s saying a lot. He’s drunk, a workaholic, and outright abusive. There’s also the creepiness of Kristen’s mother surreptitiously drugging her, even if it was with good intentions.
I didn’t like this movie as much as I love Dream Warriors but I don’t hate it the way I hate Freddy’s Revenge. I feel like the cast is too large and too driven by novelty. There’s Karate Rick, Nerd Sheila, Bad-girl Debbie, Shy Alice, Crazy Kristen, and Dan the Jock but somehow they’re all friends. Also, this seems to be the point when they start focusing on novelty deaths, like Debbie being turned into a roach (Because she hates them and they were discussing Kafka earlier.) So there were definitely tense moments but they were interspersed with goofiness, like Land-shark Freddy.
The weird part, for me, is this isn’t my favorite entry in the series so I haven’t watched it since I was young. But I still remembered the scene when the souls of Freddy’s victim start coming out of his body and it’s like stretching a sheet of rubber. I remember seeing that when I was young and it freaked me out and I didn’t want to be near my wall because I thought that would turn to rubber. Who knows how I managed to sneak watching that movie because I know my parents would not be cool with that happening at such a young age.
This is the last movie in my Nightmare on Elm Street box-set and I’m actually sad to see Freddy go. It’s been kind of nice reliving what was an essential movie series from my childhood.

Keep an Eye Out, Just Don’t Gouge an Eye Out

My friends, Kristine and Kathleen Scheiner (the latter runs Horror Feminista) are talented, hilarious women. Their latest project is creating a zombie coloring-book, Zombie Apocalypse in Ditmas Park.
What I think is cool about this is that the book is set in Brooklyn and features survivors staying the city instead of evacuating, like every other zombie narrative. I’m lucky that I work with Kristine so I get to see the pages as she draws them. The artwork is awesome, check this out.


I’m looking forward to seeing local places in a coloring book. Plus, the story includes their friends and they were nice enough to include a pic of me.
So keep an eye out for this because coloring isn’t just for kids. I color when I’m stressed and can’t wait to color in an apocalypse.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors

I have a shocking confession to make. I like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 Dream Warriors more than the original movie. I know, what’s wrong with me? It’s just a really good sequel and I honestly like the characters in this better than the ones in the original.

I love that the movie is a return to canon with Freddy striking in the dream world. Plus, the movie has a list of names that made me ridiculously excited. Patricia Arquette! In her first movie role! The return of Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon! Lawrence Fishburne as Larry Fishburne! Zsa Zsa Gabor and Dick Cavett! With Angelo Badalamenti, of Twin Peaks fame, making music with Dokken! Wes Craven working on the screenplay with Frank Darabont! This is a lot of exclamation points but I’m very excited!
The movie opens up with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe.

Then we meet our Final Girl, Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette.)

She’s been having really bad nightmares with creepy little kids but her mom is a typical, checked-out Elm Street parent. I sometimes wonder, who’s more dangerous on Elm Street? Freddy Krueger or these shitty parents? Freddy attacks Kristen, leaving her wrist bleeding, so she’s checked into a mental hospital for what’s perceived as a suicide attempt. A lot of teens in town have been trying to commit suicide. Kristen meets a rag-tag bunch of teen mental patients, all with sleep problems, who will try to fight Freddy. There’s Philip (Bradley Gregg), a puppet-maker, Taryn (Jennifer Rubin), a former junkie, Kincaid (Ken Sagoes), a bad-ass with an attitude problem, Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow), an aspiring actress, Will (Ira Stanton), a boy confined to a wheel-chair due to his suicide attempt, and Joey (Rodney Eastman), a boy who doesn’t speak. Plus, “Larry” Fishburne is Max, an orderly.

They’re all dreaming of Freddy Krueger and are all terrified to sleep. Dr. Gordon (Craig Wasson) and Dr. Simms (Priscilla Pointer) think the kids are dealing with regular psychiatric issues until Nancy (Heather Langenkamp!) arrives as a dream specialist. It’s six years after the events in the first movie and I guess she’s gotten over the crazies the second movie said she had.

Nancy believes the teens are really dealing with Freddy Krueger when she recognizes the rhyme that Kristen says she dreamed. Now it becomes a race against time to fight back in the dream world as Freddy picks off the teens, and she also has to fight the recalcitrant administration who thinks the kids are “just” crazy. Gradually, Dr. Gordon comes to believe in Nancy, especially after meeting a mysterious nun that tells the origin of Freddy Kreuger.

Yes, this movie gives Freddy some back-story but it isn’t necessarily the kind that will humanize him or make you sympathetic to the monster. Freddy’s mother was raped by violently psychotic inmates when she was accidentally locked in with them over the Christmas holiday, she conceived “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs.” Ouch. Furthermore, Freddy won’t stop, apparently, until the monster’s bones are laid to rest. Nancy takes Dr. Gordon to meet her father, the only person who can lead them to where Freddy’s buried. Nancy then joins the teens to fight Freddy in their dreams.
I like this movie because I didn’t find the second one to be very creepy but this one takes the creepy factor past the original. I especially love Philip’s death scene, when Freddy plays him like a puppet by his tendons. This freaked me out so much when I was young. I also had an awesome friend in high school that remembered this scene and we’d discuss it over and over again.



I’m glad Freddy returned to the dream world because there’s just something so creepy about this pervert being able to assault you in your dreams. I like the idea that the teens can fight back, though. Kincaid is super strong, Will can walk and is a wizard master, Kristen can do gymnastics (Literally, the only movie where I approve of tumbling), and Taryn is “beautiful and bad.”

The effects are kind of cheesy but I can overlook that just because I like the characters so much. There’s so much stop-motion! But the sets are atmospheric and creepy and there’s a return to the knives on metal sounds that is so creepy. Plus, the ending is sad, with Nancy and her dad dying, but also ambiguous about whether Freddy has truly been laid to rest. I do like the themes this series deals with, like the corrupting influence of vengeance. These parents think their kids are safe since they killed Freddy and are now pretty negligent.
You just really have to love a movie where Freddy Kreuger interrupts an interview between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Dick Cavett. See, Freddy can be funny and also super creepy.
It even has John Saxon descending from B-movie heaven.

“I must go…”

“My planet needs me.”

This is one of the few instances where I also really love a tie-in movie song and music video. Yes, it’s Dokken with “Dream Warriors.” Anyone else notice that Taryn’s wearing a Dokken shirt when we first meet her?

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy’s Revenge

Freddy is back and he wants vengeance. That’s the premise of the title, at least.

This movie feels weird compared to the first. Wes Craven didn’t want there to be any sequels and he wanted the original to have a happy ending. This is a case where the studio owns the character and can pretty much do what it wants. As a result, Freddy Kreuger does weird stuff like manifest in the waking world. Don’t ask me why, he was doing a good job killing people in their dreams.
The movie starts with a weird-ass nightmare, just because. A bus totters precariously over hell and Freddy Kreuger is chasing the three teens inside it. But then the dreamer wakes up. This is Jesse (Mark Patton.)

He and his family have moved into Nancy Thompson’s old house five years after the events of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
He’s been having trouble sleeping ever since they moved. To make matters worse, he’s having trouble in school. He’s fighting with his frenemy Grady (Robert Rusler) and his gym teacher, Coach Schneider (Marshall Bell) is picking on him.
He begins to have nightmares about Freddy and, like Nancy, is increasingly scared to go to sleep. In this movie, Freddy wants Jesse’s body. Jesse’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. His not-quite-girlfriend Lisa (Kim Myers) finds Nancy’s old diary and starts to research Freddy Kreuger.

Jesse finds Freddy’s gloves and also starts to sleepwalk. This leads to one of the weirdest sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s so weird that I thought it was a dream sequence at first. Jesse sneaks out of his house and goes to the “queer S&M bar” (Grady’s description, not mine) that Coach Schneider goes to. Schneider sees him there, takes him to the school, and makes him run laps. Can a teacher just kidnap you outside of school and then punish you? This is WEIRD. For what it’s worth, Schneider’s S&M gear is really tame. He’s just wearing a lady’s v-neck tank and a spiked wrist-cuff.

Schneider sends Jesse to the showers and goes to his office. Then, Schneider is assaulted by sports equipment. He’s attacked by all these sports balls and tied up by an unseen force and all I can think of is this scene;

^Source

Schneider’s tied up in the shower room, his clothes are ripped off and he’s whipped until Freddy slashes his back. But it’s Jesse holding the glove! Yeah, he’s pretty possessed by Freddy now. And that’s basically the movie, Jesse trying to fight Freddy.
I have to say, this is one of the gayest movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean gay the way people use gay as a pejorative. I mean it’s a movie about a kid dealing with his gayness and his gayness is personified by Freddy Kreuger.
I base this assessment on a few scenes. Aside from the coach whipping scene, there’s a scene at Lisa’s party where Jesse is about to have sex with Lisa but then his tongue turns into Freddy Kreuger’s gnarly tongue. Jesse runs away to Grady’s house and asks Grady to watch him while he sleeps. But then Freddy emerges and kills Grady. This is a pretty powerful message. I’m not sure if this is a progressive movie or not, considering that Jesse’s gay side is represented by an undead child-molesting serial killer.
How does this movie function as a horror movie? Definitely not as well as the original. I found myself having a hard time caring for Jesse but I liked his friends a lot. The movie definitely lacks the tension of the original, although I definitely enjoyed when Freddy crashed Lisa’s party. There’s also this amazing dance scene with Jesse. Oh, and CLU GULAGER is Jesse’s dad.

Freddy is as gross as ever and the scene where he kills Grady is pretty cool but the rest of the movie drags so much. For me, removing Freddy from the dreaming world was a big mistake. You’re so vulnerable when you’re asleep and you can’t control your dreams that much, even if you’re an active dreamer. That’s why Freddy’s scary, along with the pervert and murdering part and the fact that his victims in the movie are being punished for something they didn’t even do.
That being said, I’m looking forward to watching Dream Warriors. Is there anyone who really dislikes Dream Warriors?

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Welp, I’ve finally come to it, the movie that started my obsession with scary movies. When I was very little, three or four maybe, my mom heard me laughing hysterically at the t.v. It turns out I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street and I thought that Freddy Kreuger was a funny robot. Yeah, I was a little different.

I wonder if I’d never seen this movie if I’d still be obsessed with horror the way I am now. Would I still randomly sing “Dream Warriors” at work? I just don’t know but I think that this is one of the movies that made me who I am today.
The weird part is that I haven’t sat down and watched A Nightmare on Elm Street in decades. Truthfully, Freddy Kreuger still scares me. Not in his later incarnations, when he was goofy and trying to be funny. Original Freddy. He’s the reason I won’t let my feet dangle off of my bed when I sleep, because I’m secretly convinced that he’ll chop them off with his knife-hand.
It was nice rewatching this movie and, for all of its eighties-ness, it’s still a good, underapreciated film.
Here’s the story, for everyone who hasn’t seen it yet. The movie opens with what has to be one of my favorite creepy sequences. A man in a boiler room attaches knives to a glove. Then he chases a teenage girl who wakes up with four scratches in her nightgown. It turns out the girl is Tina (Amanda Wyss) and she was just having a bad dream. Actually, all of her friends have been having bad dreams. Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp), agree to stay over since Tina’s parents are out of town. Tina’s boyfriend, Rod (Nick Corri) also shows up. Tina is killed by something that violently slashes her. Rod denies killing her. Nancy becomes convinced that something in her dreams is stalking her and that if she dies in her dreams she’ll die in real life. This leads to some of the creepiest sequences that have ever been done in a slasher film.

Freddy Kreuger, the original Slenderman.

Nancy decides to willingly hunt Freddy to find out who he is. Glen is supposed to keep watch over Nancy and wake her up if it looks like she’s having a nightmare but he falls asleep.

This is when she realizes she can bring aspects of her dreams into the real world and that maybe she can kill whoever is stalking her. Nancy’s mom finally confesses that there was a child killer in their town who killed twenty children. He was never sent to prison due to a technicality so Nancy’s parents, along with other parents in the neighborhood, burn Fred Kreuger (Robert Englund) to death. He’s the one stalking the teens and killing the children of those who killed him.
After a sleep study, where Nancy wakes up with a kick-ass gray streak, she decides to face Freddy and kill him herself.

She studies how to make traps and rigs her house in the hopes of capturing Freddy in the real world. This becomes even more important to her after Freddy kills Glenn.

The ending is kind of weird. It becomes like a dream within a dream ending and it makes you question everything you just watched.
There is just so much creepy weirdness about this movie. First, the fact that Freddy is a child-killer and basically based on a child-molester. That makes things especially weird as Freddy Kreuger became a kind of cult figure and as the movies became goofier and goofier. I also found Nancy’s parents to be really weird. They’re both pretty disconnected from Nancy. Mom (Ronee Blakley) drinks a lot and Dad (Jon Saxon!) is a detective investigating the teen murders, so he’s busy and not at home. Aside from their disconnection, they were part of the vigilante posse that killed Freddy. Does that mean that they had a child who was one of Freddy’s victims? I’ve always wondered why they were involved and that seems to be a logical reason. It takes a lot to burn someone to death and I’m not sure if just knowing a kid who was killed is enough reason to do it. Also, Nancy’s mom is super creepy because she keeps Freddy’s knife glove. I would not want that thing in my house. Her speech has always given me the creeps, “He’s dead honey, because Mommy killed him. I even took his knives. So it’s okay now.” WHAT?
I’ve noticed that a lot of movies from around this time, from the mid-seventies through the eighties reflect this anxiety at home and fear for your family’s safety (See, Alice, Sweet Alice, Don’t Look Now, The Initiation, The Funhouse, Poltergeist, and The Stepfather.) If these movies have one thing in common, it’s the idea that you’re not safe, even with your family, and that the hidden secrets of those you love can be deadly.
What I really like is the added supernatural element of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which keeps it apart from the usual slashers of the era. I also like that Nancy is such a kick-ass final girl. She’s smart, tough, and funny and I think she’s pretty much my favorite final girl.
If this isn’t enough to love, this is the movie that introduced us to Johnny Depp in a cropped t-shirt.

I think it may have also invented the cat meme when I noticed this weird poster in the doctor’s office.

I think this might be A Nightmare on Elm Street week, since I do have this snazzy four-pack of the first four movies that I picked up.

Evil Dead (2013)

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. Matthew 5:30, KJB
I saw the Evil Dead remake last night at my favorite, secret theater in Lower Manhattan. I really liked it and thought it was a loving homage to the original. So, why did I, an atheist, open my review with a Bible quote? Well, I thought that there were Biblical elements to this movie. The verse I selected is from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In the preceding verses, Jesus says thinking of committing a sin is essentially a thought-crime and is as bad as actually sinning. He specifically speaks about lust and that if you think about committing adultery then you’ve actually committed adultery. In response, you should pluck out the offending eye to save your whole body from hell. That’s why I dislike religion, it sets up impossible standards. You’ve made someone think of something just by the act of telling them not to think of something. The same deal follows with your hands, if it acts against you then chop it off. You can pretty much debate all day whether or not Jesus really wanted his followers to gouge their eyes out and chop off their hands or if he just meant their metaphorical hands and where am I going with this anyway? Basically, that in this movie two characters lose hands, one of which is actually possessed by a literal demon. See, Evil Dead draws its inspiration from Sumerian mythology, which was cribbed by early Jews and eventually, by Christians. I think this movie should have come out on Easter weekend, due to its themes of resurrection and rebirth. Easter celebrates resurrection but this movie asks, is every thing you resurrect good? Also, the idea of sinning just in thought relates to the movie because so much of the plot and characters’ actions are based on things that are done or never done.
Ok, enough Bible study, I promise. The plot is quite similar to the original. Five old friends go to a secluded cabin. In this case, it’s to help Mia (Jane Levy) kick her drug habit. Why don’t movie characters ever just go to rehab?

Luckily, one of her buddies, Olivia (Jessica Lucas) is an RN and plans to help Mia through her withdrawal. Mia’s brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), even shows up. This is surprising because he’s been away from his family and friends for years, leaving Mia to deal with their mentally ill mother.

So there are all these unspoken issues between the two siblings. As Mia enters withdrawal, she finds the cabin unbearable and tries to run away.
Meanwhile, their bookish friend, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), finds the evil book, wrapped in trash bags and barbed wire. Despite every warning not to, he reads the evil incantations. Demons, ahoy!

Mia totals a car and is caught in the woods, where she’s raped by the actual shrubbery. I remember reading about Sam Raimi’s ambivalence about the rape scene in the original movie so I was a bit surprised to see it in the remake. That being said, I think it’s appropriate. It’s not filmed lovingly and it’s clear that it’s not a seduction. It’s more like nature itself is turning against the humans in the cabin.
Mia tries to warn her friends about the demon in the woods but they take her warnings as the ravings of a drug-user trying to escape rehab. Turns out that Mia’s really possessed and the movie is about the demons picking off her friends, one by one.
What I especially liked were the shout-outs to the fans of the original series. When we first see Mia, she’s wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt. The original group of students in the movie were Michigan State students. One of the first scenes with Mia involves her sketching a picture of the cabin. Cheryl, the tree-rape victim in the original, was also seen sketching. David gives Mia a necklace, like Ash gave his girlfriend in the original.
The creepy old grandfather clock is back. So is Ash’s blue work shirt, although David’s now the one wearing it.

It’s hard to see the shirt but it’s there, under all the blood.

My personal favorite is that they kept the camera work when the demons appear to be flying into the cabin. That creeped me out in the original. Also, at one point Mia looks like she has a chainsaw hand. Some shots are very reminiscent of the original.

Remember that thing I said about nature turning on them?

I was worried about two things regarding this movie. The first was that the red-band trailer would reveal all the gore. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. There are buckets of blood. I will never be able to look at an Olfa knife or a nail-gun the same way again. I was also worried when I heard that Diablo Cody was working on the script. It was co-written by director Fede Alvarez. Diablo Cody was hired to fine-tune the English. If there’s anyone I don’t want fine-tuning English, it’s Diablo Cody because I really hate about 75% of her use of the language. But her contribution was so negligible that the Writers Guild of America ruled that she could be left out of the credits. So we don’t have to worry about the characters speaking 30-year-old Valley Girl speak.
So, is the movie scary? It’s not so much jump-scares, it’s more harrowing watching what the characters undergo. Especially Mia, she has earned the right to Bruce Campbell one-liners. I especially liked the music. It was a mix of strings and the ambient drone of the chainsaw. There were moments, like when the demons are flying to the cabin, and the movie becomes oppressively silent.
It’s awesome seeing this movie look so great on the big screen. None of the versions of the original that I’ve scene look this crisp. I love that the original producer, writer, and star were able to bring their vision to the screen with a new budget and really show how they wanted to scare an audience. Especially because all the effects are practical. That is very, very, groovy.