Delivers on the gore and blood, and then some, but struggles when trying to simultaneously pay homage to the source material and create something new. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen “The Evil Dead” or “The Evil Dead II,” so I really can’t comment much on any positive or negative changes they’ve made here. The gore level is at the high end: Ripped off jaws, severed limbs and so much blood that it just stops before being too over the top. Story wise, we get the basic story from the original films, so there’s no huge surprises there. The characters are weak. The acting seems hollow, the dialog is bad and the decision making quickly goes from sound, to stupid as Hell, to downright ludicrous. The sense of humor that is associated from the franchise is almost non-existent, although they squeeze in a few moments of macabre humor. The climax gets weird, with a few big plot holes. The final scene is pretty anticlimactic, giving us the closest thing we’ve seen to a happy ending for an Evil Dead film. There is a small scene after the credits that I missed, but it really didn’t sound like it was worth sticking around for.
*** out of *****