By David Dent
Amazingly it’s been over 40 years since Sam Raimi’s ‘deadites’ crawled out of the woods to menace Bruce Campbell and friends (or longer if you count his The Evil Dead tryout short Within the Woods from 1978). It’s a fairly secure bet that none of the target audience for Evil Dead Rise were even born when Raimi’s 1981 movie was first released; hell, they’d probably only have been of school/college age at the point where Fede Alvarez’s darker 2013 reboot Evil Dead crashed onto our screens.
And it’s this reboot that Irish director Lee Cronin uses as at atmospheric jumping off point in his remake/remodel addition to a fascinating if sporadic franchise, along with the enclosed setup of 2007’s REC.
We meet Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a single mum living in a rundown, soon to be demolished tenement building, who’s soon joined by her newly pregnant sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) a guitar tech fresh off tour, where something’s gone wrong…again. The combination of poor surroundings and awkward familial relationships sets the audience up for a less than harmonious time, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. A surprise earthquake, not massive but severe enough to rip open the basement car park, exposes an underground room which Ellie’s wannabe DJ son Danny (Morgan Davies) wastes no time exploring. Among the weird religious iconography exposed by the quake, Danny also finds the ‘Book of the Dead’ and some old 78 records, which turn out to provide a modern update on the ‘demon tape’ setup of the original films.
Before we know it Danny has pored over the book and spun the discs, containing the by now familiar recitations…and then all hell breaks loose.
If you can accept the unexplained transplanting of the Necronomicon (s, as in plural) from a cabin in the woods to an urban location, and the fact that the ‘deadites’ follow their usual paths of destruction and dismemberment (they even eventually utter their catchphrases in time honoured fashion), then you’re in for a very bloody, and often darkly funny good time. Last year’s Terrifier 2 seems to have established a new bar for onscreen violence, and if you’ve seen that movie you’ll have some idea as to what awaits you. His choice to unleash the action in a confined space is a lovely nod to Evil Dead Rise’s predecessors, and contributes a really claustrophobic feel.
Cronin is obviously having great fun with the mayhem and some set pieces which gently nod to other horror classics, not just the ‘Evil Dead’ movies. As he mentioned in the introduction to the screening I saw, when addressing those members of the audience who confessed that they weren’t really down with horror movies, “well you’re fucked then!” Precisely.
Evil Dead Rise is showing in UK cinemas from 21 April 2023.
Bloody Flicks 