Bullets 'n' Babes

Markgway wrote:I will check it out, but not at the cinema. So you may have to wait a bit for my own take. I'm fully prepared to give the film a fair crack of the whip though, as always. I think only the tree rape from the original was controversial, though I always found it too absurd to be offensive. Yes, the UK banned it, but UK censorship was fucked up back then. Most of today's extreme horror would have been heavily cut or banned under the Ferman regime. The gore was comical (intended or not) and wholly unrealistic (unlike much of today's splatter output).

Shingster wrote:The gore wasn't viewed as comical back in 81, mostly because aside from big hollywood numbers like The Thing & Alien & The Omen, etc this was the standards of special effects back in the late 70s/early 80s. I'm sure some found it amusingly schlocky though, but it was generally perceived as a proper horror film. My earliest memory of the film was getting hold of an uncut french VHS of it back in the late 80s when it was only available on a heavily cut UK VHS, and even back then The Evil Dead was considered a seriously gory horror film.

The problem this film has is that it's so strait-laced in its intention to gross you out, it's just violence, gore, violence, gore, violence, gore, The End; which I guess isn't a bad thing if all you need from your horror films is to be shocked out of your ordinary sensibilities and taken on a queasy ride for an hour and half. This it does well, Fede's Evil Dead is slickly made (particularly the audio design), but it's very much an endurance feat like French Horror New Wave (is that a term?) shockers À l'intérieur and Martyrs.

The problem is that we expect more from the Evil Dead franchise. IMO this remake comes close to matching the tone & intent that the original had back in 1981 (and it continued to have throughout the 80s), but it crosses the line from gruesome-fun to just plain gruesome. Raimi managed never crossed that line in the original, he went overboard with the grand guignol and deliberately set out to shock, but his direction was also quirky enough that it never got too intense.

I think he's been quoted as saying that he approached the film like a "one man three stooges film with blood" which imo doesn't mean he set out to make a horror-comedy, but rather he understood that violence in horror and comedy can be two sides of the same coin. In comedy you can put someone through the ringer with "harmless" slapstick, but in horror you can use "harmful" slapstick to revolt in a way that alleviates tension.

IMO if there's one scene in Raimi's film that typifies this it's the scene when Ash "decapitates" Linda with the shovel and then you have that great shot of Linda's headless corpse violently bleeding out onto Ash's face. It's gross and it gives you a laugh because of all the **** Ash has been through leading up to this. There's nothing like that in the remake, even though the characters are put through the ringer so much more than Ash in the original. It's screaming out for some form of release and IMO the only scene you could say provides any release is right near the end.

For the record, I enjoyed this remake, but thought it was pretty disposable. Well made but rather forgettable given the amount of Evil Dead clones that have cropped up over the years. This does it better than pretty much all of them except for Cabin in the Woods though I guess.

Shingster wrote:Fede's Evil Dead is slickly made (particularly the audio design), but it's very much an endurance feat like French Horror New Wave (is that a term?) shockers À l'intérieur and Martyrs.