Remakes, reboots and re-imaginings are certainly the hot to trot thing in recent times. I think I can count on one hand the amount of successful, entirely original films that have come out in the past few years. However, that’s not to say that reboots, or remakes can never be good. Just look towards the recent Dredd 3D as a prime example of a great reboot. On the whole though, most remakes are generally looked at with disdain. Horror fans are especially critical of remakes, as they generally all tend to be very passionate about the objects of their affection. Here lies the conundrum of The Evil Dead remake, which was rounding up it’s cast when we previously reported on it.
Now it appears to have finished filming, and has even been edited and assembled into a raw cut of the film. Bruce Campbell himself has even seen the film, and has given it his official blessing. In a recent interview, he event went on to express his feelings about the film itself, and whether the Evil Dead fanbase will accept it.
He then made scary hands and stared into your soul.
via [DigitalSpy]
How is it going to be different from the original films?
“There’s none of the original characters. We didn’t want to compare apples with apples. It’s a contemporary movie – just like Evil Dead was contemporary in 1979, this is contemporary for young adults now.“It’s basically five new kids who are going to have a really bad night with a brand new director – Fede Alvarez, who was handpicked by Sam Raimi. I’ve seen it already; I think it’s definitely fabulous.”
Do you think the fans will embrace it?
“We’re really excited and really behind it, [but] it’s going to take a bit to get the Evil Dead fans behind it. We know we’ve pissed a lot of them off. We appreciate that and we appreciate their anger and their zeal, but the only thing we want to impress upon them is that we didn’t screw it up. This is going to be just as memorable as [the original] Evil Dead without being the same movie.
Somehow I think I can live with Jane Levy as the new main character.
So for the rest of you Evil Dead fans who are still running around saying the sky is falling, this should help ease along all those bricks you’ve been shitting. I’ve been an Evil Dead fan since the first time I saw it when I was 12, and thought that there was no way the movie could ever be remade. The mere thought of attempting to replicate the brilliance of the film seemed blasphemous. As I grew older though, I realized what makes Evil Dead so great, is that it’s the quintessential Teens In A Cabin In The Woods movie. Every single thing about it was born from a place of passion, and commitment to making as balls out wacky a horror film as they could. Translating that idea into modern times is pretty brilliant, and is something that needs to be done. I haven’t felt like a horror film has really had the balls to go full bore into a total gore-fest of insanity in a long time. The basic concepts of Evil Dead still work today, because it’s pretty timeless.
I think most Evil Dead fan’s problems with the idea of a remake, is the thought of trying to recapture the magic that Bruce Campbell brought to the role, forgetting that he really didn’t become “Ash” until Evil Dead 2. In Evil Dead, he was just another ho-hum nobody who was forced to deal with an increasingly terrible series of horrors that culminated in his own horrible death. People forget that too, that the last shot of Evil Dead was originally meant to be him dying. Fans have taken such a liking to the Ash character that imagining someone other than Campbell trying to be Ash seemed sacrilegious. Normally it would be, but Evil Dead wasn’t about Ash, it was about screwed up crap happening to a bunch of dumb teens in a cabin. If Cabin In The Woods has taught us anything, it’s that that’s a concept that we’ll watch over and over again. I can’t wait for the remake, and I expect it be goddamned awesome, because that’s the bottom line and Bruce Campbell friggin’ said so.
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