Evil Dead Rise Review!!
CAST:- Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Lily Sullivan,Gabrielle Echols
IMDB Rating :- 6.7 \10😞
In 2013, a bracingly unpleasant Evil Dead reboot was released. Considering Sam Raimi's original flicks' slapstick humour and the current state of the horror genre, this was a surprise. Despite the genre's constant churn, a visceral demonic body horror performed without a knowing wink and with a respectable budget wasn't exactly standard back then and isn't exactly commonplace now, which could account for why Evil's strong box office performance didn't immediately result in additional releases.
Following the recent revivals of Scream, Hellraiser, and Halloween and before we see more of The Exorcist, The Thing, and Friday the 13th, Evil Dead Rise is an inevitable resurrection a decade later at a time when dead franchises are coming back to life with more vigour than possibly ever before. It was originally scheduled for an HBO Max debut but was sensibly elevated to a theatrical release. It deserved this upgrade since, unlike so many other straight-to-streaming movies, it looks and feels like a genuine motion picture. While his film doesn't quite have the terrifying impact of the previous installment, Irish writer-director Lee Cronin has made an excellent transition to studio fare since his 2019 debut, The Hole in the Ground, which won modest acclaim.Similar to his previous film, Cronin focuses on a family unit in Evil Dead: Beth (Lily Sullivan), her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and Ellie's three children. Ellie is dealing with a recent breakup, and Beth is taking a break from life on the road to see them while she struggles with an unintended pregnancy. However, family issues are quickly forgotten when an earthquake releases a well-known cursed book, sparking a bloody struggle for survival.
A concept from an Evil Dead movie is so well-known that Drew Goddard's sarcastic comedy The Cabin in the Woods most obviously took its cue from it: a bunch of young people face hell when they travel to... a cabin in the woods. When Cronin rewinds a day and takes us to a soon-to-be-condemned apartment block in Los Angeles, it presents a dilemma for the writer who is attempting to create believable limitations for a survival horror. Cronin begins with a hint to this, a cold open revealing precisely that.
Why wouldn't they simply... go? Given the severity of the situation (mum transforms into a masochistic demon early on), one wonders if they could have tried a little harder to escape. His script does a decent enough job of explaining that away, pointing out that the building is in disrepair and that the earthquake manages to easily affect the lift and stairs. Cronin never quite manages to generate enough of the claustrophobic suspense such a scenario requires, despite how visually appealing the movie is and how gorgeous it actually looks in the flattened world of poorly put together streaming video. Although thankfully brief and entertainingly unhinged, none of his frenzied set pieces have ever had us jump out of our seats.
There is more than enough hacking, stabbing, and beheading to satisfy the gorehounds, and the violence may occasionally be particularly awful. However, it is also occasionally too other to cut too deeply, and it is also too fanciful for any injury to feel like it is occurring to a body we can identify as human.
Although the previous movie played around with the idea of addiction, it was released before the obsession with making every tale, regardless of how well it fit, actually about something more meaningful (often trauma). It feels as though Cronin is just including it in an almost obligatory way, a nod to where we're at right now, but without the heavy hand that so many other horror films have recently employed. Cronin's follow-up is loosely about motherhood, and in an ultimately, and I believe unintentionally, sort of pro-life way. He is far more interested in seeing how much blood (supposedly more than 1,500 gallons) he can utilise in a single film. As the good and bad sisters, Sullivan and Sutherland give their all, but Cronin's script calls for the former to make some laughably stupid choices, including one involving a set of headphones in an emergency that would be difficult for even Meryl Streep to sell.
Evil Dead Rise is a respectable little splatter film with just enough gore to justify the revival of the genre but perhaps not quite enough to make viewers want much more. We're left with very little to chew on despite all of its gristle.
