For four decades, the Evil Dead has been the twisted Teddy Bear’s Picnic of horror — a black-humoured, blood-soaked saga in which young people go down to the woods one day, and find themselves in for a big surprise. Writer-director Lee Cronin’s new addition to the franchise breaks that tradition like a bone. Where previously all hell would break loose in the bowels of creaky cabins, deep in the moonlit woodlands of rural America, this fifth entry in the big-screen Evil Dead canon redirects its flesh-devouring demons to inner-city LA. Not everyone was sold on the move when the film’s first trailer dropped late last year. Would an Evil Dead movie still feel like an Evil Dead movie, some fans worried, without the isolation that powered past instalments? Were Cronin, plus producers Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, in danger of taking a chainsaw to the very thing that made the original Evil Dead groovy?
The answer, it turns out, is an emphatic, “Hell, no.” Evil Dead Rise — in which two estranged sisters, Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), reunite just in time for an ancient Sumerian text to doom them and their entire family — is a rare horror sequel-cum-reboot that refreshes and reinvents rather than simply retreading. Yes, the film replicates the schlocky spirit of Sam Raimi’s 1981 original, blurring the line between horror and humour by dropping 6,500 litres of blood on that line and scorching the ground on which it’s drawn. Yes, it’s a story that once again begins with unwitting teens accidentally unearthing a copy of the ‘Necronomicon Ex-Mortis’ — an unholy tome that summons screaming hordes of the damned and wreaks havoc every time it’s opened, like Prince Harry’s memoir. And yes, it features a spirited hero rising to the occasion, hacking through Deadites like there’s no tomorrow, wielding a familiar weapon or two in the process.
Packs more inventive scares than you could shake an Ash Williams boomstick at.
But Evil Dead Rise also takes the series to exciting new places beyond just its new digs in La La Land. Cronin — a vital new voice in horror, as anyone who saw his 2019 chiller The Hole In The Ground can attest — is a filmmaker who thrives on finding fresh ways to fright, and his second feature film packs more inventive scares than you could shake an Ash Williams boomstick at. Each scene expertly exploits the claustrophobic domestic environment its story unfolds in, leading to set-pieces involving various cooking utensils that’ll have you shuddering at the sight of your cheese-grater next time you open up your kitchen drawer. And prepare for your step count to go through the roof in the weeks following your first viewing of this movie: a truly gruesome scene trapping viewers inside an elevator with an unseen, earring-snatching demon means you’ll probably be taking the stairs for the foreseeable.
The character work in Evil Dead Rise is on a par with the series’ best, with Beth and Ellie each battling their own personal demons long before any actual demons awake. But that’s not the main draw in this series, and Cronin knows it. That honour belongs to the Deadites, the movie’s hideous, shit-talking ghouls, who are magnificently mischievous and malevolent here. Evil, you see, doesn’t just rise in this movie, whatever the title may promise. Instead, it teases and torments. It decapitates and disfigures. It crawls under the skin of the film’s characters and audience alike, and chews them up like glass between molars, spitting you out in a bloody mess.
Is the film perfect? Not quite. Story beats are often detectable from a mile away — it’s how it happens rather than what happens that propels Cronin’s screenplay — and the film’s one-apartment setting arguably hinders as much as it helps, keeping the tension cranked high but leaving the movie feeling small in scale after the fact. But these quibbles are exactly that, especially given the context around this revival of one of horror’s most beloved treasures. It’s been a long time since the Evil Dead last graced the big screen, and an even longer time since a tale that truly bottled the brutal magic of the original trilogy. A 2013 reboot titled Evil Dead, produced by Raimi and directed by Fede Álvarez, was an admirable attempt that had everything except the series’ lashings of zany humour. And the well-received but recently cancelled Ash Vs Evil Dead never left the confines of its small-screen home. In Evil Dead Rise, the Evil Dead franchise has gorily got its groove back.
