‘Evil Dead Rise’ Review: Lee Cronin’s deliciously disgusting delight
Lee Cronin’s latest horror offering re-awakens The Evil Dead franchise (from the dead) for the fifth time. And with OG’s Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell at the helm producing, the film has long-promised to be a faithful instalment of a much-beloved series, and I’m pleased to announce that it delivers.
Evil Dead Rise opens with the signature flying camera, POV’ing us through a beautiful stretch of mountains, trees and lakes until finally settling at a cabin in the woods where a group of teenagers are spending their summer vacation. A comforting and ‘loyal to the genre’ opening, settles me in my chair. However, within the following three minutes, one of the girls becomes possessed and subsequently scalps her friend, decapitates her boyfriend and levitates high into the air to the excruciatingly loud opening title score.
We then flashback to a towering block of apartments in downtown LA one day previous. Beth (Lily Sullivan), our lead, is visiting her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a single mother struggling to raise her children alone. This is where the film falls into the trap of trying to ‘modernise’ too much – Beth is a metal band roadie; Ellie, the mother, is a tattoo artist, and one of her kids is a practising house DJ. It ends up feeling like it was written by an undercover cop trying to infiltrate a youth subculture – a little forced, but I rolled with it.
After a tremor in the city shakes the tower block, a vault within the basement becomes exposed, and the three kids explore deeper, discovering an ancient tome as well as some old-looking vinyl which they take to mini-David Guetta’s bedroom to play through his decks.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m a sucker for a scratchy recording of a priest warning about the danger of ancient malicious demons – and that’s exactly what we receive. After this, chaos ensues, as each character becomes possessed in more and more menacing ways.
The performances in this film are wonderful. I always think the sign of a good horror film is when the ‘monster’ or, in this case, ‘demon’, is revealed on screen, forcing them to be scary in their own right and more than a mere jump-scare – and this is here in spades. Such appears most notably in Sutherland’s Ellie, the lead demon who manages to twist and contort her face into some of the most sinister and horrifying expressions.
Another thing to note is the beautiful set design – shout out to production designer Nick Bassett who has melded traditional grimy horror film sets with an almost dream-like German expressionist vibe. These stylised long corridors, pointy corners of rooms and asymmetrical, jagged windows keep the shots interesting in what is basically a chamber piece.
The film maintains a thought-out balancing act between comedic and scary, managing to always keep on the side of not taking itself too seriously. Yet, as the film goes on, it becomes slowly apparent that the director perhaps doesn’t have many tricks up his sleeve, and it ends up going round in circles with jump scare after jump scare, leaving me with a strange cocktail of emotions – both scared and exhausted.
This is a solid film with some genuinely scary moments executed by an obviously talented director who knows the genre well – however, as a whole, Evil Dead Rise doesn’t quite offer enough distinction or uniqueness to elevate it from the echelons of creepy but mildly forgettable horror.
