There was a surprisingly straight face attached to 2013’s bracingly nasty Evil Dead reboot, a surprise given both the knockabout humour of Sam Raimi’s original films and the genre landscape at the time. A visceral demonic body horror performed without a knowing wink and with a decent budget was not exactly run-of-the-mill back then and isn’t exactly commonplace now, despite the genre’s ever-increasing churn, and could explain why its robust box office performance didn’t immediately translate to more Evil outings.
A decade later at a time when dead franchises are coming back to life with more gusto than arguably ever before, Evil Dead Rise is an inevitable resurrection, following on from recent revivals of Scream, Hellraiser and Halloween and before we see more of The Exorcist, The Thing and Friday the 13th. Originally slated for an HBO Max premiere, it’s been wisely upgraded to a theatrical release, smart because of the genre’s consistent theatrical success and deserving because, unlike so many other straight-to-streaming productions, it looks and feels like a real movie. Irish writer-director Lee Cronin, whose debut, The Hole in the Ground, received polite acclaim back in 2019, has made an impressive leap to studio fare and while his film doesn’t have quite the horrifying impact of the last installment, it’s a solid stab.
Like his last film and for the first time within the Evil Dead series, Cronin focuses on a family unit: Beth (Lily Sullivan), sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Ellie’s three kids. Beth is taking a break from life on the road to visit them, grappling with an unwanted pregnancy while Ellie deals with a recent break-up. But family troubles are soon made insignificant when an earthquake releases a familiar cursed book and a violent struggle to stay alive ensues.
An Evil Dead film is known for a formula so set that it served as the most obvious inspiration for Drew Goddard’s fun-poking comedy The Cabin in the Woods: a group of youths experience hell when they head to … a cabin in the woods. Cronin starts off with a nod to this, a cold open showing just that but then rewinds a day and takes us to a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building in LA, something of a challenge as a writer trying to create believable constraints for a survival horror. Why wouldn’t they just … leave? His script does a decent enough job at explaining that away – the building is in a state of disrepair and so the earthquake manages to easily affect the elevator and stairs – although given the extremity of the situation (mum turns into masochistic demon early on), one wonders if they could have tried a little harder to escape.
As visually sleek as the film looks, and in the flattened world of cheaply cobbled together streaming content, it really does look rather pretty, Cronin never quite manages to create enough of the claustrophobic suspense such a setup requires. It’s all entertainingly deranged and mercifully brief but we’re never lured from the back to the edge of our seat by any of his frantic set pieces. There’s more than enough cutting and slashing and decapitating for the gorehounds and at times the violence can be inventively nasty but it’s also a little too other for it to cut that deep, a little too fantastical for any injury to feel like it’s happening to a body we can recognise as human. While the last film toyed with the theme of addiction, it came out before the horror genre at large had been infected by the obsession with making every story, no matter the fit, really about something more substantive (usually trauma). Cronin’s follow-up is loosely about motherhood, and in an ultimately, and I believe unintentionally, sort of pro-life way, but it feels as though he’s merely including it in an almost obligatory manner, a nod to where we’re at right now, but without the heavy hand that so many other horror films have recently employed. He’s far more concerned with seeing how much blood he can use in one movie (apparently more than 1,500 gallons). Sullivan and Sutherland are committed as the good and bad sisters although Cronin’s script requires the former to sell some eye-rollingly dim-witted decisions, one involving a pair of headphones at a time of emergency that would be a struggle for even Meryl Streep to convince us.
Evil Dead Rise is a decent little splatter movie which contains just about enough to justify the franchise resurrection although perhaps not quite enough to demand that much more of it. For all of its gristle, we’re left very little to chew on.
Evil Dead Rise is now showing in the US and UK
