Five Creepy Music Videos Better Than "Thriller!"

A slate of horror-themed videos you DEFINITELY need to check out this All Hallow's season...

In 1983, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" -- probably the first true long-form music video -- was played on MTV. Depending upon the ebb and flow of teen suicide rates, it usually bests "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the periodic best music videos of all-time countdowns. It was even added to the National Film Registry, meaning the U.S. government considers it a worthwhile work of art on par with D.W. Griffith's and Stan Brakhage's finest.

Now, I've never been a huge Michael Jackson fan, but even on an objective level, I've never really understood what all the big fuss was about. Yeah, it's got zombies and werewolves and Vincent Price and all, but it all seems so cartoonish and full-of-itself, as if director (and remorseless child killer) John Landis just wanted to spend money for the sake of spending money. That, and it entails what is quite possibly the single most intelligence-insulting premise in the history of modern cinema: it asks viewers to actually believe that Jackson ported about something that even remotely resembled heterosexual longings.

With Halloween right around the corner, you're definitely going to be hearing, and seeing, quite a bit of "Thriller" for the next 30 or 40 days. While the video and Jackson will undoubtedly continue to receive postmortem praise (and largely, from the same people who were making chi-mo jokes up until the Gloved One's final hours) I figured it was worth our collective whiles to celebrate a few music videos with a decisive horror bent that don't get the same kind of recognition that "Thriller" does -- although, as you will soon see for yourselves, they most certainly deserve it.

The Greg Kihn Band 

"Jeopardy" (1983)

Never heard of the Greg Kihn Band? Well, they're the band that does the "The Breakup Song," itself one of their spookier-sounding pop hits from the early '80s. While "Jeopardy" is a slightly cheerier sounding tune (complete with a bass line more or less stolen from Stevie Wonder's "Superstition"), the music video for the song is pure, Reagan-era horror cheese at its finest.

For one thing, its one of those old school music videos that actually looks like it was filmed on somebody's home camera. Secondly, the atmosphere is just goddamn terrific, providing us with the absolute best kind of horror music video: the kind that starts off fairly non-horror-ish, that you can just sense is going to spiral into genre madness at any moment.

So, the premise here is simple: a dude with a mullet is having apprehensive thoughts at his wedding. He imagines his arguing parents' having their hands welded together like some kind of "Elm Street" special effect, he pulls back his wife's veil for a wedding smooch and BAM! The entire reception turns into a zombie apocalypse, complete with the groom having to use a piece of wood to fend off an aluminum foil hell monster. And then, he proceeds to play the makeshift stake like an air guitar, because that makes way more sense than trying to escape from a cathedral crawling with the living dead and shit. And oh man, how about that pseudo-misogynistic happy ending where he drives off with the wedding bubbly without his bride?  This is just all of the archaic, stupid stuff that made Pre-AIDS America awesome -- for my money, THIS is the spooky music video from 1983 we should've been celebrating for all these years.

Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper

"Be Chrool to Your Scuel" (1985)

My musical tastes have changed a lot over the years, but no matter what aural phase I've gone through, Twisted Sister's "Stay Hungry" has remained one of my all-time favorite albums. Likewise, Alice Cooper is one of my favorite musicians ever, and a man whose ouevre is so rich, he's probably the only person in history that could be able to release an entire album filled with nothing but songs he's contributed to shitty B-horror movies.

So what happens when you combine the two? Well, you get pure awesomeness, that's what, and that pure awesomeness is called "Be Chrool to Your Scuel."

In this eight-minute(!) opus, Bobcat Goldthwait plays a jaded high school teacher, who mumbles stuff about SAT scores and number two pencils with an intonation that sounds like John Travolta trying to gargle marbles. After rambling about tacos and squirrels not picking him up at the airport for three and a half minutes, he runs to the teacher's lounge , plugs in a Twisted Sister tape, and as expected, the proverbial shit hits the metaphorical fan. Not only are the zombies in this one way more grotesque than the living dead in "Thriller," I think they look better than any of the zombies you'd have seen in "Day of the Dead" -- and since Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper ain't pussies, you actually get some pretty good gore in this one, too, including two zombies literally sucking face, a couple of arms hacked off and even a sequence where a zombie student has his larynx carved out by a zombified nurse!

Death In Vegas

"Dirt" (1997)

1997 was an important year for the music video format, for two reasons. For one, that was the year MTV decided to drastically cut back the number of programming hours dedicated to actual music videos, representing what would eventually be the network's slow descent into becoming a channel that shows "Teen Mom" 23 and a half hours a day.

Secondly, it was the year "electronica" was supposed to kill rock and roll for good, as highly-touted groups like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers were given all the hype and corporate backing in the world to supplant all of the crappy, post-Nirvana grunge-pop acts. As part of the not at all engineered techno-rock ploy, Death in Vegas was one of the soundalike groups that got momentary MTV stardom in the late 1990s -- although, as with Aphex Twin, just about everybody remembers them for their freaky-ass videos and have no recollections whatsoever of what the band actually sounded like.

All-in-all, I'd say "Dirt" is pretty much the exemplary pseudo-Dadaist, semi-intellectual, stream-of-conscious-pretentious-corporate-rock-techno-surrealist-shit that the timeframe gave us. With its self-indulgent black and white imagery, cryptic Holocaust visuals and blunt anti-religious imagery (complete with a funk-rock bassline tailor made for late '90s sneakers commercials), this music video is just about the finest tribute to the "Titanic" era zeitgeist you'll probably ever encounter.

Robbie Williams

"Rock DJ" (2000)

Forget Weird Al and all of that shit Spike Jonze directed -- this is far and away the greatest satire in the history of music videos.

With a face that residing somewhere between Jackass's Johnny Knoxville and Mr. Bean, Robbie Williams epitomized the era's flash-in-the pan Brit-pop manufactured stars, whose promotion was clearly designed to ride in on the coattails of pretty boy (and painfully closeted homosexual) Ricky Martin. Perhaps catching a whiff of its own syntheticness, this brilliantly subversive video posits Williams as a golden idol the masses just can't wait to consume ... literally.

As with "Jeopardy," the video really excels at making you feel that something weird is going to happen, no matter the generic trappings presented upfront. If you ever wondered what would happen if Clive Barker was selected to direct a George Michael video ... well, I'm pretty sure "Rock DJ" is what we would've ended up with.

Strapping Young Lad

"Love?" (2005)

Devin Townsend -- the Canadian death metal guy who looks suspiciously like Brad Douriff, pre-Voodoo soul transfer in "Child's Play" -- is an absolute musical genius, as evident by albums like "Terria," "The Human Equation" and "Ziltoid the Omniscient." Best known for his work in Strapping Young Lad, 2005's "Alien" is probably the band's best overall offering, and as far as SYL songs go, I can't think of one I like more than "Love?," a really weirdo ballad about a dude off his meds talking about how interpersonal intimacy is just a neurological coping mechanism.

So, imagine my surprise a few years back, when I did a Google search for the song, and not only did a legitimate music video pop up, but the entire fucking thing had an "Evil Dead" motif!

Needless to say, this thing is just amazing, from start-to-finish. From the laughing moose heads from "Dead by Dawn" to the infamous Deadite hand infection to the zooming camera shots so spot-on they feel like Sam Raimi was filming it himself, "Love?" is far and away the best homage to "The Evil Dead" in modern media. Sigh ... why didn't they let Devin Townsend make a musical reboot instead of that god-awful remake we got last year?

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Surprise! The 2013 “Evil Dead” Remake ABSOLUTELY SUCKS.

Not only is the needless “reboot” a disgrace to the original, it stands out as one of the WORST remakes in horror history.

Well, this is it; the moment we’ve been dreading for a good fifteen years now.

The first time I heard rumblings of an “Evil Dead” remake was in 2000. I immediately sent an e-mail to the most pertinent source I could think of at the time -- that being, of course, legendary drive-in critic Joe Bob Briggs -- who responded by saying, and I am afraid I have to paraphrase here, that every time he heard someone use the term “re-imagining” or “re-envisioning,” all he wanted to do was yell “write a goddamn original script!” as a high-pitched rebuttal.

Of course, I never really thought that such a project would ever get off the ground. Then again, this was well before the era of rampant horror remakes, and even as we progressed through the PG-13 Shymalan era to there being a “My Bloody Valentine 3D” playing in actual chain theaters, I still thought this would never, ever happen. First, they came for “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” then they came for “Halloween,” and then “Friday the 13th.” Yet, still, I remained optimistic. “The Evil Dead is our holiest of holies,” I would placate myself. “There’s no way a just god would allow such a blasphemy to ever come to fruition.”

Even as legendary flicks like “Night of the Demons,” “Black Christmas” and “Silent Night Deadly Night” got the “re-do treatment,” I felt safe. It just can’t happen, I kept thinking. And then, the trailer hit, and I realized it: “The Evil Dead” had just been defiled, and there was seemingly nothing I could do about it.

I promised to not watch the “new” movie. As a kid, I actually promised myself that if this day arrived, I would organize a national boycott to picket theaters playing the atrocity. But over the last couple of weeks, something utterly unexpected happened; as if by the divine right hand of God himself, fate had chosen me…via a New York Times article shoutout…to be the individual that gave this crime against celluloid the literary thrashing to end all literary thrashings.

If someone was going to piss upon the eternal monument known as “The Evil Dead,” than I believe it is my celestially appointed duty to chug a 57-ounce XL QuikTrip cup of Mountain Dew Code Red with vanilla flavoring and piss back with all the fury my bladder can muster.

And so, I grabbed my girl, a couple of tofu dogs, and headed to the drive-in. Fede Alvarez and what’s left of Sam Raimi’s reputation called me out to a fistfight, and you better believe I was ready to scrap like a motherfucker.

You may be wondering if there’s some bias at play here. Granted, I revere the original “The Evil Dead” with the sort of sacrosanct respect normally reserved for war heroes and religious figureheads, but even if I didn’t necessarily have an appreciation for the 1983 (or is it 1981?) original, I still would have hated the ever-loving shit out of Fede Alvarez’s absolute on-screen abortion. If this is supposed to be the Uruguayan wunderkind’s grand Hollywood debut, a much-touted prospect hasn’t had a failed first impression of such a magnitude since the legendary “Shockmaster” made his first appearance on WCW television.

Of course, I didn’t want the “remake” to be good. Then again, I also knew that it would’ve been impossible for a remake to recapture ANY of the magic of the first movie, and I sure as hell knew that it wasn’t going to be on par with the original when an unproven (now proven to be an unskilled douche bag, though) wannabe auteur and Diablo Cody was behind the screenplay process.

The fact of the matter is that “Evil Dead” (2013) -- henceforth referred to as either “Evil Dead ‘13” or “this/that worthless piece of shit” -- is not only as bad as I imagined, it’s actually far, far worse than I would’ve predicted. Not only is this a film that fails to reproduce any of the charm or atmosphere or shock of the original, it’s a film that fails to generate charm, atmosphere or shock of virtually any kind. Unlike its’ inspiration, “Evil Dead ‘13” is a lifeless, plastic film, with acting so wooden, dialogue so clunky, and pacing so stilted that it feels like you’re more or less watching a SyFy made-for-cable original. This is a film with absolutely zero understanding of what made “The Evil Dead” an American independent cinema classic -- unable to detect the low-budget, anti-establishment creativity and against-the-grain structuring of the ‘83 flick, apparently Alvarez thinks that it’s just blood and guts that gave the film its vaunted reputation. There’s plenty of plasma and severed limbs to be found in “ED ‘13,” but none of the suspense, originality, or ingenious camera shots that “ED ‘83” had. And even the gore quotient is relatively ineffective; after 32 years of higher-budget imitators, all of the by-the-numbers, tongue-in-cheek disemboweling and dismemberment doesn’t seem anywhere near as “Grand” or “Guignol” as it used to.

So, where did this remake go wrong? Well, in a lot of places, to start off.

One of the really great things about the original “Evil Dead” was that it didn’t really have an exposition to explain who, how or why all of the freaky shit started happening to the kids in the movie. Granted, the sequels cleared all of that stuff up, but that enigmatic plot point -- you know, the same reasonless device that never explained why zombies were running around in the first “Night of the Living Dead” or why Michael Myers wanted to kill people in the first “Halloween” movie -- gave the film this ultra-spooky, mysterious quality that added to the suspense of the picture. In the remake, a needless prologue -- featuring a bunch of country rubes setting a teenage girl on fire -- serves as something of an explanation to the films’ happenings, and takes out virtually all of the suspense regarding the vacationers subsequent exploration of  the cabin, finding of the demonic relic, and unleashing the forces of hell due to their willy-nilly behaviors.

As with the original, we have ourselves a cast of five kids -- two males, three females -- who were all childhood friends. Now, whereas in the first film, the cast were just a bunch of Michigan State students hightailing it to Tennessee for your typical 1980s weekend of doin’ drugs and doin’ it, the kids in the remake actually have an agenda. You see, one of the kids has a really bad heroin habit, and the weekend retreat is more or less an intervention to help her quit smack, cold turkey. The fact that this plot point completely rips off last year’s “Resolution” is something you probably shouldn’t look into, though.

While nobody’s going to call the acting in the original “Evil Dead” commendable by any stretch, at least there was a certain sense of sincerity to both the dialogue and delivery of said dialogue. Listening to people speak in the remake, however, is like chewing on an eight pound block of Styrofoam; nothing anybody in the movie says sounds anything even remotely resembling honest or serious; in other words, the characters in the film seem to be playing self-aware characterizations themselves. Corny -- yet attempting to be serious -- dialogue is one thing, but the phoniness and laziness of the acting and scriptwriting here is almost “Twilight”-levels of plastic awfulness.

There are a lot of odes to the original film -- the necklace medallion (which doesn’t really have the same function that it had in the first flick), the chainsawing, and even a split-second cameo by Bruce Campbell in a post-credits sequence -- but none of them have even a fraction of the impact that those same devices had in the original flick. Especially disappointing is Alvarez’s “update” of the iconic tree-rape sequence; when you can make an entire crowd of theater-goers laugh as a woman has a tree limb jammed up her hoo-ha, you know you’ve royally screwed up as a filmmaker.

There’s a lot of gore, guts and gunge in the movie, but without the suspense, pacing and creativity that the first film had, the on-screen violence in the remake becomes both self-parodying and unrealistic to the point of viewer disengagement. It’s clear that Alvarez is aiming for the gross out in several sequences -- a chick pukes blood in another girl’s mouth, people get pegged by semi-automatic nail guns, and one character gets turned into a living Venus de Milo statuette  via nonconsensual shotgun surgery --but none of it is really shocking or effective, to any degree. Even now, the scene in the first film where what’s her name gets a pencil jammed through her ankle is more disturbing -- and stomach churning -- than anything you’ll see in the remake, times twenty.

As both a remake and film on its own merits, “ED ‘13” is an absolute disaster. It’s worse than 2009’s “Friday the 13th,” and it’s worse than 2010’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” -- as a standalone horror flick, it’s easily the worst I’ve seen in a theater since “Red Riding Hood” -- aka, that goddamn movie where Gary Oldman wears aluminum foil nail polish and Amanda Seyfried just stares doe-eyed at the camera for 90 minutes. It’s a film that’s not just structurally stupid, it’s clear that the filmmakers set out to make as stupid a motion picture as they could; all in all, had Alvarez taken a dump on the original negatives of the film, it would’ve been a more loving tribute to the source material then what the no-talent hack shat out on the screen here. Remember the scene in the original where Ash buried his girlfriend alive, only to bring her back to life with a motorized defibrillator he just McGuyvered out of a car battery and a couple of conveniently-packed syringes of adrenaline? If Alvarez directed  a remake of “Psycho,” he’d probably have Norman Bates turn into an eight foot tall eagle creature that’s warded off by a bazooka lugging bounty hunter.

Simply put, “ED 2013” is a monumental failure, in literally every sense of the term. Not only is it an affront to the source material, it’s just a flat out awful picture in every conceivable category. In addition to the unimpressive special effects, the heinous acting, the unsure direction and the sloppy script, the cinematography and soundtrack of the film are similarly atrocious and even the credit sequences of the film look like something designed on Final Cut Pro by an eight year old school-shooter in the making.

As both a standalone offering and a remake, the film certainly owes quite a bit to the original “The Evil Dead.” And if you ask me, “an apology” would be the best place to start.

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The Evil Dead…on the Commodore 64!

The Ultimate Experience in Grueling (Cartridge-Based) Terror!

Seeing as how the much-anticipated/much-dreaded “Evil Dead” remake is being released this weekend, I figure it’s only fitting that we take the time to revisit the first “Evil Dead”-branded video game to hit the market, no? 

Oh, by the way; for those of you that think you have to go back to 2000 and “Evil Dead: Hail to the King” to play the first officially licensed, Deadite and Fake Shemp filled title…you’ll actually have to go back much further than that. How much further, exactly? Try before the Nintendo Entertainment System was even available in the U.S., you primitive screw heads.

The very, very first official “Evil Dead” game was released in 1984, on the much beloved (but hardly played by anyone under the age of 30) Commodore 64. As for the back story behind the title? The game was apparently produced by some dude named Richard Leinfellner, and produced by U.K.-based Palace Software. According to the wiki at Giant Bomb, Leinfellner’s most recent forays into the world of gaming are re-dos of “Populous” and “SimCoaster,” released in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Meanwhile, the much more reliable Moby Games database says that the dude’s had a pretty prolific career, working on such cult classic titles as “Outlander” and “Alfred Chicken” in the early 1990s and helping produce numerous Electronic Arts games  throughout the aughties -- including 2004’s abysmal  “Catwoman” and the fairly-underappreciated (and Avril Lavigne-tastic) “Burnout Dominator” in 2007.

Palace Software continued to make games up until the studio officially shuttered its doors in 1991, when the group’s parent company sold it off to Titus Software -- the same publishing masterminds behind such legendary offerings as “Superman 64” and “Blues Brothers 2000.” Outside of “The Evil Dead,” the studio’s most famous game is probably “Cauldron,” an All Hallows Eve-themed SHMUP which began life as, of all things, a platformer based on John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” And crazily, when the studio ported “Cauldron” to the ZX Spectrum, they actually included a totally free version of “The Evil Dead” as an unmarketed “bonus game” on the flip side of the tape!

Now, seeing as how the game was released almost 30 years ago, you’re probably not going to be surprised by the fact that the gameplay therein is rather limited. As are the graphics, the sounds, the controls and pretty much every other technical attribute you can think of. That said, the game -- for its time, anyway -- is actually pretty decent, and shockingly, quite a bit of limited fun, pending you have a tolerance for vector graphics and Atari 2600-esque gameplay dynamics.

"The Evil Dead” was a fairly simplistic movie, and the Commodore 64 version of “The Evil Dead” is even simpler. The title screen is very minimalistic, but I think that works in favor of the game -- especially considering the “bare-bones” nature of the source-material. I really dug how that creepy, Castlevania-esque music starts piping up as soon as the cartridge loads; unfortunately, it’s the only portion of the game with anything that resembles “actual music,” so enjoy it while it lasts.

And of course, any long-time “Evil Dead” aficionado will note at least one discrepancy regarding the cast list presented here. I suppose we could overlook the misspelling of “Ashley” as a data compression issue, but, then why in the heck would the characters “Cheryl” and “Shelly” be fully spelled out?

That awesome, spooky title theme continues as a brief cutscene unfurls. The sequence is basically our exposition and a tutorial at the same time, with the uninitiated learning the whole “Evil Dead” mythos in about the time it takes to heat up a cup of Ramen noodles.

The premise of the game is absurdly simple. You play Ash, and it’s your job to close all of the doors and shut all of the windows in the iconic “cabin in the woods,” so that the “Evil Dead spirit” - - the unseen force in Sam Raimi’s movie, which is visualized in the game as a generic puffy cloud -- can’t seep in and turn everybody into frog monsters. Uh…more on that plot point later.

By the way, if you accidentally touch the Evil Dead cloud yourself, it’s an instant kill. I bring this up, simply because the death screen in the game is so amazingly minimal, yet effective; the screen gets all static, a few distorted beeps ring out of your C64, and then, it’s time for a re-do, with a freshly reset game clock. Be careful though; in the game, you only get three lives, and believe you me, you’ll run out of all of them in a hurry.

So, back to those afore-mentioned frog monsters. When the Evil Dead fog hits one of the non-playable-characters in the game, they transform into “green mutants”…which is the precise term the explicatory cutscene used earlier to describe what you are fighting. Needless to say, if they end up touching you, it’s time for another interstitial of static to scroll across your monitor.

To defend yourself against the Brussels-sprout hued legion of the dead, however, the game gives you a small arsenal of weaponry to defend yourself with. Sprinkled throughout the cabin, there are axes, shovels, a samurai sword (must’ve been in the long-unseen “first draft” of “The Evil Dead” screenplay, I imagine) and this narrow, baseball bat-looking object that could really be anything. A piece of lumber, a lead pipe, a sledgehammer…really, the only boundary here is your imagination. Every time you pick up a weapon, the game clock freezes for about a half second. On the surface, that doesn’t really seem like a long time, but seeing as how your stage-time-linked life bar drains from full health to “deader than Elvis” in less than two minutes, trust me…those seconds matters.

Probably my favorite aspect of the entire game is that after you “slay” a “green mutant,” the demon returns…this time, as a small platoon of disembodied, multi-colored body parts. It’s an incredibly small detail, but something that I think really pushes the game over the hump from being a mere “cash-in” to something with at least a little bit of thought and planning behind it.

Considering the scope and technological restrictions imposed upon the software, it’s probably not surprising that the overall “game world” is rather limited. The cabin you walk into is really the entire game geography, so outside of a few rooms and some extremely limited walking space a few centimeters around the parameter of the cabin, that’s all there is to see in the game. That said, the in-game cabin itself is a pretty detailed representation of the one from the movie -- not only do you get the fireplace and a couple of beds, you even get that spooky, creaky swing set on the porch, which actually sways back and forth while you murder-death-kill broccoli-headed zombies.

So, yeah, as I was saying earlier: the gameplay here is EXTRAORDINARILY limited. Seeing as how your life bar is perpetually draining, I think it’s pretty unlikely that anyone can last longer than about five minutes on any play through of the game. I guess you could find ways to up your high score by tracing the patterns of the “Evil Dead” clouds and proactively closing windows and doors, but if you have enough time to figure that out…congratulations on having such a fruitful life.

Despite the obvious gameplay deficits, I would still consider “The Evil Dead” on the Commodore 64 to be an “entertaining” game, keeping in mind two major caveats. Number one, it’s the kind of game you play in ten minute spurts, and usually, just once a year (around Halloween, preferably.) And secondly, you have to remember this game was released when this was considered visually groundbreaking home video gaming. It’s basic, and repetitive and purposelessly difficult, but you know what, kids? That’s what video games used to be about, in general. If you can’t get at least a twinge of nostalgic happiness out of this thing, your attention span is probably too short to even make it this deep into the article, anyway.

There’s really not much else to say about the game, I suppose. It’s a curious little relic from yesteryear, and if nothing else, a mildly entertaining diversion for a couple of minutes. And in my humblest of opinions? It sure as hell beats the pants off the Commodore 64 treatment “Friday the 13th” got, that’s for darned sure…

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JIMBO GOES TO THE MOVIES: “Oz The Great and Powerful” Review

I can think of at least two ill-fitting adjectives in the title of this movie…

When Sam Raimi makes a movie, the final product generally takes one of four potential forms. When he’s firing on all cylinders, the end outcome is modern, American cinematic gold -- “The Evil Dead” and “Spider-Man 2” immediately spring to mind. Then, there are his movies that, while mostly enjoyable, feel a little intentionally light and empty; “Drag Me to Hell” and “Darkman” are probably the two best examples from his oeuvre. Then, there his movies where he’s trying so hard to not be Sam Raimi that you can almost feel the DVD itself straining to not throw in a Three Stooges sight gag or display a hurdling object zooming towards someone in first-person. “For Love of the Game” and “A Simple Plan?” I find both of you guilty as charged.

And then, there are the films where it’s apparent that he just doesn’t give half a good goddamn what he’s doing, and the final dividend is just straight up rubbish. There are still innocent victims being pulled out from underneath the cinematic wreckage of “Spider-Man 3,” I hear.

Raimi’s latest is a film that seems to be something of an interphase between “OK” Sam Raimi (he who gives us “Crimewave” and “The Gift”) and the Sam Raimi that’s just churning out stuff because it’ll result in a paycheck of some kind (anybody remember “M.A.N.T.I.S.” or “Cleopatra 2525?”)

“Oz The Great and Powerful” isn’t really a bad movie, per se, but it’s certainly underwhelming when taken as a whole motion picture. There’s plenty of great ideas to be found in the movie, and the aesthetics, as expected, are pretty great, and there’s even a few really clever elements to the script, but none of those things add up to a cumulatively engrossing movie-going experience.

Problem number one, of course, is the “source” material. Even thinking about approaching a property as beloved as “The Wizard of Oz” is usually a recipe for disaster, and Raimi’s lame attempt to subvert the matter (“it’s not a remake, it’s a re-imagined prequel!”) is an insufficient cover-up for the fact that there’s hardly anything new to be found herein. Hell, at least “The Wiz” had a cameo appearance by Richard Pryor as an evil robot head that shoots fire at stuff.

Raimi’s flick, in an obvious homage to the 1939 original that actually wasn’t the original, begins with a lengthy black and white sequence, in which we are introduced to Oz, a down-on-his-luck, philandering, conning, conniving and generally douchey stage magician that makes a living (barely) by hustling country bumpkins and abusing his best friend while he makes “Police Academy!” sound effects behind the curtain. Oz, in case you weren’t aware, is played by James Franco, who I swear, is actually David Arquette in disguise. Go ahead, look at them side-by-side, and tell me we are talking about two different people here.

So, we’re introduced to a bunch of seemingly one-off characters (a gaggle of Oz’s bitter romantic conquests, his best girl -- who is about to get married to someone else -- and even a paraplegic girl that wants the phony Oz to use his “magical powers” to heal her of polio. All the while, a tornado picks up steam in the background, and well, you know what’s destined to happen next.

After getting sucked into a funnel, Oz finds himself awakening in the pastel, 3-D, wide-screened wonderland of Oz (yes, both the main character of the film and the location of the film have the same moniker) and he runs into Meg Griffin, whose wearing a really funny looking hat and way too much red lipstick. Anyhoo, she tells Oz that he’s been prophesized by the oracles of Oz to just fall out of the sky and save the kingdom from the tyranny of an evil queen. So, yeah, it’s pretty much the same thing as the ending of “Evil Dead 2,” really, only with less chainsawing and arterial explosions.

Sigh...why couldn't have "The Quick and the Dead" gotten this much merchandising muscle?

So, Oz enters, uh, the kingdom of Oz, and he runs into Rachel Weisz, who plays one of Meg Griffin’s sisters, who claims that their other sister is really all evil and shit. Of course, Rachel Weisz’s character is actually the evil one and the hitherto unseen third sister -- played by what’s her name from “Dawson’s Creek” -- is actually the only one of the sisters that’s worth a damn, and yeah, you don’t care. At one point, Oz decides to do a Scrooge McDuck cannonball dive into the Emerald City castle’s treasury of golden riches, and despite only knowing him for about five minutes, Meg offers to marry him so they can co-rule the kingdom. Eventually, Rachel Weisz manages to send Oz on a wild goose chase, in which he’s supposed to kill the “evil-but-actually-good” witch, and along the way, he runs into a horrifying, wise-cracking CGI monkey in a bellhop uniform and a living porcelain doll that lives in a kingdom of teapots called “China Town” -- probably the best bit in the entire movie, as far as I am concerned. And oh yeah, did I mention that all of these characters are somewhat modeled after people we were introduced to in the film’s sepia-tone first half? Well, they are.

The movie really hits a snag once Oz and his buddies enter the suburbs of Oz, where the suspiciously multiracial community consists of men with curly mustaches and women with even curlier ponytails. Oh, and that black midget from “Bad Santa” plays a stagecoach driver, because if there’s one thing the ‘39 “Oz” lacked, it was blatant racist subtext.

Eventually, Oz, his monkey sidekick, his china doll liability and Michelle Williams decide to wage war against the combined forces of Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis, who gets turned into the much more traditional, hook-nosed, green-skinned witch-y poo we usually associate with L. Frank Baum’s works after her sister feeds her a poisonous apple. I think it was around that point that, amidst a small ocean of assured “Once Upon a Time” fans in the theater, I stood up and yelled “that’s not even the right license!” before being shot with literally dozens of disappointed gleams.

The denouement involves the evil winged baboon forces and eleven foot tall nutcracker soldiers of the Emerald City taking on a junta of Oz communitarians. I’m not sure if Raimi is trying to make some sort of snide comment about the rift between the rural and the urbanized here, but a pivotal plot point to the film is that, under absolutely no circumstances, are the citizens of Oz allowed to kill anyone or anything, while the denizens of the Emerald City are some hyper-violent mofos that have no qualms about killing everything and anything. Like I said, no sly sociopolitical context going on here, at all.

Of course, Oz and his brigade of common, decent country folk, simple industrial laborers and, uh, midgets, concoct an elaborate ruse implementing the main character’s carny-knowhow to trick the Emerald City forces through video projectors, scarecrow automatons and plenty of firecrackers. I can applaud Raimi for incorporating a (largely) nonviolent ending to the picture, but at the same time? There’s no way around the anticlimactic dullness of the film’s final twenty or so minutes.

Unless you are an idiot, you’re not even going to ask if this film is on par with the 1939 film. For that matter, I reckon it’s not even on par with “Return to Oz,” and let’s face it, that movie kinda’ sucked a little. Even though Sam Raimi is a registered Republican, and hence, I should have suspected nothing of the sort, I was just a tad disappointed that the director didn’t touch upon the super-socialistic roots of the source material - - bet you didn’t know that “The Wizard of Oz” is actually a hyper-allegorical tale about populism and the plight of the lower class, didja?

As before, I didn’t hate the movie, but I certainly didn’t enjoy it all that much either. It has some decent moments, and I guess you’ll stay awake for most of it, but at the end of the day? All we’re talking about here is a yellow brick road to disappointment.

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Why The 2013 “Evil Dead” Remake is Destined to Suck…HARD.

Five reasons why the upcoming remake/retread is bound to be awful…

I’ve been meaning to write about next year’s “Evil Dead” remake since I saw the launch of the red-band trailer last Halloween, but I haven’t been able to for one primary reason: because every time I think about this upcoming abomination of celluloid, I become too angry to link up coherent sentences in my head. I’ve actually tried to sit down and iron out a blog post about it a couple of times, but during every attempt, I had to slam my laptop shut in disgust and just walk away. Not dwelling on the subject at all, I suppose, may end up saving me a couple of fist-shaped holes in the drywall.

I’ve gone on record about a billion times regarding my adulation for “The Evil Dead.” I never get tired of telling people about my quixotic quest to find a VHS copy back in the day, after reading blurbs in the Leonard Maltin film book about how disgusting it was. I ended up finally scoring a copy at the downright skuzziest mom and pop in town - they didn’t even have box art for the movie, it was just a piece of lumpy Styrofoam with the words “Evil Dead” written on it and a Roman numeral “I” positioned underneath it. The video copy itself was absolutely horrible - if I didn’t know any better, I would say it was a copy recorded off HBO sometime in the early 1990s - but as soon as I jammed that little rectangle of evil in my VCR, I just knew my life would never be the same.

I’ve written so much about “The Evil Dead,” and it’s influence on middle-school me, that it’s just redundant to mull the same-old stuff for the one quintillionth time. What I will re-state, however, is threefold: a.) “The Evil Dead” remains arguably my all-time favorite movie, in any genre, b.) it inspired me to pursue a career in the arts (because after watching it, I was convinced ANYBODY with a camera, pluck and a lengthy set of ideas could make exquisite trash cinema) and c.) it instilled inside me a sense of DIY ethos, an independent spirit, if you will, that found not only quality, but virtue, in making low-budget, un-financed projects.

Which, of course, brings us to the subject of the “Evil Dead” remake, a big-budget do-over scheduled for a national, theatrical release next spring. Seeing the much-ballyhooed/criticized trailer earlier this year was a downright shock to me, primarily, because I had no idea the long-discussed remake was in post-production, let alone already filmed. And needless to say…I was not impressed by what I saw.

Now, I haven’t seen the “Evil Dead” remake, and unless it cures all diseases known to man, I won’t be seeing it, either. In some ways, you could attack me for decrying something that I haven’t even encountered yet, or, you could look at me as a guy with a good sense of depth perception that knows when we’re about to hit a brick wall of bullshit at 90 kilos per hour. The writing, as they say, is clearly on the wall here, and I’d venture to guess that there’s a 99.999999999989 percent chance the “Remade Dead” is going to not only suck, but suck hard enough to cause a magnetic field reversal and end humanity as we know it.

So, why do I think the movie is going to blow, and magnificently? Well, here’s five iron-cast reasons as to why the “Evil Dead” remake simply cannot succeed as a cinematic retread…

REASON NUMBER ONE:

It’s Not a Product of the Same Conditions as the Original 

The production process of “The Evil Dead” is a part of Gen Y lore - in fact, you could even say that the success of the project is pretty much the quintessential Millennial fantasy made flesh. A bunch of Michigan State dropouts spend their entire college stay making Three Stooges homages instead of studying for biology class, and after making the greatest backyard horror movie of all time, manage to cajole some financer to give them moolah to make this insanely violent, hyper-original horror movie for roughly the same amount of money today that would earn you a new SUV.  Being the professional sorts they are, the filming process took over FIVE years, with Raimi, Tapert and Campbell doing special effects in their grandmothers’ attic and having to film outdoor scenes inside of garages with barely enough walking room for more than two people. And then, there’s the urban legends about the sheer torture the crew had to go through to make the flick - but yeah, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about those by now, anyway.

Some people say the inherent “cheapness” of the original “Dead” was what gave it its aesthetic charm, but if you ask me, it’s what made the movie work in its totality. Had the makers of the film had an actual budget to work with, the entire spirit of the flick would’ve been different. It was a team effort, constructed by a ragtag ensemble of highly passionate (and highly broke) individuals that were willing to substitute unbridled creativity for financial backing. The process behind “The Evil Dead” simply cannot be replicated again, and as a result, I think it’s highly, highly improbable that a re-do under more favorable economic conditions can result in the same highly original, highly energetic and highly entertaining product.

I guess you could say that the heart of the matter here is that “The Evil Dead” remake just doesn’t have the same contextual significance than the original had. The original “Dead” came out during the height of the American degenerate cinema Renaissance, at a time when independent films still had distribution options and the term “CGI” was completely non-existent. The original “Dead” was something of a counter-culture, punk rock horror flick that was reactionary to the multi-million dollar, kid-friendly “horror” flicks of the time, like “Poltergeist” and “The Amityville Horror.” It brought the genre back into the gutter where it rightfully belonged, only infused with a sort of DIY creativity that made it stand out from the million billion slasher flicks of the timeframe. The stunning camerawork in the film was basically Sam’s means of “covering-up” the fact that the crew didn’t have enough money to film things conventionally; the movie was a lot of fun, no doubt, but it also carried a pretty palpable amount of “F U” to the industrial movie complex of the early ‘80s.

As a $14 million film with CGI effects using SAG actors and actresses, that same independent spirit just isn’t there for the “Evil Remake.” It’s not a labor of love and fury made by starving youngsters the same way the original was, and the film will almost assuredly lack the somewhat political animosity that the original carried against the Hollywood system of horror. Simply put: how are we supposed to expect the same product when the process is complete anathema to the system that made the original offering to begin with?

REASON NUMBER TWO:

It’s Being Helmed by a Totally Inexperienced Director (and a Screenwriter We Know for a Fact SUCKS)

The director hand-picked by Sam Raimi for the project is a dude named Fede Alvarez. The movie is not only his first mainstream feature film, but his first feature film EVER; take a good look at his resume, and you’ll note that the dude’s entire filmography up until the “Evil Retread” were nothing but short films (and three quarters of his works were made BEFORE he turned 18, at that.)

You can check out his last “movie,” a 2009 iMovie called “Panic Attack,” and honestly?  I’m not seeing what Raimi sees in this kid. Yeah, he’s good with Final Cut Pro, but as far as technique, and originality, and the ability to produce anything beyond an aesthetically interesting product? Not only has this Alvarez tyke NOT proven that he can make films with depth, he hasn’t even proven that he can make actual films, period. Hell, even Raimi and Co. had at least a feature film under their belt before getting the green light for “The Evil Dead.” For that matter, the beta project the kids used to get funding for “The Evil Dead” was a lengthier, more nuanced production than anything Alvarez has ever handled. It’s one part of a dyad of unavoidable suck, which goes from pessimistic to downright hopeless once you figure out who’s beyond the remake’s script: Diablo Cody.

OK, so the script is actually credited to a four man team involving Fede, Sam, some guy that works with Fede and Cody, but just having the “Juno” scribe as a part of the parallelogram is like some sort of furtive warning that pure suck is ahead of us. Can Cody make a straight-up film as opposed to a cross-referential hodgepodge of pop cultural name checks? Well, if you’ve ever seen anything she’s written, you know that’s simply impossible. Hell, we already LET her take a stab at “real horror,” and the result ended up being a tremendously horrible train wreck noteworthy simply because of a pointless scene in which Megan Fox and her toe thumbs play tongue lacrosse with that huge-eyed chick from “Red Riding Hood.” Odds are, the Necronomicon will have at least one New Kids on the Block sticker placed on it somewhere, because, you know, it’s all kooky and kitschy and stuff.

And for all you poor souls that think that having Raimi on board as a writer is enough to save the movie from utter crappiness, just remember: this is the same dude that penned such cinematic wonders as “Easy Wheels,” “M.A.N.T.I.S: The T.V. Movie” and, gulp, “Spider-Man 3.” Like several tons of fertilizer, the net outcome here could be a thunderous explosion of shit, no doubt.

Reason Number Three:

Seriously…Why is Everything So Green? 

A lot of things struck me about the trailer for the remake, but after watching it two or three times, the only thing I could think about was “Jeez, why is everything so guldarn GREEN?”

Go ahead, watch it. You have my permission…to have your eyes blinded by what appears to be celluloid soaked in lime Jell-O. I don’t know if this Fede kid is trying to make some sort of abstruse environmental message with the movie or what, but this much is incontestable: if the hard R-violence doesn’t make your stomach churn, the monochrome, Game Boy-esque cinematography of the movie might just be enough to have you dry heaving in theaters.

Reason Number Four:

There’s No Way it Will Have the Same Impact as its Inspiration

When “The Evil Dead” was originally released, nobody was praising its premise as being original; five kids go into the woods, and they DON’T come out of them with the same number of arms and legs they used to. Even in the late 1970s, it was a done-to-death convention, and after a billion-trillion “Evil Dead” rip-o…err, homages…like “Cabin in the Woods” and “Cabin Fever,” the narrative hook seems even more hackneyed and lifeless today.

“The Evil Dead” had a profound effect when it was initially released, because at the time, IT WAS something different. Slasher flicks were a dime a dozen, and a super-gory, no-budget supernatural splatter flick was pretty much anathema to U.S. horror at the time. It took a standard template, amped it up to a billion, cut no corners, and drove home its point with highly innovative camerawork, an aesthetic and pacing model that was totally contra to everything else out there at the time, and oh yeah! It was violent as all shit, too. Watching people have pencils jammed through their ankles and sexually assaulted by tree limbs was the kind of stuff audiences just weren’t used to circa 1983 - today, however, it’s pretty much cinema du jour, thanks to all of those lame torture porn flicks like “Saw” and “Hostel” and “Madea’s Witness Protection.”

The standard of shock has been raised dramatically since then, and since we already KNOW what gimmicks the movie is going to use (it is a remake, after all), then how in the bluest of hells is the flick supposed to have even a modicum of surprise or innovation?

Reason Number Five:

How Could they Possibly Make it Live Up to the Original? 

While there have been some decent horror remakes over the years, here’s a litmus test for you: just how many remakes have you seen, over the last fifteen years, that were BETTER than the original movies?

Go ahead, hit up Wikipedia, and try your best.

And as a final note, I would just like to parrot what one of my friends recently said on the matter, who also considered the upcoming remake to be utterly pointless.

“Besides, there’s already a great remake of ‘The Evil Dead out there,’” he said to me.

“It’s called 'Evil Dead 2.'”

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