Evil Dead Rise (2023)
Evil Dead Rise
- 4/5 Cameras 🎥🎥🎥🎥
- Directed by: Lee Cronin
- Starring: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies,
Gabrielle Echols, and Nell Fisher
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| No Copyright Infringement Intended To be clear right from the start, I love the Evil Dead. It’s
easily my favourite horror franchise and quite possibly my favourite film
franchise overall. Needless to say, this meant I was very excited going into
Evil Dead Rise, and why wouldn’t I be? This is the one longstanding horror
franchise with no bad entries, and the trailer and pre-release reports promised
all the thrills and spills one could want from an Evil Dead film. Did it
deliver? Without any doubt. The film dives straight in with a pre-title sequence that
tells its audience exactly what it’s in for culminating in one of the coolest
title shots I’ve ever seen with our first deadite of the day on full display
over a lakeside setting. It then jumps to our main cast, Ellie, a struggling
single mum (Alyssa Sutherland) her three children, and her sister Beth (Lily
Sulivan), just back from working overseas. After an earthquake, Danny (Morgan
Davies), the oldest of the children finds a secret vault under their apartment
building’s car park where he uncovers a book and a couple of old records. The
book is quickly revealed to be one of three known copies of the Necronomicon,
the records are of a priest reading passages from it and Danny quickly realises
he should not have messed with it as the Evil is unleashed. So far, so familiar with the only real twist to the formula
being it takes place in an inner city apartment block rather than a cabin in
the woods and that the cast includes children, Danny and the middle child
Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) being mid to late teens and the youngest child
Kassie (Nell Fisher) being around 10. But nobody is going to an Evil Dead movie
for a deep character study or in search of a profound message. We’re here for in-your-face
horror, twisted humour, and bloody carnage. The film offers a little bit of
each character’s personality to help us relate to them before it kicks into
gear, from which point it rarely lets up for more than a couple of minutes at a
time. The best performance in the film comes from Alyssa Sutherland, who as
shown in the trailer (a trailer which I must say shows too much) becomes
possessed leading to many of the film’s more effective scary moments. In terms of its tone and feel Evil Dead Rise, while still
definitively more horror than anything else allows more of the fun side of the
franchise to come in than the brutal Evil Dead 2013 did. This also shows in the
level of violence and gore; make no mistake, this is an extremely violent, gory,
and brutal movie with massive amounts of blood spilled, but where Evil Dead
2013 might have twisted Evil Dead Rise chooses to stick resulting in one or two
moments where I might have preferred director Lee Cronin to really push the
boundaries and mess with his audience. The climax as well felt to me to be
slightly derivative of the 2013 film and didn’t hit quite as well as I’d have
liked it to. Despite these minor gripes, I had a great time watching Evil
Dead Rise. It had moments of fun mixed with all-out terror, mostly satisfying
gore, and a cast of characters I cared enough about for violence to have some
meaning. Sure, there’s not much subtext going on, but if you’re looking for a
bloody good time you won’t find much better. |
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