UPDATED: Bruce Campbell wants you to know that they didn’t “screw up” the Evil Dead remake

UPDATE:  Our man Jimmy O just had a chat with director Sam Raimi and got this bit from him to go along with Campbell’s comments below; “I read that thing he [Campbell] said and I’d have to agree. I saw the same cut which was really before Fede [Alvarez] was done shooting – maybe three weeks before. And it was probably already like 110 to 120 minutes long so it wasn’t even an editor’s cut but it was just a lot of the scenes he had shot, missing a lot of scenes – missing A LOT of scenes – and it was really working in great fits and starts and it was terrifying and gut-wrenching and gritty. The performances are all there, he really got great performances from the actors. I think, even though it’s really too early to say, I think he’s got the basics for a really great horror film.”

Below is the original story:

We haven’t heard much from THE EVIL DEAD remake camp for quite a while, but today actor/producer/chin Bruce Campbell had some info to share about the pic, much of it focusing on the doubt and vitriol that’s come from fans of the original series in the notion of a remake.  Having seen a rough cut of the film and calling it “fantastic,” Campbell elaborated on his feelings about the pic and the difficulty of selling it to the old guard fans.

“We’re really excited and really behind it, [but] it’s going to take a bit to get the “Evil Dead” fans behind it,” Campbell said. “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.”

Campbell also talked about the “upgrade” of the film, saying,“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. Though granted Sam Raimi is a mad genius, so we got a crazy result like “Evil Dead” out of this amateur enthusiasm sort of thing.”

I think that the film will have an uphill climb with fans of the original series simply because Campbell as the rambunctious time-travelling Ash is such a seminal character to the franchise and notably absent from the remake.  Campbell and Raimi were the two ingredients that made the films work as well as they did, so without their direct involvement, other than producing, it will take a special kind of horror movie magic to get over the remake hump.

THE EVIL DEAD, directed by Fede Alvarez and starring Jane Levy, Jessica Lucas, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Elizabeth Blackmore, awakens in theaters on April 12, 2013.