Early Evil Dead Remake Reviews

The first reviews for the Evil Dead Remake have hit the web. With SXSW going on early reviews of the film are popping up everywhere and our very own Flay will also with some luck get a review submitted shortly. As you all should know it was announced this week that a sequel is already in the works which is either good or bad news.

My biggest question is how will a sequel to the remake impact on Sam Raimi’s recently announced Evil Dead 4.

While you wait for Flay’s review here is what some other mainstream sites are saying about the remake of Sam Raimi’s classic;

Hitfix says;

There are a lot of character details and behaviors in the first 45 minutes of the film that seem to be setting up things that will pay off in the second half of the film, but a surprising amount of it ends up going nowhere…What I like about the film is the way things spin so wildly out of control in the second half, [where] there are sequences that are genuinely crazy and horrifying.

But in some ways, I feel like they’ve sort of forced this into a more mundane “Exorcist”-style narrative, losing the unfettered creativity and punishing imagination of the first two Raimi films…

Cinemablend says;

The movie opens a bit rough, both from a performance and a script standpoint, as there’s a good deal of forced exposition that needs to be waded through, but once the characters and story really gets going all of it improves vastly…

The gore factor is what ultimately makes Evil Dead such a raucous crowd-pleaser. Alvarez not only completely drenches the film is the red, sticky stuff, he does so with impressive creativity and has an impressive knack for building tension.

The Hollywood Reporter Says;

“Blood-drenched” barely begins to describe Fede Alvarez’s remake of Evil Dead, a gore-for-broke affair that strips the flesh off Sam Raimi’s cult-beloved comic-horror franchise and exposes the demons at its core.

The presence of Raimi, original collaborator Rob Tapert, and star Bruce Campbell as producers should give the faithful permission to attend what would otherwise smell like a shameless exploitation of the 1981 film, but the high production values and nonstop action offered here should also please younger genre fans who’ve never bothered to rent it.

As with all reviews take them with a grain of salt because at the end what matters most is what genre fans think and the mainstream film sites dont always get it right when it comes to reflecting on our genre. Do you plan to go and see the remake in theaters this April?