Movie Review: 'Evil Dead Rise'

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Directed by Lee Cronin

Written by Lee Cronin

Starring Lilly Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies

Release Date April 21st, 2023

Published April 21st, 2023

The Evil Dead franchise is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be gross, it's supposed to shock you out of your seat, but above all, it's supposed to be fun. Writer-Director Lee Cronin, the creative force behind the new re-imagining of the Evil Dead franchise has completely forgotten the fun of the franchise. Don't get me wrong, Lee Cronin is a terrific horror movie director. The gore and the weirdness he achieves in Evil Dead Rise is impressive on a technical level. But it's not The Evil Dead.

Evil Dead Rise begins at a cabin in the woods because it has to, it's an homage to the original film setting. After a gory set piece, we go back in time by one day. We arrive at a rock club where we meet Beth (Lilly Sullivan), a guitar technician for a small scale rock band. Beth has just found out that she is pregnant and is struggling with this information. While in Los Angeles, Beth goes to see and stay with her sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and Ellie's three kids, son Danny (Morgan Davies), daughter Bridge (Gabrielle Echols), and youngest daughter Kassie (Nell Fisher).

The kids' father has rather recently disappeared and the family is being thrown out of their ancient apartment building because it is about to be condemned and torn down. Then, an earthquake hits and reveals a treasure trove in the basement. Curious, Danny goes searching the rubble and finds a tomb in the basement. Inside is a book made of human flesh and series of records that contain the voice of a Priest who has translated the horror Latin of the book, revealing that this is The Book of the Dead.

You can guess what happens next, the demons are loose, people are possessed, and terror is unleashed on one member of the family after another until the movie mercifully finds a properly blood-soaked ending. It's all rather skillfully crafted, the blocking, the sound design, the overall staging of the blood and guts of Evil Dead Rise, is all first rate horror stuff. But, where's the fun? There is zero fun to be had in Evil Dead Rise and that, for a fan of the franchise, is a death knell.

If this movie was not an official sequel of The Evil Dead franchise, I might find it more appealing. But as it is, billed as a part of a legendarily dark comic horror franchise, Evil Dead Rise just feels like a bad fit. I was reminded of how horror producers of the 70s and 80s would find a random script and attach a familiar franchise title to it as a marketing gimmick. Sometimes they might graft onto the script a very loose scene to connect it to the franchise, but it was clearly born as something else.

That's Evil Dead Rise. This feels like a movie that was given a connection to The Evil Dead solely for marketing purposes. Sure, the Book of the Dead makes an appearance and there is a chainsaw that has a role to play in how the film ends, but that's just set dressing. The whole of Evil Dead Rises is rather miserable. It's grimy and dark in that way that all modern horror movies use darkness as a shortcut to horror. The Evil Dead was shockingly bright given all that the low budget production needed to cover up about the DIY practical effects in use.

The darkness extends to an unrelentingly grim tone in Evil Dead Rises. The film, I assume, wants to be edgy in placing children in the path of the demonic deadites but it comes off as merely gross and ugly, like everything else in this movie. It's one thing for a group of dopey adults to get brutally slaughtered by demonic ghosts, watching a family grossly decimated is a bit of a bridge too far for me. It's simply too grim and in a movie that already has no sense of humor, it makes for a bleak and deeply uninviting movie experience.

Again, I need to say this, Lee Cronin is a very good director. He has some really big, gross, gory ideas that really do work. The final monster of Evil Dead Rises is an inspired choice, it's a monumental piece of horror movie gore. But its not The Evil Dead. It's not darkly comic, it's mirthless and harsh. The theme of the film is about mothers but the film doesn't have the depth to make this theme meaningful. And considering that The Evil Dead was not built on themes but on big idea thrills and innovative ideas of horror, trying for something deep in an Evil Dead movie feels desperately out of place.

There may be an element of reflexive self-assessment in the idea of a man fighting his own hand, but I feel confident that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell were more interested in taking The Three Stooges into a horror context than they were in examining man's inhumanity to himself. There isn't much of a bigger idea to the Evil Dead franchise and thus, grafting onto it a subtext about the insecurities felt by new moms or or moms in general feels tacked on to an Evil Dead movie. It might not have felt tacked on to a movie that wasn't trying to be part of the Evil Dead lore.

Perhaps, you could argue that Evil Dead Rises is taking the franchise to a new place and appealing to a younger more serious horror crowd, one not so reflexively irreverent as the old school Evil Dead fan. That's a fair reading of the intent and the result that is Evil Dead Rises. That said, it doesn't address my criticism about the film being too grim and too dark, literally and figuratively, to fit the template of the reputation that precedes an Evil Dead movie regardless of the changing audience demographic.

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