★★★★☆
Hollywood loves to reboot a franchise, especially a horror one. Friday the 13th, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street have had more or less successful reboots in recent years. Even Saw is coming back for another film in the series, despite the fact that main killer John Kramer died in the third film back in 2006.
Sam Raimi’s lo-fi horror classic The Evil Dead was rebooted in 2013, to moderate success. While Evil Dead Rise isn’t specifically a direct sequel to that, Lee Cronin’s take on the franchise is sure to satisfy even the most hardcore of us gorehounds.
Guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan) shows up at her sister Ellie’s (Alyssa Sutherland) doorstep suddenly. Their already restrained relationship is about to get a lot worse as Ellie’s kids find a creepy book in an abandoned, underground bank vault in their building. As Ellie’s son Danny, an aspiring DJ, plays the vinyl that came with the book, an ancient evil is let loose and it targets Ellie first.
Credit: StudioCanal
First things first. Evil Dead Rise is deliciously, gleefully gory. A scene involving a cheese grater has already gone viral from the trailer, but turns out, that’s only the beginning. Writer-director Lee Cronin has created a bloody symphony of torn-off limbs, severed heads and goop.
If you look past the blood-soaked surface, Evil Dead Rise really boils down to parental anxieties. For fans of Cronin’s debut feature The Hole in the Ground, Evil Dead Rise might feel a little too familiar, but whereas Cronin’s first film was quietly unnerving, Evil Dead Rise is loud and brash, in the best possible way.
Cronin also brings the action from a rundown cabin in the woods, to the big city. Much like Scream 6, Evil Dead Rise understands we’re not scared of isolation; fear has infiltrated our everyday lives and we’re now more scared of each other than we are of malevolent forces.
It wouldn’t be an Evil Dead film without the Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead has had a very handsome makeover for Evil Dead Rise and this might be the best iteration of the book yet. While the use of vinyls seems maybe a little silly, it finally resolves a decades-long plot issue; why do these people keep reading the Latin from an ominous book? In Evil Dead Rise, they don’t! They play it on vinyl and are unable to stop it from playing the words that summon the titular evil.
At times, Evil Dead Rise feels a little bogged down by its influences. As if being part of an already iconic franchise with its own signature elements wasn’t enough, Cronin has also clearly been influenced by The Thing and The Shining. A couple of nifty visual references to those stand out in otherwise such a fiercely original horror offering.
While Lily Sullivan doesn’t quite have the charm of Jane Levy or series original Bruce Campbell, Alyssa Sutherland’s performance is absolutely perfect. Playing a deadite (aka a possessed person in an Evil Dead film) is a physically arduous job, but Sutherland tackles it head on, giving us a memorable, terrifying deadite for the ages.
The biggest compliment we can give Evil Dead Rise is just how much it feels like an Evil Dead film. It’s much more brutal than its 80s companions, but retains the brutality of the 2013 reboot. It’s not without the humour either, something that made Evil Dead 2 into a cult classic. While the new film never succumbs to Army of Darkness levels of silliness, the small injections of humour bring much needed breaks from the otherwise non-stop gore.
Cronin is clearly a fan of the franchise and understands the inner workings of how to make not just a good but a great Evil Dead film. Evil Dead Rise is gory, fun and relentless in its terror.
Evil Dead Rise is in cinemas 21 April.
1 Comment
Really enjoyed this review but I have to admit one part distracted me. The plot-issue you described isn’t decades old – it only happens in the remake. In the original films a tape recording (very similar to the one that plays on the vinyl in Evil Dead Rise) is what speaks the latin from the book.