Hot Docs ’13: When I Walk

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***/****
directed by Jason DaSilva

by Angelo Muredda Midway through When I Walk, Jason DaSilva’s seven-year record of his experience since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It’s to DaSilva’s great credit that that curiosity about what will become of him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal checkpoints of a committed relationship–babies and all–when one also has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn’t to say we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a depressive’s video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva’s hook is honestly come by and cannily placed. What’s more, it pays off to the extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties.

Hot Docs ’13: Fuck for Forest

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda “Don’t you think we’re already fucked anyway?” a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak’s gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It’s a decent question, but you don’t get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it’s directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group’s journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs ’13: Remote Area Medical

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***½/****
directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman

by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days’ worth of travel away–23 more than if he’d been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman’s film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Posted in2013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Revenge, Superhero, Theatrical

Ironman3

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black’s Iron Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black’s films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes’s work on semiotics and myth: he’d be Barthes’s greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone’s seen and read and heard everything they “should have” seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a “stupid sexy Flanders” homosexual fantasy. Certainly, there’s a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It’s a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

Hot Docs ’13: NCR: Not Criminally Responsible

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***/****
directed by John Kastner

by Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver could well be the start of John Kastner’s NCR: Not Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese’s paranoiac dream closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner’s film opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means–for everyone from victim to convict to society at large–to reintegrate into Canadian culture a violent criminal who’s been found not culpable for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors’ assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim’s family is understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so are we.

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

Shooting bigfoot trailer

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists–likely just to himself–that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot–defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons–is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders. 

Hot Docs ’13: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia

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**½/****
directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin

by Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or less compelling paean to the troupe’s fortitude against Russian orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued from the feminist collective’s 15-second guerrilla performance of a song called “God Shit” at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that’s the most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a 3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply religious values are embedded in Putin’s Russia, which turns relatively minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of political dissent.

Hot Docs ’13: Downloaded

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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***/****
directed by Alex Winter

by Angelo Muredda Who would have expected both Bill and Ted to become a pair of slick documentarians about media revolutions? Just last year there was the Keanu Reeves-produced Side by Side, and now, Alex Winter’s Downloaded, an engaging if overly twee sort-of prequel to The Social Network about the formation and early death of Napster. Downloaded moves at a good clip, establishing early on both the company’s miraculous birth over a bunch of IRC chats between nerdy cofounders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (interviewed in a ridiculous penthouse suite that Facebook built) and the larger systemic changes in information management that produced their baby, the first major decentralized file-sharing system. Winter gets utopian about the spirit of exchange that ensued when campus-dwellers started trading their Nirvana concerts and Sugar Ray singles in the late-Nineties, but you can forgive him for getting misty-eyed: It’s easy in retrospect to forget just how easy and inevitable library consolidation through downloading became when Napster took off.

Hot Docs ’13: Interior. Leather Bar.

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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*/****
directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews

by Angelo Muredda Whatever goodwill James Franco built up with his mesmerizing turn in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is bulldozed by Interior. Leather Bar., his second infuriating Hot Docs appearance in as many years. Ostensibly a recreation of a lost 8-minute sequence from William Friedkin’s Cruising that was to show Al Pacino’s undercover detective intimately crowdsourcing a gay S&M bar for a serial killer, this is nothing short of an incompetent lecture on queer theory and the importance of being a heterosexual ally to the community from a vain graduate student and, even worse, a tourist.

Hot Docs ’13: The Manor

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Family, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

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**½/****
directed by Shawney Cohen

by Angelo Muredda "I call myself a filmmaker," Shawney Cohen muses off the top of his debut feature The Manor, "but I've actually been a strip-club manager for longer." Family inheritances have long proven fertile ground for emerging documentarians, like Sarah Polley with Stories We Tell just last year. Still, Cohen has a distinctive enough angle here, given the unusual visual dynamics of his family (dad's overweight, mom has an eating disorder) and its business, the titular Guelph club that Cohen's father has been running for over 30 years.

Pain & Gain (2013)

Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Michael Bay, Theatrical, Thriller

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**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the articles by Pete Collins
directed by Michael Bay

by Angelo Muredda A man does a stomach crunch in mid-air, suspended off the armpit of a muscleman logo that’s spray-painted onto the side of a gym. Is there a more quintessential Michael Bay image than the opening shot of Pain & Gain? The only serious contender comes later on, in a slow-motion tableau of the same bro, Mark Wahlberg’s personal trainer-cum-murderer Danny Lugo, sailing over the windshield of an SUV, propelled by the debris from a flying fruit stand. When your story doesn’t have any Autobots, I guess you just have to improvise with your surroundings to get all your primary colours in. To say that the radioactive pop palette and abs-fetishism are familiar is an understatement, but it’s the thematic material and belaboured telling of it that makes Pain & Gain a perfect storm of Bay. Temporarily freed from the restraints of a battling-robot franchise, he’s allowed to make his most purely ideological statement yet in the form of a (fact-based) story about three idiots pursuing their warped vision of the Horatio Alger myth–which happily coincidences with Bay’s.

Tristana (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Spain

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***/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos
screenplay by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined schlock like Simon Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an errant bodily signifier that doesn’t always play nice. Just think of Million Dollar Baby, which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank’s impairment as a narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood’s transformation into a tender father, troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at once. Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene partner’s newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that her bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over how to frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the background or a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her hospital window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so common that in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it “aesthetic nervousness,” meaning a text’s tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.

The Blob (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, The Criterion Collection

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***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe, George Karas
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate
directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

by Jefferson Robbins Burt Bacharach and Mack David’s sock-hoppin’ title-track lyrics aside, the key creature of Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.’s The Blob never “leaps.” Sure, it sort of lunges up a stick to absorb an old hermit’s paw, but mostly what it does is ooze around, digest flesh, and act as the centring point for the film’s fine balance of character, pacing, and grace in the face of certain doom. While The Blob has its light moments, it’s seldom again as carefree as its opening credits would seem to portend. The blob crashes within its meteor case into a riven small-town society and drives it–the way all good monsters do–to better know and reconcile with itself.

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

The Fury (1978) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Brian De Palma, Espionage, Israel, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Teen, Thriller

***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras D
starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning
screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel
directed by Brian De Palma (as Brian DePalma)

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. While Brian De Palma is nothing if not a leitmotif filmmaker, it’s curious that he chose to direct The Fury right after Carrie. Imagine Spielberg following up Jaws with Orca–it’s like De Palma was begging to be pigeonholed. And it’s not surprising that The Fury wasn’t as zeitgeisty: it lacks the classical simplicity and youth appeal of Carrie, with almost no one in the cast under 30 save for future softcore legend Andrew Stevens and Carrie holdover Amy Irving, a good actress who just doesn’t have that X factor. But The Fury‘s echo can still be heard, because its ending is indeed that impactful. Nearly every review mentions it, and the terms in which Pauline Kael and her acolytes described it gave it a kind of porny rep that’s since inspired generations of young film buffs to seek the movie out. (Armond White called it an “orgasm.”) It is a great ending, but a revisit makes clear that The Fury is worth reading for the articles.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

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****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an ambiguous, brilliant indictment of “Jewish vengeance” wrapped in this impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance, and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist’s evolving theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film’s most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin (Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we’ve caught by the tail: our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our ends are so very righteous.

Like Someone in Love (2012)

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Japan, Romance, Theatrical

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***½/****
starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Rio Kase, Denden
written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It’s clear enough that Like Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it’s harder to say at first what we’re looking at and why. The closest voice we hear belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who’s a little too preoccupied with lying her way out of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young revellers in front of her. Whether she’s our lead takes a couple of false tries to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp directing his employees. Somewhere in between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who’s even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used to be after she’s vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets back.

True Blood: The Complete Second Season (2009) + True Blood: The Complete Third Season (2010) – Blu-ray Discs

Posted in2000s, 2009, 2010, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

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Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
S2: “Nothing But the Blood,” “Keep This Party Going,” “Scratches,” “Shake and Fingerpop,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Hard-Hearted Hannah,” “Release Me,” “Timebomb,” “I Will Rise Up,” “New World in My View,” “Frenzy,” “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”

S3: “Bad Blood,” “Beautifully Broken,” “It Hurts Me Too,” “9 Crimes,” “Trouble,” “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “Hitting the Ground,” “Night on the Sun,” “Everything Is Broken,” “I Smell a Rat,” “Fresh Blood,” “Evil Is Going On”

by Walter Chaw “True Blood” is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant and Bill have already so eloquently pointed out, it’s highly-addictive pulp crap–the sort of shallow, handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung up around prime-time soaps like “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest”. White-collar smut that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time, it was the super-rich; now, it’s the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme. It’s certainly soapier than showrunner/creator Alan Ball’s previous pay-cable drama, “Six Feet Under”, but to its credit what “True Blood” does in returning sexuality–and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings–to the vampire mythos, it does well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the appropriate supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest that gays present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood contagion? Doesn’t that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly? At least it’s not “The Walking Dead”.

Extracurricular Activities: “The Monster Show”

Posted in2013, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Comedy

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NqEpjagt3WA%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_detailpage

by Bill Chambers Recently, my brother Derek and I–a failed screenwriting team if ever there was one–took advantage of the new technological democracy and decided to make our own web cartoon, spun off from a short story Derek wrote (“The Monster Strikes”) about a closet monster who goes on strike and becomes roommates with his intended victim. For years, we had scribbled ideas for a potential TV show based on the concept, though our initial desire to satirize sitcom tropes changed (evolved?) over time as we realized we wanted to get away from meta-humour and do something more organically stupid.

“Zero Dark Thirty”: The Ashes Of American Flags

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blog, War

by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue’s digest of how torture “works” on behalf of democratic governments seeking to defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There’s no debate: by means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way from Osama bin Laden’s outer network to his inner circle, one, two, three. As journalist Malcolm Harris put it, “That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become.” But subtly, in the way Bigelow presents her lead character’s view of the battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.

Evil Dead (2013) + Beyond the Hills (2012)

Posted in****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Romania, Theatrical

Evildead

EVIL DEAD
***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
screenplay by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, based on the screenplay by Sam Raimi
directed by Fede Alvarez

BEYOND THE HILLS
****/****
starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Tapalaga
screenplay by Cristian Mungiu, inspired by the non-fiction novels of Tatiana Niculescu Bran
directed by Cristian Mungiu

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony of Fede Alvarez’s otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi’s Spam-in-a-cabin classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where it references its primogenitor are actually the movie’s weakest. I’m thinking, in particular, of handsome young hero David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high Raimi smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films drew their tone from Bruce Campbell–and how much this new one misses him. The danger of casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously (and jettisoning the “The,” in a gesture that reads as hipster insouciance) is that Evil Dead might draw closer to the mainstream and farther from its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both its absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then crossing it (a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle…but only for a moment) and its surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed brother/sister relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez’s film is a solid, even affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money shots. Compare its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against the disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the Woods to see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old religion, it’s really pretty great.