Evil Dead Rise
As far as horror franchises go, “Evil Dead” is something of a miracle. There has yet to be a bad movie with its name on it. A great deal of that credit goes to series creator Sam Raimi, who’s so picky about who he lets play with his groovy blood soaked baby that there have been only five “Evil Dead” movies in 40-plus years. But there’s also something about the simplicity of its premise excepting the totally loony “Army of Darkness,” of course that just works for “Evil Dead.”
This time around it’s called “Evil Dead Rise,” and comes from Irish writer/director Lee Cronin, whose very promising 2019 feature debut “The Hole in the Ground” was also about sinkholes and mommy issues. Cronin’s sensibility is much more down and dirty than Raimi’s live action cartoons, though closer to remake director Fede Alvarez. But he does share at least one thing in common with Raimi, and that’s an evil imagination.
A cheese grater takes center stage in the marketing for this one, but those are hardly the only tools used in “Evil Dead Rise.” Eye trauma, hand trauma, vomit, bugs, broken glass, broken bones, decapitation, dismemberment stab wounds alone would take up four or five more ellipses before we got to every form of grievous bodily harm inflicted by this movie. And let’s not even get into all the blood, enough is spilled over two people during the last 20 minutes of this movie to recreate the elevator scene from “The Shining” and soak them head to toe.
This movie takes place in a cabin with a bunch of friends, but changes location to an old, beat up apartment building in downtown Los Angeles where a family resides. That’s what makes it even more messed up when single mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) gets possessed by a Deadite and starts psychologically torturing her own kids youngest daughter Kassie (Nell Fisher) is pretty young herself, though that doesn’t make the older teenage fates of siblings Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) any less painful. “Evil Dead Rise” wrings quite a bit of sicko juice out of violence against children, which along with the extreme gore is what makes it such a punishing experience as an “Evil Dead” movie should be.
The trouble is that it takes more time and exposition to set up the story’s departure from the classic “cabin in the woods” formula, threatening to throw off that elemental simplicity that is so much part of what has made this series work in the past. This occurs mainly during the first act, which also has to introduce Ellie’s rocker sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) and an earthquake that opens up a hole in the floor of the parking garage beneath their feet, leading Danny to discover an old safety deposit box full of some mysterious records that let loose everything else from there. The building used to be a bank – one of several tidbits “Evil Dead Rise” must lay on us before getting down business.
But once “Evil Dead Rise” gets going, it really doesn’t stop. This is loud movie in a crowded theater at midnight fun, at its SXSW premiere, there was much yelling and cheering and genuine screams from startled audience members throughout. Cronin unapologetically uses both jump scares and “look behind you!” type gags as exclamation points in his relentless bloodbath, and one sequence in the film’s roller coaster of a middle section seems destined to inspire much shouted profanity at screens around the world.
Not everything in this movie flies There’s a pregnancy subplot that plays as if it were written by a man (which it was), and the cold open is so random that a scene has to be tacked onto the end of the movie just to explain it. But for an unknown cast led by an untested director, it does an awful lot particularly when it comes to the physical performances (think crazy rigging devices and nasty prosthetic makeups) and gnarly gore. Once “Evil Dead Rise” gets out its own way and starts giving people what they paid for, it is an absolute blast.
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