With all due respect to director Sam Raimi, whose Spiderman trilogy are definitive, I find it exceedingly difficult to get precious over his 1981 cheapo horror flick where he put five twenty somethings in a cottage and had a demon kill em off.
I love having things go boo, I love horror because it transmutes real horrors of death and decay into imaginary hallucination blood fests. I reviewed the documentary about the hidden meanings behind "The Shining" the other day, "Room 237" and compared to questions of genocide and species amnesia, there is nothing the evil dead can really do to us.
So you can give up and give in to this $14M (hardly a fortune, right) remake, which sticks two guys and three girls in a cottage and won't let em leave till the skies quite literally rain blood. Nothing much is at stake, and there is no one to root for, butit is a singleminded gorefest with some great moments: one character pulls her hand off to escape the demon, another blows stuff up with oil and a letetr and there is some great dumb moment, "go back and get some water with sugar" one person tells his girlfriend. Maybe he didn't like her very much.
Construction, it changes POV three times and keeps you guessing (not about why but who, of course) till the very end. Nobody expects much more than to jump out of their skins from time to time and that just about first time director (he made a scary short) Fede Alvarez provides the goods. Jane Levy II is pretty good as a junkie, if she dyed her hair red she'd be a dead ringer for Emma Watson.
Music: Roque Banos incidental music accentuates the scares but there is no songs as such.
Movie: B
Music: C+