As I usually say, a horror film must be between 80 and 95 minutes long. In my opinion, that’s sufficient time to include all the critical details without making the audience lose interest. Evolution of Evil managed to bore me with just seventy minutes. Here’s where I think the film went wrong.
For one, the story wasn’t particularly fresh. A group goes camping at an isolated spot and gets murdered by some inbred cannibalistic family. It’s not exactly original. Instead of The Sawyers in Texas or Jupiter’s Clan in Nevada, we get Arvis in the Pacific Northwest. Accompanied with…his son? His brother? It’s actually a woman and we are not given a sufficient backstory as to why Arvis seems to think she is a he. No one else is given any context either.
These characters are, for lack of a better word, dislikable. In this super short story, Chris and Lori are our leads. Chris is fine, but Lori is downright vile. She’s a whining Wanda. She is rambling about the strange sign on the general store, she is complaining about the “teens” that are overly rowdy she is so irritating, I actually want to blow her head off. The kind woman in the store even had a taste of her incredibly sarcastic side when she said to Chris that the store does not accept cards. It was this point when they had shoved in Lori wanting some beef jerky, and instead of Jack Links, she wants the local stuff because, “local is better” That is when I realized that there would be cannibals in this movie because the beef jerky was in a plain brown bag with ARVIS JERKY written on it in a sharpie. And you know, that’s how they would totally sell human jerky. The next morning, Chris is taken by Arvis, and Lori wakes up somewhere close to a creek. She then begins hobbling through the woods. She spies a road and guess who stops to pick her up? Arvis! Then it turns into a terrible knock off of so many films just like it.
There was even a clear reference to The Shining. Not much else to say. Lori is our final girl who gets aided by the same “teens” she ridiculed for drinking PBR.
Kevin Forrest has primarily been a cinematographer. Most of his directing work consists of shorts. It seems this film was destined to be a short because It has so many shots that should accompany the behind-the-scenes of any other movie, and those clips are never used. Sadly, a big chunk of this movie is B-roll footage. I witnessed a greater number of oaks and foliage shots than what one would expect in a nature movie. It also includes too many drone shots. It’s like someone got a drone for Christmas! I’m seriously tired of seeing that. It isn’t brilliant filmmaking. It’s atrocious cinematography, and, what it worse, it completely takes you out of the picture.
Evolution of Evil was simply a boring mosh of clips and storylines. Those seventy minutes felt more like two hours, but the most painfully dull two hours possible.
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To watch more movies like EVOLUTION OF EVIL (2018) visit hurawatch.