A gory (what else?) ' Evil Dead' remake

Everything feels amplified in this new edition of a 1981 cult favorite.
In 1981, director Sam Raimi made a small splash with a cultish horror movie called The Evil Dead. Raimi followed with a 1987 sequel that added more humor to what had become a landmark mix of shock, gore and murderous invention.

I'm not sure that The Evil Dead deserves to be enshrined in anyone's horror hall of fame, but it clearly demonstrated that Raimi -- who reportedly made the movie for a meager $50,000 -- had serious chops.

Raimi, of course, went on to enlarge his sphere of influence with several Spider Man movies and most recently with the commercially successful Oz the Great and Powerful.

Now comes another rendition of The Evil Dead with Raimi serving as one of the movie's producers. Directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Alvarez and Diablo Cody of Juno fame, this edition follows the basic arc of the original.

You know the drill: Five young people travel to a secluded but rundown cabin in the woods, where they begin to confront an unseen evil force that turns them into hideous zombies.

The special effects have been updated for the kind of maximum impact that technological advance and a larger budget allow. In an odd (and perhaps telling) way, this version of The Evil Dead isn't better than original: it's only louder, more amplified in every regard.

The unsuspecting need to know that The Evil Dead movies are designed to flood the screen with gore, which means they're not for the squeamish.

In the case of the new movie, we're talking about severed limbs, severed heads, geysers of spewed blood and copious projectile vomiting. There's more, of course, but I think I've given you "taste" enough to get the idea.

And let's be real here. Audiences who enjoy this kind of entertainment are prone to evaluating the level of gory creativity that the filmmakers are able to bring to their efforts. And when a chainsaw appears, the presumption is that you know the jagged history that links chainsaws to big-screen horror, that you'll smile to yourself about the way the movie is connecting to its big-screen horror lineage.

In general, the acting in this installment surpasses that of the original, although it should be noted that we're not talking about a high bar. It's worth a passing mention that Bruce Campbell, who starred in the original, joins Raimi in serving as one of the new movie's producers.

In this outing, Jane Levy plays Mia, the character whose drug addiction prompts her cohorts to gather at the cabin in the first place. They've all pledged to help Mia kick a long-time heroin habit.

Mia's brother (Shiloh Fernandez) emerges as the main character in this gruesome ensemble with Lou Taylor Pucci portraying Eric, the young man who discovers the book that contains the incantation that jump starts the gory proceedings. It's often said that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover. An exception might well be made in this case: The cover of this eerie book of the dead is made out of human skin.

Jessica Lucas and Elizabeth Blackmore round out the cast, mostly in the role of victims.

The 2013 edition of The Evil Dead contains a fair sampling of the kind of obviously dumb behavior that allows audiences to feel superior to every character. An example: Everyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows that exposure to risk increases exponentially if one stupidly ventures into a basement. You don't necessarily want to be wandering around a fog-shrouded forest, either.

For the most part, Alvarez directs with more seriousness than humor, although certain parts of his gore fest drew laughter at a preview screening.

With some updating, a few alterations of plot and a modest bow to the Exorcist movies, the new Evil Dead resists becoming a precise rehash of the original, and its final encounter with evil is so luridly bloody, it demands to be watched with a certain stunned amazement.

Was there any reason to make another Evil Dead movie? Not really.

And that's the rub: This one's been amped-up, revamped and super-charged for contemporary tastes, but it can't possibly replicate the giddy (if certifiably guilty) sense of discovery created by its 1981 predecessor.

Put anther way, The Evil Dead is unredeemed and unashamed trash. One presumes its audience wouldn't want it any other way, but that may not be enough to kick it onto the plus side of the ledger.

A somber, silly 'Red Riding Hood'

Red Riding Hood tries to enter a teen-oriented Twilight zone. This dismal failure is redeemed only by the occasional inadvertently evoked laugh.

Red Riding Hood: "Why, Mr. Critic, what big claws you have." Critic: "The better to rip you to shreds." Venom, like most potent drinks, should be poured judiciously, and Red Riding Hood is too easy a target to bear the brunt of a totally brutal assault. Besides, a lack of epic scale keeps the movie from entering the upper echelon of big-screen stinkeroos, although it definitely earns its place among a host of less important flops.

Aside from the fact that the movie springs from an idea as generic as it is bad - a werewolf terrorizes a medieval village - Red Riding Hood suffers from undistinguished direction, wretched writing and acting that ranges from bland (the movie's young leads) to overwrought (Gary Oldman as Solomon, a werewolf hunter).

The movie's marketing calculations seem obvious. Red Riding Hood looks as if it has been designed to appeal to the Twilight crowd, right down to the hiring of director Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first Twilight movie.

The cast, I presume, is meant to make young hearts flutter. Amanda Seyfried portrays Valerie, the movie's title character. Two suitors: Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and Henry (Max Irons, son of Jeremy) fight over Valerie.

So much for the eye candy.

Of the adult cast, only Julie Christie (as Grandma) seems to have any inkling of what the movie could have been, showing occasional flashes of leering, subversive wit.

I was half-tempted to begin this review by proclaiming Red Riding Hood the best comedy of the year, but decided against it because all the laughs are inadvertent, deriving mostly from a ton of portentous dialog.

-- "It was the most brutal winter I could remember."

-- "Come with me or the streets will run red with blood."

Or my favorite, an exchange between villagers after someone suggests that Valerie be handed over to the wolf, a snarling, scrawny computer-generated beast the size of a pony.

One villager: "You can't give her to the wolf. That's human sacrifice."

Another: "We've all made sacrifices."

Ain't that the truth?

Some of the additional chuckles derive from the movie's attempt to draw class distinctions among the squalid townsfolk who suffer through a dark, cold winter that's punctuated with werewolf attacks.

We learn, for example, that a woodcutter earns far less than a blacksmith. That's why Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) wants her daughter to marry blacksmith Henry instead of woodcutter Peter. She urges her daughter to move on up, as it were. For her part, Valerie - who provides the movie with occasional bits of narration - insists on following her heart.

Seyfried, who seemed so promising on TV's Big Love has yet to show much A-list potential on the big screen. She spends much of Red Riding Hood looking perplexed, as she peers out from beneath the hood of her trademark red cloak, a gift from Grandma.

Of course, the Red Riding Hood story is well known, so it's up to the filmmakers to find some juicy subtext and oddball embellishments.

How's this for an add-on? A sinister Oldman arrives in town with a giant iron elephant in tow; we eventually learn why he's traveling with such a bizarre prop, putting an end to what might be the movie's only real mystery -- and a minor one at that.

Screenwriter David Johnson (Orphan) dabbles in themes that range from sexual to silly, with the two often overlapping.

He also introduces a variety of red herrings to go along with Valerie's red cloak. Because the wolf spends most of its time as as human, we're led to wonder whether he could be hiding in the guise of the village dullard or an earnest looking fellow who signs up for wolf hunts or, of course, in the person of grandma, who lives in a cabin outside the village and serves Valerie unappetizing bowls of gruel.

All, however, is not grim. At one point, the villagers believe that they've killed the wolf. Their celebration involves a communal dance scene that's something to behold: Swaying villagers getting down with their bad selves.

I've read that the movie has been transformed into a novel by author Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, Blakley-Cartwright "would spend as many as 14 hours each day writing, occasionally taking a break from her typewriter to visit the set or interview the characters for inspiration."

I'm amazed that anyone could spend 14 minutes writing about this misbegotten tale, but that - as they say - is another story.

A blood moon announces the worst of the werewolf attacks. By the time it arrives, I found myself thinking that the only thing that could have made this movie any more preposterous would have been the arrival of Sarah Palin to shoot the wolf from a plane that was speeding over the fog-shrouded landscapes. Come to think of it, that would have added a welcome touch of lunacy to a movie that's too somber to recognize its own silliness.