Review: Evil Dead Rise

Evil Dead Rise
Cert: 18 / 97 mins / Dir. Lee Cronin / Trailer

Fair play, to get an 18 certificate from the British Board of Film Classification in this day and age, your horror movie has to be particularly gratuitous or particularly malicious. Evil Dead Rise is often being one of those, and at several points it's both.

Taking time out of her job as a touring guitar-tech in what turns out to be a mild crisis, Beth (Lily Sullivan) returns to her older sister Ellie's (Alyssa Sutherland) run-down Los Angeles apartment where she lives with her adolescent kids (Nell Fisher, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols) for support and advice. But when an earthquake strikes the city and uncovers a forgotten vault in the building's foundations, the discovery of an ancient gnarled book and three records where a priest describes exactly how not to use it... well, this is only going one way.

DOOMED

So whether the worst advert ever for a library-card is despatching squawky teenagers in a cabin or emotionally and physically torturing the most non-likeable dysfunctional family this side of a Will Ferrell comedy, it's clear from the off that the viewer doesn't have to spend time getting attached to the doomed players. The script certainly doesn't. In this respect, writer/director Lee Cronin's film is a clear tribute not only to the films whose name it holds, but of an entire genre of work from the decade that raised it.

Considering the 93 minute runtime, EDR's first act (once the pre-title framing-prelude is over) is surprisingly meandering. The urgency picks up as events dictate (because you can't put a demon back in the box), but it's an indication that the story itself is slight. It does feel, at times, that the only need for this film to exist is a financial one, in an era where Michael Myers, Ghostface and the Candyman refuse to lie still and stop making money for their rights-holders.

While Cronin doesn't try for anything especially new here, that also means he doesn't fail in that aim. And there is an undeniable visceral joy in this movie's unflinching quest for claustrophobic, tinnitus-baiting extremis. The film treads little new ground, but dances with practised ease in the foot prints of its forebears. We'd do well to remember of course that Evil Dead's first sequel was a remake and its second was a thinly-veiled fantasy adventure. The 2013 entry was another back-to-basic retooling of the first (or first two), so there's no real harm in retreading that path again; cinematically, there is next to no narrative thread to follow*¹.

FOXED

The storyline make as much sense as any of the series, and (thankfully) doesn't try to over-explain itself. Our characters only learn what is necessary to fight the powers tacked against them (and statistically, most of them don't even manage that), and the audience learn only what ie necessary to root for the characters. Just about. Where it gets more sticky is the seasoned viewer hoping / expecting / waiting for overt links to earlier Evil Dead films.

Because it's all very well making a hell-for-leather urban gorefest movie, but this particular one has an Evil Dead™ sticker on the case, so some connective tissue is needed at least. There are scripted references to the property's roots ("swallow your soul", "dead by dawn"), but in all honesty these moments are so heavy-handed they wouldn't feel out of place in a fan film*². Structurally we're on firmer - if still firmly linear - ground; the core of the story is a troubled soul unearthing forbidden knowledge, and unleashing arcane, malevolent forces that cannot be controlled as a result. Not only does this sit well with the Raimi/Alvarez precedent, it's also fundamentally in line with the series Lovecraftian lineage.

WHOED

It's not all plain sailing, of course. In what appears to be a bizarre clawing for moral ammunition to appease approval/censorship bodies, our heroine cannot hope to actually defeat the demon until she has accepted not only surrogate care of her young (now effectively orphaned) niece, but also her own pregnancy and subsequently impending motherhood*³. Aliens toyed with exactly the same themes of course, but in the midst of a more emotionally weighted film.

Oh, and on a purely technical level, the continuity as Beth plays the third (and crucially, plot-critical) gramophone record from the vault is appalling. Vinyl is by its definition a continuous medium, and the needle is shown to be back and forth across the disc in every intercut shot. I expect the current generation which fetishises the format so much to at least know how it works.

All of this is a nice way of saying that if you're going along for shotguns, chainsaws, screaming and everything covered in blood, you won't leave disappointed.

Ultimately, the events of Evil Dead Rise occur because of one moody teenager's obsession with locking themselves away in a bedroom with obscure and catastrophically bad records. Now that is how you pay homage to the youth of Generation X...

*¹ I'm not including the Ash vs. Evil Dead series in this round-up, not least because I haven't watched it yet. I know I know, I'm a terrible fan. Look, I don't have time to watch quality horror on my TV when I spend my hours watching the absolute worst at the cinema. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Also, The Necronomicon / Naturom Demonto is largely a picture-book now, with blasphemous rites of cross-dimensional resurrection reduced to background texturing... ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ In much the same way that Neeson, Wahlberg and Butler can only be The Hero™ if they have a teenage daughter in the background, in fact. It seems that in Hollywood only the breeders get to save the day. Well, quite. ^{[ BACK ]}

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