The Evil Dead Reassurance Tour marches on! The new installment of the classic horror trilogy being directed by Fede Alvarez has just finished principal photography in New Zealand, and Bruce Campbell has seen the footage! He is a producer on the flick, along with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, and he provided some quotes to Digital Spy that 1. acknowledge how die-hard fans are not taking news of this remake very well, and 2. to quote Michael Bay, they need to chill out.
But since Campbell is not Bay, he uses much different words and actually takes the opinions of Evil Dead fans into consideration. (Read: Is less of a dick about it.)
Here are his words:
[I]t’s going to take a bit to get the ‘Evil Dead’ fans behind it. We know we’ve pissed a lot of them off. We appreciate that and we appreciate their anger and their zeal, but the only thing we want to impress upon them is that we didn’t screw it up. This is going to be just as memorable as [the original] Evil Dead without being the same movie…
I’ve seen it already; I think it’s definitely fabulous.
Campbell goes on to say that we need to consider this movie to be a member of the Evil Dead family, but not one who is trying to commit patricide and take over. It's a brand new movie with brand new people who are battling the evil demons and monsters we know and love, and we should welcome them into the fold. If you need even more reasons, there's this: fancy special effects!
The nice thing is the film looks beautiful. The effects are 10 times better than we ever had access to and the actors are all better than we were in 1979.
Plus, none of them knew what they were doing on the first movie! While it's true that gives it a certain charm — or as Campbell puts it, "amateur enthusiasm" — imagine if it had a budget. Shiny, shiny money to make it super-duper shiny! I can think of one person who is probably excited about having a little extra money on hand, and that person is Ted Raimi. Now they can hire a professional to sweat buckets in a rubber suit and spin from the ceiling like a demented piñata! But don't be surprised if he shows up somewhere, maybe getting hit in the face with a branch by his brother Sam, in an "off-camera" cameo.
Speaking of cameos, I'm going to put my money on one featuring Bruce Campbell. Why? Because rather than just say he wasn't going to do one, his words were, "I’m not at liberty to discuss that," then more emphasis on this being an entirely different story from the first movies. See, why not just an emphatic "NO"? It would make plot sense to not have him there, but it would make zero spiritual sense to have any breed of Evil Dead movie without the Grand Poobah himself.
Bruce Campbell has seen the new 'Evil Dead' and says "It's fabulous"! [Bloody Disgusting]
