Extra Cinema: Evil Dead (18)

Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez. Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore.

Running time: 1hr 31mins.

I AM failing to see just why this film was made. It seems to have upset fans of the original without making too many fans of its own.

The Evil Dead was a ground-breaking piece of cinema for some, while others thought of it as just another of a new form of cinema — often referred to, in its day, as a video nasty.

It was director Sam Raimi’s first feature film and cost him a paltry $375,000 to make.

He had done away with the concept of an involved story-line and just centred upon the action.

You have a few teens who decide on a break in a remote cabin and bad things happen to them.

The fact that versions of this scenario have been replicated to provide umpteen offspring cannot be laid at his door.

What Raimi made was a very scary film on a very low budget.

What Raimi made was a very scary film on a very low budget.

What we have with Evil Dead (note the absence of The) is an attempt to update the original.

But given that a) the original had such a slight storyline and b) it had been reproduced so many times under different guises, the question why this was made seems pertinent.

This time the reason for heading to the obscure retreat is that one of the teens, Mia (Levy), is a recovering drug addict being helped by her friends and brother, David (Fernandez).

In the basement, o ne of the friends, Eric (Pucci), discovers a book with the warning that it is not to be read.

But where’s the fun in that, so he reads and unleashes a terrible evil which tracks down the hapless group one-by-one, slaying them in gruesome and blood-thirsty ways.

A plus is the special effects have improved over the last 32 years and have become a bit more gut-wrenching which in a movie like this really is a plus — which in a movie like this really is a plus, you don’t go for the sparkling dialogue.

Rating: 2/5