For more than four decades, the Evil Dead has been the darkly comical Teddy Bear's Picnic of horror. It's blood-soaked, black-humoured saga in which young people visit the woods one day, and find themselves in for an exciting surprise. Lee Cronin's newest installment to the series breaks that tradition as bone. Where previously all hell broke free in the bowels of rustic cabins that creak in the dark woodlands of rural America The fifth installment in the big-screen Evil Dead canon redirects its blood-sucking monsters to urban LA.
Not everyone was sold on the movie's first trailer dropped late last year. Could the Evil Dead movie still feel like an Evil Dead movie, some fans worried, without the solitary feel that drove past instalments? Did Cronin and his co-producers Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell in danger of bringing on a chainsaw the very thing that made the first Evil Dead groovy?
The answer, it turns out is a clear, "Hell, no." Evil Dead Rise -- in which two sisters who are separated, Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) meet just in time to read an ancient Sumerian text to doom them and their entire family is a rare horror sequel, re-boot or sequel that refreshes and reinvents rather than simply retreading. Yes, the film reinterprets the fun and snarky style of Sam Raimi's 1981 original, blurring the line between comedy and horror by dumping 6,500 litres of blood on that line and burning the ground on the ground on which it's drawn.
It's a tale that once again begins with innocent teens accidentally finding an 'Necronomicon' book Ex-Mortis' - the unholy tome that calls forth screaming hordes of the damned and causes havoc each when it's opened, just as in the case of Prince Harry's memoir. It also features an ebullient hero who rises to the occasion, cutting into Deadites like there's no tomorrow, wielding a familiar weapon or two during the process.
But Evil Dead Rise also takes the series to thrilling new places beyond just its new locations in La La Land. Cronin -- a vital new voice in horror, as any who watched his 2019 horror film The Hole In The Ground can attest -- is a director who loves to find new ways to scare. his second feature film has more imaginative scares than you could make a sound with an Ash Williams boomstick at.
Each scene expertly exploits the cramped home environment that its film takes place in, leading to set pieces involving various cooking utensils which will leave you shaking when you see your cheese grater next time you open up your kitchen drawer. And prepare for your step count to increase in the weeks following your first experience with this film. A truly gruesome scene trapping viewers inside an elevator with an unidentified, earring-snatching demon means you'll likely be climbing the stairs for the foreseeable.
The character development in Evil Dead Rise is on a par with the series' best, including Beth and Ellie each fighting their own personal demons long before any actual demons awake. However, this isn't the only draw in this series, and Cronin knows that. The title is ascribed to the Deadites, the movie's hideous, shit-talking ghouls, who are magnificently mischievous and malevolent in this film.
Evil, you see does not just appear in this movie, whatever the title promises. Instead it tames and afflicts. It decapitates and disfigures. It crawls under the skin of the actors and the viewers, and chews them up like molars rubbing glass, spitting you out in bloody splatter.
Is the film perfect? Not quite. Stories are usually identifiable from a mile away -- it's how it happens rather than what happens that drives Cronin's screenplay -- and the film's one-apartment setting arguably isn't as helpful as it assists in keeping the tension cranked high however, the film feels small in scale after the fact. These aren't the only issues what they seem to be, especially in light of the context of the 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 a longer time since the story that bottled the brutal magic of the original trilogy. A 2013 reboot titled Evil Dead, produced by Raimi and directed by Fede Alvarez It was a great effort that had everything except the series' lashings of hilarious humour. And the well-received but recently ended Ash Vs Evil Dead never moved out of its tiny screen home. The latest installment, Evil Dead Rise , the Evil Dead franchise has gorily returned to its original form.