‘Evil Dead’
Director: Fede Alvarez
Stars: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez
Rating: R
3 (out of 5) Globes

Because the sequels took a goofier stance, it’s easy to forget that Sam Raimi’s first, scrappily no-budget 1981 film “The Evil Dead” is a serious, harrowing experience that only masochists would consider a fun time. The new sorta-remake of Raimi’s breakthrough, unexpectedly co-produced by him — one could say inexplicably, considering the Diablo Cody screenplay credit — retains the intense, genuinely nightmarish tone of the original. Here, as there, being forced to perform self-amputation doesn’t, a la “Evil Dead II,” result in an amusing Ernest Hemingway joke.

As with the original, a quintet of collegiates visit a creaky cabin, where one of them finds — and very foolishly reads aloud from — a mysterious book made of human skin and written in dried blood. Inevitably, a demon latches onto the one (Jane Levy) who’s supposed to go cold turkey from a smack habit, who promptly goes from sickly to a super-carnivore prone to “Exorcist”-y obscenities.

“Cabin in the Woods” was supposed to end audiences’ preoccupation with the titular horror cliche, and this new “Evil Dead” gets major brownie points for playing it completely straight anyway. It also, alas, subscribes to the notion that characters ought to behave idiotically, none moreso than Levy’s dedicated brother (Shiloh Fernandez), whose insistence that his sister’s merely in the grips of withdrawal extends well past being monstrously delusional.

Director Fede Alvarez powers through the inanities and inconsistencies, cranking up the dread with a pukey color palette and an army of fog machines. There’s few bodies to rip through, so the final survivors are kept inhumanly spry. It’s safe to say few screen characters have sustained this much physical damage and (almost) lived, with one taking hits from a kitchen knife, a syringe (to the eye!), a nailgun and a crowbar.

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Though actually set closer to the turn of the (last) century, the classic-movie-nerd opening of “Oz the Great and Powerful” recreates the look of 1939: the box-shaped frame, the artificial sets, the mannered acting. It’s the era of not the first “Wizard of Oz” film — several were made prior, including a 1925 feature with Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man — but the most beloved, and director Sam Raimi makes sure to get everything right. His only mistake is James Franco, cast as the 30-something Oscar Diggs, aka the actual Wizard of Oz — because when you think of the 1930s, you obviously think of mumbling stoners.

Perhaps realizing this is a classier gig than hosting the Oscars, the amusingly miscast Franco tries hard. Robert Downey Jr. was originally slated to lead this, Disney’s second attempt to piggyback off a mega-classic. (The 1985 film “Return to Oz” tanked, on account of it being as awesomely scary and demented as L. Frank Baum’s books.) But Downey Jr. would have only done Downey Jr., whereas Franco lends an unpolished, excitable and unique presence to a script that’s overly safe and which has clearly been exec-noted to death.

The plot uses little directly from Baum’s 14 “Oz” books, hitting us with yet another origin story: Franco’s Diggs is a magician/conman whisked away by a twister (original!) to the magical land of loud colors and anthropomorphized animals. There, he befriends a flying monkey (voiced by Zach Braff) and a porcelain china doll (Joey King), while running afoul of the younger (and hotter) versions of the three witches: nice Glinda (Michelle Williams), drolly evil Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and her sister, the gullible and sweet Theodora (Mila Kunis).

Raimi dutifully plods through the thin plot while encouraging his actors and effects team to spice things up. Weisz is reliably arch, and the director of three “Evil Dead” movies uses the third dimension to have beasts and pointy objects leaping in our faces. His most lasting effect on this product is more reserved and loving: His is a movie about the relationship between science and magic, producing the most trenchant mainstream picture on the subject since Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige.” And though the overall effect is lightly likable, at least it’s not cluttered, narratively or visually, like another Joe Roth production with a Danny Elfman score: Tim Burton’s grotesque violation of “Alice in Wonderland.” (3 out of 5 Globes)

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