Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 Evil Dead (2013)

I mean, how do you even dare to do an Evil Dead remake?  The original movies are iconic and yet, here we are.

Five friends gather in a super-creepy cabin in the woods (and now I want to watch that movie again) in a somber reunion to help Mia (Jane Levy, excellently bug-eyed and twitchy) kick her dope habit.  Others in attendance are healthcare worker Olivia, bookish Eric, Mia's older, absentee brother David, and David's girlfriend, "Natalie," who is such a non-entity that I didn't even know her name until the nail-gun started going off.

It hits all the horror tropes - which, back in the early 80s still was new but now opens no uncharted territory: people doing extremely stupid things like crawling into dark holes, going down into the fetid basement which is full of cat corpses strung from the ceiling, reading aloud from the Necromicon.  Seriously, who does that?  The cabin is much, much bigger on the inside that it would appear from exterior shots.  Brief, early appearances of a shotgun, electric knife and nail-gun, being used appropriately, clearly signal that we'll be seeing them all again later, in a much more gruesome manner.

Fans of the originals will recognize plenty of callbacks, including but not limited to evil hands, self-amputations and putting THE CHAINSAW into play.  I may have cheered a little at that one.  At the very end, there's a flash of humor as the last remaining characters are bathed in enough fake blood to make Dead Alive envious.  I would like to say, however, that I wish we hadn't revisited the invasive vine sequence.

Right from the start, this Evil Dead reworking shows that it is not going to back away from the gore and over-the-top violence, although the cheeky humor of II is definitely lacking.  Final verdict: not a complete waste of time for the viewer but there really wasn't any reason to remake this one.  Go back and rewatch the Bruce Campbell ones instead.

The Third Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #4: Bubba Ho-tep

All right, that's it - I am officially terrible at picking this year's scary movies.  Next year, for the FAFMSSOMS, someone else should pick the movies.  I'll take requests.  Cripes, I clearly can't do it for myself.

On paper, though, Bubba Ho-tep should have worked:  a 90 minute long campfest whereby Elvis and JFK, who are not dead but who are, in fact, ensconced in an East Texas old folks' home, battle against an ancient Egyptian mummy who is feeding on the old folks ... and Bruce Campbell - mothereffing Bruce Campbell!!! - plays Elvis.  How could it lose?  It should have been campy and just a touch funny and all kinds of funny.  (Did I mention Bruce Campbell in the lead?)  Wrong.  It's awfully slow, hardly scary at all and just not that funny.  Ossie Davis plays JFK and it's largely due to him that the flick is at all entertaining: he says that after he got shot in Dallas, the gov'mint took him back to the lab, removed a chunk of his brain and replaced it with a bag of sand, and then dyed his skin black so no one would know it was him.  When Elvis presses him about how Marilyn was in the sack, Jack says that information is top secret, "But between you and me, ... wowwwww!" - and he stretches that "wow" into about six syllables with the most gleeful expression.  But other than that, not so much with the glee (I may have dozed off for a couple moments).

Unless you're a Bruce Campbell completist, you can skip this one.  After this and the Dead Meat debacle, it is with much ambivalence that I'm eyeing the DVD of Rubber that awaits us next.

Sam Axe kicks ass

So far I've only watched the first half of USA's Burn Notice special prequel, "Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe."  It's pretty light and fluffy, even for Burn Notice.  But it's all about Bruce Campbell's character, Sam, and how he fell out of favor with the CIA.  I love Bruce Campbell and he looks great here, having lost about twenty pounds and shaved the grizzled BN scruff to de-age himself.  The best part?  The scene where he fires up that chainsaw - how great was that?  No demon/zombies this time, but awesome nonetheless.  Burn Notice starts back up in June, FWIW.