Will Diablo Cody Really Write the Remake of The Evil Dead?
If you read the article, my headline slightly misleads. A guy named Fede Alvarez is both directing and writing a supposed remake, but Diablo Cody is “doing revisions” on the most recent draft. You know, Diablo Cody who wrote Juno and Jennifer’s Body (and United States of Tara, which I’ve admittedly never seen). The same Diablo Cody who seems as if she learned English by watching Kevin Smith movies. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have anything against Cody, per se. This normally wouldn’t be cause for alarm except that The Evil Dead (and yes, the first one is called The Evil Dead) doesn’t need the glossy super-referential teen-hipster one-liners and snappy back-and-forth that her work tends to showcase. The dialogue in The Evil Dead is campy and cheesy and in parts terrible on purpose. If we must explain our suspicion and hesitation, answer this: why don’t (most) truck stop eateries include foie gras on their menus? Because it just doesn’t fit.
Really? We need to remake this?
Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are still involved, but right now only in the “producer” capacity. That’s not where they need to be. They need to be writing/directing/acting, which they did…in the original The Evil Dead. Bruce Campbell is gung-ho, as he should be when promoting a new project, but says pretty clearly that the project is a remake. Why this need remake, y’all? What is the purpose of this reanimation? What are you going to do, jazz up the awesome cheap-ass effects? Refine the script (apparently)? Polish up the mise-en-scene? The cruddiness of the original was the main reason we loved it. When you create a work of art, even if tongue-in-cheek, let it be or else run the risk of regressing toward the mean.
Maybe I’m being a prick about this, but it seems we’ve all been burned in the last few years, with few exceptions, by remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, sequels, prequels, seqprereshizzles, whatever. Since it looks like the movie is going to be remade no matter what, let’s look at the bright side: Alvarez showed promise with his short film Panic Attack, both on the visual and aural ends (good use of the 28 Days Later theme). Giving him a not-too high profile or expensive gig like this probably makes sense to see if he’s got the chops to pull it off, though I wish he wasn’t messing with a cult classic. Diablo Cody has already written a decent horror flick, so maybe if she’s touching up the story and not the dialogue…And as I mentioned before, Raimi and Campbell are probably watching this thing like a hawk. After all, we put our trust in them before, and they repaid us with Evil Dead II and Army Of Darkness. Let’s hope they come through again.
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The Brown Tweed Society 
It’s funny to read this today, because the other night I woke up in a cold sweat after a horrific nightmare that poodles were eating the Mona Lisa.
Forgive my vitriolic rant, but count me firmly in the camp against everything about this. There’s no need to remake this movie outside of the fact that, well, we’re remaking EVERYTHING. And to hand the script over to Diablo Cody for “punching up” just ensures it will be miserable. I think I’m the only person in the world who didn’t find Juno as clever and darling as the everyone else clearly seemed to (I’m sorry, but there’s no way a girl that age knows the entire Stooges oeuvre, or uses a hamburger phone only popular for six months in 1983, no matter how “cool” she is – it just doesn’t track), and Jennifer’s Body was a decent idea made insufferable by the hipper-than-thou dialogue. To imagine Ash cocking a shotgun and saying “Charles is in Charge, baby” makes me want to kill myself. I hope a meteor demolishes the earth before I see my first movie poster for this, so I can go to my grave never knowing it existed.