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Audiences might be wondering if they have stepped into a time machine when looking up at their movie theater’s marquee this weekend with the two new releases being Jurassic Park and Evil Dead. While the former is getting its original retrofitted in 3D & IMAX, the latter is getting remade. I was surprised to not hear outrage with Evil Dead getting a new lease on life with a younger cast given its ultimate horror cult film status. Yet, with support from its originators, director/writer Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell, along with the daring tagline “The Most Terrifying Film You Will Ever Experience,” audiences and myself are pretty pumped.

Having never seen The Evil Dead before, I figured it was finally time to get myself initiated with “The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror.”

Rated X upon its release, which translates to NC-17 today (a rating that is undeserved nowadays, yet it still wears), Evil Dead was one of the horror films to propel the “splatter”-genre that ran out of steam a few years back with Saw and Hostel. While those last two series were all blood and guts, Evil Dead has withstood the test of time because it also has a heart.

The no-name actors cast by placing ads in newspapers clearly go beyond the call of duty to make this little film work; not just for their sake, but also for director Sam Raimi, who put every financial avenue he had on the line to scrap together the $375,000 budget. Shot in the middle of the woods during a freezing winter that is supposed to be a warm spring break, a group of five friends are subjected to a night of unspeakable evil when they find and play a taped translation of a passage from the “Book of the Dead.” Becoming possessed by dead monsters, evils within the living woods are determined to destroy them all before the sun rises.

I found there to be plenty of scares in Evil Dead as well as dark humor-based laughs that are with us due in no small part to the constant use of practical special effects. There is no sub-par CGI to be seen, because there are barely any graphics at all. The only thing that looks a bit goofy now is the much-ado tree rape scene, but the concept is so disturbing that it still produces tension. The evil dead-ites look scary enough to produce nightmares and the limb hacking sequences are still wince-worthy (“Watch out for the pencil!”).

Happily not disappointed by the film after the immense build-up, what I really enjoyed about The Evil Dead was the unpredictability of who was to become the next victim to the living woods. While of course we know Bruce Campbell stars throughout the trilogy, unlike other classic horror films, the killing order seems to be preserved with secrecy for some reason. Maybe this is because the cast is killed off relatively fast during the 85-minute production, or because the film really isn’t about the characters, but rather the scares and laughs.

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