When Sam Raimi's low-budget splatter flick "The Evil Dead" emerged in 1983, it had the same sort of queasy impact you get when you hear a thud and feel something dragging under your tires. "The Evil Dead" was a terrifying and ghoulish film like no other, a signpost of sorts, marking new territory on horror's fringe. Whatever you thought was possible with gruesome special effects at that point — a boundary delineated by some combination of "The Exorcist," "Dawn of the Dead," "Alien" and "Suspiria" — Raimi surpassed it with a fiendish glee.
The film originally received an "X" rating in the States and was banned in several countries due to its squirm-inducing gore, which included eye-gouging, brain explosion and a possessed woman biting off her own hand. But what was once fringe is now the norm, and the remake, "Evil Dead," is if anything more extreme, but with only an "R" rating to show for it. Of course, the ratings board tends to be more indulgent of major-studio product than it is with indies, but the reality is that gore is all-too common nowadays: The splatter here is probably equaled by TV series "The Walking Dead," although the sheer amount of it and the use of close-ups make "Evil Dead" a much tougher watch.
Director Fede Alvarez's version hews pretty close to the original: Five friends gather for a weekend in a remote cabin in a dark forest. One dude (Lou Taylor Pucci) finds a witchy looking book with all sorts of blood-red warnings scrawled over it, and like so many characters in horror films, displays zero common sense and reads out loud an incantation that some previous reader has quite clearly warned will summon demons. (And perhaps the Darwin Award aspect of horror films is why we don't mind seeing such stupidity punished.)