The Pitch: When you think of an Evil Dead movie, a few things come to mind: Bruce Campbell, “Ash, housewares,” a sickening mix of supernatural splatter-horror and pitch-black comedy. The Sam Raimi classics are burned into the eyeballs of many a classic horror fan: even 2013’s Fede Alvarez remake carried its own Grand Guignol fun.
Evil Dead Rise veers from the pack by shifting its Deadite demons from a cabin in the woods to a decrepit apartment building in Los Angeles. There, the Necronomicon finds itself in the hands of a tight-knit family — tattoo artist and single mother Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), teen DJ Danny (Morgan Davies), middle child Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and innocent tot Kassie (Nell Fisher).
There’s also Auntie Beth (Lily Sullivan), a worn-down roadie visiting her sister very belatedly after the kids’ father left, herself facing the prospect of motherhood and, it seems, hoping to get some insight. But a timely earthquake unearths the Book of the Dead right underneath their building, and before long the family’s trapped in their fourteenth-floor apartment, fighting for survival.
Come Get Some: There’s one reason, and one reason only, to invest in Evil Dead Rise — the gore. Writer/director Lee Cronin (coming off the Sundance fave The Hole in the Ground) has a tantalizing command of mood and atmosphere, and knows how to string together a gut-busting setpiece.
Glimpses of Raimi’s tongue-poking-through-cheek comedy pop up here and there — the opening shot emulates the previous films’ hyper-fast zooms through muddy woods, only to pull back and reveal it was coming from a drone the whole time. Cute. But after that sizzling, scalp-ripping cold open, featuring a suitably fist-pumping title card reveal, we cut to “One Day Earlier” and the events of the main story.
From here, we learn the stakes of our maternal drama: A drifter returning to the bosom of family to seek guidance from the one woman she knows who’s doing motherhood even slightly right. Tensions and resentments burn hot even before the demons come, even if our characters don’t get much time to establish themselves before it’s time to battle evil.
Evil Dead Rise (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Mommy’s With the Maggots Now: Once Danny summons the powers of the Necronomicon (represented here, refreshingly, as a series of vinyl recordings from priests in the 1920s attempting to translate its occult writings), Evil Dead Rise becomes a rapidly-escalating series of gross-out gags that are clearly the reason you’re paying full ticket price. Sutherland has a ball shifting from brittle mother to cackling Deadite, lips twisted into a Cheshire-cat grin as she taunts the very children she’s spent her life protecting, and Cronin makes merry mayhem from all kinds of household implements: Stovetops, hairspray, tattoo guns, kitchen shears, even a cheese grater.
The more you try to destroy a Deadite body, the angier and more decrepit it comes back; chop off a limb, and it might just try to puppet another dead body to replace it. Cronin’s camera is unrelenting, refusing to cut away or let you blink as the possessed Ellie wrecks an entire floor of innocents while we witness helplessly through a peephole. It’s gratifying, and more than a little tragic, to watch this rapidly-shrinking family have to defend itself against the decayed remnants of their loved ones, especially as the demonic meat puppets get younger and younger.
Still, while it resists the overt jokiness of Raimi’s works, it’s hard to say that Cronin’s version completely lacks humor. There’s arch fun to be had, after all, in Ellie using her fingernail and mouth as a demonic gramophone, or Sullivan embracing her chainsaw-wielding, blood-soaked mama bear status in the exponentially-gory climax. There are nods to [REC] and the bloodied elevator from The Shining, and even the barely-human mutant pretzels from The Thing, delivered with gallons of fake blood and effortless practical effects.
The Verdict: Sure, it takes a while to get going, and the family dynamics are a little too underbaked to really affect you by the time flesh starts to rot. But Cronin gets that these characters are either here to bleed or do the bleeding, and when the shocks come, they ramp up with frightening frequency. With Rise, we learn that the Evil Dead franchise doesn’t have to be limited to one wisecracking, lantern-jawed battle with the forces of darkness; the Book of the Dead, and its ability to turn those you love against you, is enough to hang a film on if you do it right.
Where’s It Playing? Evil Dead Rise takes a cheese grater to your eyeballs in theaters April 21st.
Trailer:
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