SXSW Film Fest, Day 1: "Evil Dead" & "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone"

The streets of Downtown Austin, TX, are flooded with badge-holders lugging bookbags and shoulder-strapped briefcases. Telephone poles and sidewalks are covered with flyers for movies with titles like Big Ass Spider!, Loves Her Gun, and Kiss of the Damned. Pedestrians shuffle from location to location with that overwhelmed look that indicates five too many tacos, one too many Lone Star pounders, and brisket.

All of this can only mean one thing: It's once again time for the annual SXSW Film Festival, Austin's eight-day-long celebration of independent cinema from all parts of the world. And, per usual, this year's lineup of intriguing motion pictures runs the gamut from buzz-worthy horror (V/H/S/2, You're Next, and Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem) to documentaries about Napster (Downloaded, directed by former Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure star Alex Winter) and nostalgia for V/H/S technology (Rewind This!). And that doesn't even cover all of the foreign dramas, quirky comedies, and special screenings of new films starring the likes of Matthew McConaughey (Mud), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Don Jon's Addiction, his directorial debut), and Selena Gomez (Spring Breakers).

Yours truly, Complex Senior Staff Writer Matt Barone, will be here in Austin through next Saturday, March 16, catching as many of the screenings as humanly possible. Hopefully without succumbing to a BBQ coma and/or a gluttonous overload spurred by the excellent menu provided by the city's flagship theater, Alamo Drafthouse's Ritz venue, located smack-dab on of 6th Street, which begins to resemble New Orleans Mardi Gras once the Music portion of SXSW begins on Tuesday.

As of now, the self-imposed goal is to see 30 movies by the time I head back east next Saturday, and—considering that I saw 27 last year during a stay that lasted two days less—that's definitely not a pipe dream. Plus, if the quality of films continually lives up to the first two that I caught tonight, it'd be a shame if I didn't reach that mark. Even if, by day six, the SXSW fatigue and dementia (caused by a massive celluloid consumption in such a short amount of time) has me feeling like one of the characters in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Haunted.

So far, so good, though. Earlier this evening, the world premiere of the long-awaited, heavily hyped Evil Dead remake took place at the Paramount Theatre, one of SXSW's biggest screening venues. It was prefaced by the premiere of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the Steve Carell/Jim Carrey magician comedy that opens next Friday

Is Evil Dead the epic, mind-blowing horror remake that fans of Sam Raimi's original cult classic have been clamoring for? Or, like so many genre revamps that've come before it, is Evil Dead (opening nationwide on April 5) yet another case of a badass trailer followed by an underwhelming feature-length effort? And how about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: Is it 2013's first actually hilarious comedy? Or is more blunder than wonder?

The answers can be found after the jump. Let the 2013 SXSW Film Festival's cinematic games begin.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Director: Don Scardino
Stars: Steve Carell, Steve Buscemi, Olivia Wilde, Jim Carrey, Alan Arkin, James Gandolfini
Running time: 85 minutes
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Score: 6/10

Leave it to Jim Carrey to kick off this year's SXSW Film Festival with some pleasant debauchery. Walking onto the Paramount Theatre's stage, alongside his The Incredible Burt Wonderstone co-stars Steve Carell and Olivia Wilde, Carrey earned an eruption of applause when he said of the film festival's host city, "Austin is like a big, beautiful woman, and I just want to take advantage of it."

And with that, the sold-out arena was full of happy, laughing spectators ready for a Hollywood comedy that delivered the jokes. And, for the most part, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone gets the job done, using a bunch of self-centered, pompous characters to poke fun at the silly but still undeniably fascinating world of professional magicians. Directed by feature rookie Don Scardino (whose previous experience comes from producing, as well as directing episodes of, 30 Rock), The Incredible Burt Wonderstone hits all of the predictable beats associated with the redemption tale: Man has it all, man loses it all, and then, with the help of the people he'd scorned during his reign, man gets it all back.

In this case, said man is the titular Vegas showman, an arrogant womanizer who went from being bullied as a kid to selling out Bally's and making tons of cash for the casino's equally me-centered CEO, Doug Munny (James Gandolfini). He's been doing so with the help of his childhood pal Anton (Steve Buscemi), now Anton Marvelton; together, they're "The Incredible Burt & Anton," with the subhead, "A Magical Friendship." As the films opens, they hate each other's guts, mostly due to Burt's ridiculous methods of ego inflation. For example, when he takes home a female fan for sexual relations, Burt makes them sign a waiver so that they won't blame him for any damages caused by epic intercourse.

Further complicating their situation is the arrival of Steve Gray, a.k.a. the "Brain Rapist," a Criss Angel-like street magician played by Jim Carrey with the kind of magnified silliness he hasn't shown since his Ace Ventura. He's a problem for old-school magicians Burt and Anton, who look on in confusion as crowds go crazy for Steve's absurd "tricks"—i.e., holding his urine for multiple days and not blinking while someone unloads pepper spray into his eyes.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is, at its best, a showcase for several inspired comedic pairings, namely Carell and Carrey, who get to go far beyond the chemistry they initially forged in Bruce Almighty. A battle of dim wits where Burt and Steve compete to be the most memorable magician at a 10-year-old kid's birthday party is comedy gold. It's also indicative of what gives the film its strength: Allow Carell to play alongside other talented funny men (and women—Wilde scores a few big laughs of her own) and he's untouchable. Give him too much of a good thing, though, and he's liable to wear thin.

During its sluggish middle section, Scardino relies too heavily upon Carell's mostly one-note schtick—Burt's conceitedness is funny in doses, but when it dominates the film, the whole thing drags. Imagine an entire movie built around Carell's Anchorman character, Brick Tamland—we'd all be calling for Ron Burgundy to come back. Here, it's Carrey's over-the-top antagonist who's underused.

As if conscious of that issue, Scardino and screenwriters John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein wisely pull back from the all-Burt approach for the film's final section, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is all the better for it.

Director: Fede Alvarez
Stars: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore
Running time: 91 minutes
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Score: 7/10

You can't tell director Fede Alvarez and the producers behind Evil Dead that they aren't audacious. On what's definitely one of the stronger posters to arrive in some time, Evil Dead's confident tagline reads as follows: "The most terrifying film you will ever experience." Of course, they didn't really mean that as much as they intended it to express their own self-assurance and assuage the millions of skeptics questioning why the original team behind the 1981 cult classic—Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Robert Tapert—would willingly revamp their beloved masterwork of gonzo low-budget genre filmmaking.

With that kind of tagline, though, comes a certain expectation, one that could only be satiated by taking the original's gory anarchy and ratcheting it up tenfold, all with the resources and on-set trickery that Raimi and friends couldn't afford 32 years ago. And, on a few must-address levels, the new Evil Dead isn't nearly as batshit as its predecessor, nor is it as creepy.

What it is, however, is bloodier—in fact, first-time director Alvarez's hard-R rollercoaster descent into Hell just may be the most viscera-drenched mainstream horror film of the new millennium, if not of all time. Which is the one major level that Evil Dead ultimately succeeds upon: When this baby kicks into ludicrous gear, it's a cover-your-eyes knockout. Yet this Evil Dead interjects far too many brief respites in between its money-shot sequences, resulting in a somewhat episodic flick that prevents it from ever truly reaching the overpowering ferocity Alvarez and company no doubt wanted.

But damn does it come close. Much to his credit, Alvarez—a Uruguayan novice who first caught insiders' collective attention back in 2009 with the acclaimed sci-fi short Panic Attack!—has a steady hand on his camera when it counts. Whereas most Hollywood genre directors tend to dress gruesome scenes with kinetic editing, Alvarez shows every second and detail of each hideous dismemberment and self-mutilation that befall the five unfortunate characters. Similar to the original Evil Dead, they're a group of lifelong friends spending a few nights inside an isolated old cabin in the woods.

There's a catch here, though: One of them, Mia (Suburgatory star Jane Levy), has a dangerous drug addiction, and the trip deep into the woods is actually an intervention to get her to kick the habit. Before long, the doomed pals find a book filled with Satanic imagery and red-written warnings. And, naturally, one of them reads every indecipherable word and summons possessive demonic forces.

The script, co-written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues (with some assistance from Diablo Cody), isn't the project's strong suit, particularly due to a succession of hokey, at times downright idiotic dialogue. In one scene, a character projectile vomits blood all over the face of another, to which the latter says, as if unaware that such geysers of blood can't actually pour out of a person, "She's totally psychotic!" Actor Lou Taylor Pucci, playing the prerequisite "Something's wrong here, guys," character, suffers the most from the dialogue issues—practically every line his character says is problematic.

Sticklers for screenwriting proficiency will probably have a field day picking Evil Dead apart. But, let's be honest: You're not paying money to see this movie in hopes of getting Glengarry Glenn Ross. The horror is what counts here, and, yes, Evil Dead is on fire whenever the scares are at hand—meaning, the entire third act, which culminates with one exceedingly loony showstopper that finds one character (who'll win genre fans' hearts over forever thanks to this extended action sequence) in a human-vs-demon showdown complete with blood showers, arms getting ripped in half, and terrific use of a chainsaw.

It's a curtain-closing moment that'll leave weak-stomached audience members reeling, gorehounds cheering, and—assuming they're able to drop all pretensions and embrace this altogether successful remake's unsubtle, ghastly charms—those who've groaned at the film's numerous missteps throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Screw it, that was pretty damn badass."