I know I covered the Evil Dead movies a couple of years ago, but we now have three post-Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) Evil Dead movies that have been produced and spat out into theaters. We’ll begin with 2013’s Evil Dead from director Fede Álvarez, a remake of the original movie. Don’t let “remake” scare you off. This one’s actually pretty good. More scares than laughs, but that was the supposed intention of the original Evil Dead.

The movie begins with a young woman running away in the woods from some grody hillbillies only to be captured and tied to a post in a basement somewhere. An old lady whispers incantations in Welsh while Harold, the father of the young women, stands there distraught. His daughter pleads for mercy, but Harold pours gasoline on her. Before he sets her aflame, she tells her father that she’ll rip his soul out. As she catches on fire and screams maniacally, Harold tells his daughter that he loves her and blows her head off with a shotgun. I’d say that’s a fairly brutal scene.

Next, we see a group of young men and women meeting up at a deserted cabin in the woods. We don’t have recasts of Ash or Linda, but an entirely new group. David (Shiloh Fernandez) has brought his sister Mia (Jane Levy) up to the cabin to get her to detox from the drugs she’s addicted to. Also there for support are David’s girlfriend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), and their friends, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), a high school teacher, and Olivia (Jessica Lucas), a practicing nurse. Mia keeps complaining about the smell of rotting flesh, but the others don’t smell anything and figure it’s withdrawal symptoms. David then discovers the door leading to the basement which I assume is the same basement we saw in the beginning of the movie. Amidst some rotting animal carcasses is Naturom Demento, the book of the dead.

Eric decides to mess around with the book, reading the incantations out loud and thus summoning the ancient demons. Mia sees an evil version of herself and tries to escape it in Eric’s car, but soon crashes. The demon possesses her and when the others find her, they reason away her new strange behavior as withdrawn symptoms. Still, it’s not long before she’s floating in the air and upchucking gallons of bloody chunks onto her good friends. Eric begins to realize that he actually summoned something from hell, but David remains skeptical until his girlfriend saws her own arm off.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I enjoyed this movie despite the absence of the mighty Bruce Campbell. Maybe it’s the fact that we have regular people like nurses and high school teachers caught up in this mess rather than a bunch of spoiled rich kids that were common in horror flicks of the time. Maybe it’s those few instances of heroism a brother shows to a sister he had neglected. Or maybe it is the nail gun to the face and the sky raining torrents of blood. Yeah, it’s a splatter fest, but there’s a good amount of terror sprinkled throughout. Good remake.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443,episode 444, episode 450,episode 477, episode 491, episode 492,episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, episode 599, episode 642, episode 643,episode 644, episode 645, episode 670, episode 686, episode 687,  688, and 689) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.