Don't tell mama
The sad thing about Evil Dead Rise is that it is so extremely happy to be an Evil Dead movie. Writer-director Lee Cronin is clearly a huge fan of the series, and has put great effort into making sure his movie evokes all sorts of specific lines and story beats and whatnot. One might say, he's making sure that the film is checking all of the boxes that an Evil Dead film has to check, except that's kind of the thing - there hasn't been a checkbox before, across the last 42 years, all that the phrase "an Evil Dead film" has referred to has been the three increasingly silly movies made by Sam Raimi and his goofball muse, Bruce Campbell - The Evil Dead from 1981, Evil Dead II from 1981, Army of Darkness from 1992 - and the 2013 remake of the 1981 film that doubles-down on the gross-out factor. Which means that most of what "an Evil Dead film" has been is just whatever Raimi had on his mind at that particular point in his young career. So really, with Evil Dead Rise, Cronin is not merely checking the boxes, he is writing down the checklist. This film is defining the parameters of "an Evil Dead film" as much as it is fulfilling them. And it does so with the grand joy of a fan getting invited into the sandbox for the first time.
I call this "the sad thing" because being an Evil Dead film isn't much at all a benefit to Evil Dead Rise, which feels to me like it would surely be better if it could just be its own standalone thing about possessed zombie-like humans tormenting their loved ones in a falling-down apartment complex. One of the best sequences in the movie specifically isn't even an Evil Dead sequence: it's more or less explicitly asking, "what do you suppose it was like in that elevator in The Shining before the door opened and the blood started flooding out?" The film does take some things of value from the series: the design of the possessed creatures - "deadites" in the parlance of the series, though I'll admit that I missed that word if it was ever spoken aloud in Evil Dead Rise - draws heavily from the make-up in the first two movies while obviously benefiting from a budget that Raimi and company couldn't even daydream about; the notion that part of what the deadites do is to specifically torment their victims emotionally, making you feel very unhappy and traumatised before they do whatever it is they do to your soul isn't, of course, limited to this series, but it's a big part of it, and this film gets to automatically tap into that. On the other hand, the inevitable chainsaw is wedged in at the last minute because "can't be an Evil Dead without a chainsaw", and the many dialogue lifts from earlier films tend to clang a bit, though the dialogue in this film mostly clangs, so it doesn't entirely matter. I would say that it feels unnecessarily labored how this film gets its flesh-bound book of unspoken evils going (it's called the Naturom Demonto this time, same as the 1981 and 2013 films, but not the 1987 and 1992 films), but I am exceptionally impressed by the work the art department did in illustrating it (so is the film: it gives those illustrations pride of place in the end credits), so I'm inclined to call that one a push.
Whatever is going on in terms of being a franchise extension, the main body of Evil Dead Rise follows the unhappiness in an apartment a month out from being condemned in Los Angeles: one of the handful of units still being occupied belongs to Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who lives with her teenage children Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Danny (Morgan Davies), and little preteen Kassie (Nell Fisher). On this particular day, Ellie's moderately-estranged sister, a roadie and instrument technician named Beth (Lily Sullivan), has come by in a moment of crisis, having just learned that she's pregnant; this is the first time that the sisters have talked in at least several months, since it's only through a humiliating gaffe that Beth learns that Ellie's husband abandoned the family a little while ago. Cue the sisters having a tense meeting of the minds while the kids go pick up pizza; on the way back, they get caught in the building's basement during a mild but nerve-wracking earthquake, and this opens a vault (the building used to be a bank) containing a horrible-looking book and some vinyl LPs. Danny, using peerless horror-movie logic, immediately decides that the book is probably a valuable antique and if he can ascertain its provenance, he can sell it to raise some money for his mom; this involves, of course, accidentally cutting himself and bleeding onto it, and the playing the LPs, with a recording of a priest from 1923 reciting some words in Latin that have the effect of waking the book up. All previous concerns are now shelved as the book sends a low-height camera racing towards Ellie with a whining noise, upon which she becomes the first of several deadites to be created from innocent humans before dawn.
This is all enormously sturdy, in part because I skipped over the bad bits. For no obvious reason other than to fit a cabin in the woods into the movie, the story actually opens 24 hours after the rest of its plot, to find the book's evil has obviously escaped the apartment and ruined some annoying young people's weekend getaway. This comes back as a "duhn-duhn-DUHN!" beat at the very end of the movie, and the whole frame just feels out of place and trite, though it's also one of the only places where Evil Dead Rise permits itself to be knowingly cheesy, rather than just dour (the shot where the film's title appears is particularly tongue-in-cheek). The other main thing is that Evil Dead Rise is About Motherhood, with stress on that capital A and M. Obviously, it's fine for movies to be about motherhood. Evil Dead Rise smashes Motherhood into our faces like a frying pan. "You look like Mom" says one sister to the other, and the subtext is obviously "you look like our miserable slattern of a mother whose substance abuse and general poor behavior ruined both of our childhoods". Beth's entire plot is about not being ready to have kids; Ellie's entire plot is- well, she doesn't get a plot, but her function in other peoples' plots is to be a perverse corruption of Motherhood, the loving caregiver turned into a manipulative succubus who wants to feed on the innocence of her children and make them suffer by using their sympathy and love against them. There's a way of making this all good, but subtly isn't a strong suit of 2020s filmmaking, and particularly not for Cronin, whose only previous feature, 2019's The Hole in the Ground, is also a horror story about parent-child relationships, and it's an especially tiresome example of the kind of "art" horror that's so unattractively eager to make sure that we Get the subtext that it decides to maybe just do away with having text in the first place. Evil Dead Rise is better than that, but it suffers from a version of the same problem: it talks its themes at us constantly in the first two-thirds, until thankfully the sheer muchness of the stage blood and rotting flesh latex effects drown it out.
And that is, to be fair, a great strength of the film: it absolutely has the goods as a violent horror movie. And not just violent: there's a lot of the first act that is downright good at being scary, something that hasn't always been a priority for this series (I would, in fact, suggest that Evil Dead II is the only for which "scary", rather than "shocking and horrific", is ever actually a goal). Cronin's writing skills need some work, but his handling of tone is pretty great, and his knack for showing off the make-up effects his crew have presented remains strong right up until the very last scene. Sort of: probably the single worst thing about Evil Dead Rise is that cinematographer Dave Garbett has concluded that the best way to make a rotting apartment look spooky is to simply not light it, resulting in a film that is too dark for a simply ludicrous amount of its running time, "too dark" in the sense that it's literally tough to be able to make out what we're looking at, sometimes. It's no longer atmospheric at that point, it's just frustrating, and it's probably the biggest reason that Evil Dead Rise tops out at "sturdy" rather than "actually a pretty good horror movie, if you can ignore that it's got some trivial, by-the-books character boilerplate going on".
Which it does, no question about it. The best version of the motherhood material would still never be fresh, and this isn't the best version of it by any stretch of the imagination. Both because it is rather flatly written, but also because the cast is having some trouble navigating their dialogue: Evil Dead Rise was shot in New Zealand with an almost entirely Australian cast (the crew is split between those countries for the most part, while Cronin himself is Irish), and this already raises some questions. Like, okay, so why Los Angeles, if there's absolutely nothing in your film that looks like Los Angeles, and nearly all of it is set in the one apartment set? But I digress. The point is, the entire cast is struggling with their American accents, to a degree that is honestly kind of film-breaking; it's one of those things that feels uncharitable and petty to notice, but when it's literally everybody and it's in most of their scenes, this ceases to feel like a nitpick or bullying a given actor, and more like a sign of some actual dysfunction in the filmmaking process. It sort of works for the sense of unease that none of the actors ever feels comfortable in their interactions, especially once Sutherland switches over a digitally-augmented deadite voice, and suddenly becomes much more adept at delivering lines; but it also makes it feel like this is happening to a bunch of thinly-sketched movie characters rather than people. And that's certainly not one of the elements from the original The Evil Dead that needed to be brought back
Reviews in this series
The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
Evil Dead II (Raimi, 1987)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)
Evil Dead Rise (Cronin, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
I call this "the sad thing" because being an Evil Dead film isn't much at all a benefit to Evil Dead Rise, which feels to me like it would surely be better if it could just be its own standalone thing about possessed zombie-like humans tormenting their loved ones in a falling-down apartment complex. One of the best sequences in the movie specifically isn't even an Evil Dead sequence: it's more or less explicitly asking, "what do you suppose it was like in that elevator in The Shining before the door opened and the blood started flooding out?" The film does take some things of value from the series: the design of the possessed creatures - "deadites" in the parlance of the series, though I'll admit that I missed that word if it was ever spoken aloud in Evil Dead Rise - draws heavily from the make-up in the first two movies while obviously benefiting from a budget that Raimi and company couldn't even daydream about; the notion that part of what the deadites do is to specifically torment their victims emotionally, making you feel very unhappy and traumatised before they do whatever it is they do to your soul isn't, of course, limited to this series, but it's a big part of it, and this film gets to automatically tap into that. On the other hand, the inevitable chainsaw is wedged in at the last minute because "can't be an Evil Dead without a chainsaw", and the many dialogue lifts from earlier films tend to clang a bit, though the dialogue in this film mostly clangs, so it doesn't entirely matter. I would say that it feels unnecessarily labored how this film gets its flesh-bound book of unspoken evils going (it's called the Naturom Demonto this time, same as the 1981 and 2013 films, but not the 1987 and 1992 films), but I am exceptionally impressed by the work the art department did in illustrating it (so is the film: it gives those illustrations pride of place in the end credits), so I'm inclined to call that one a push.
Whatever is going on in terms of being a franchise extension, the main body of Evil Dead Rise follows the unhappiness in an apartment a month out from being condemned in Los Angeles: one of the handful of units still being occupied belongs to Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who lives with her teenage children Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Danny (Morgan Davies), and little preteen Kassie (Nell Fisher). On this particular day, Ellie's moderately-estranged sister, a roadie and instrument technician named Beth (Lily Sullivan), has come by in a moment of crisis, having just learned that she's pregnant; this is the first time that the sisters have talked in at least several months, since it's only through a humiliating gaffe that Beth learns that Ellie's husband abandoned the family a little while ago. Cue the sisters having a tense meeting of the minds while the kids go pick up pizza; on the way back, they get caught in the building's basement during a mild but nerve-wracking earthquake, and this opens a vault (the building used to be a bank) containing a horrible-looking book and some vinyl LPs. Danny, using peerless horror-movie logic, immediately decides that the book is probably a valuable antique and if he can ascertain its provenance, he can sell it to raise some money for his mom; this involves, of course, accidentally cutting himself and bleeding onto it, and the playing the LPs, with a recording of a priest from 1923 reciting some words in Latin that have the effect of waking the book up. All previous concerns are now shelved as the book sends a low-height camera racing towards Ellie with a whining noise, upon which she becomes the first of several deadites to be created from innocent humans before dawn.
This is all enormously sturdy, in part because I skipped over the bad bits. For no obvious reason other than to fit a cabin in the woods into the movie, the story actually opens 24 hours after the rest of its plot, to find the book's evil has obviously escaped the apartment and ruined some annoying young people's weekend getaway. This comes back as a "duhn-duhn-DUHN!" beat at the very end of the movie, and the whole frame just feels out of place and trite, though it's also one of the only places where Evil Dead Rise permits itself to be knowingly cheesy, rather than just dour (the shot where the film's title appears is particularly tongue-in-cheek). The other main thing is that Evil Dead Rise is About Motherhood, with stress on that capital A and M. Obviously, it's fine for movies to be about motherhood. Evil Dead Rise smashes Motherhood into our faces like a frying pan. "You look like Mom" says one sister to the other, and the subtext is obviously "you look like our miserable slattern of a mother whose substance abuse and general poor behavior ruined both of our childhoods". Beth's entire plot is about not being ready to have kids; Ellie's entire plot is- well, she doesn't get a plot, but her function in other peoples' plots is to be a perverse corruption of Motherhood, the loving caregiver turned into a manipulative succubus who wants to feed on the innocence of her children and make them suffer by using their sympathy and love against them. There's a way of making this all good, but subtly isn't a strong suit of 2020s filmmaking, and particularly not for Cronin, whose only previous feature, 2019's The Hole in the Ground, is also a horror story about parent-child relationships, and it's an especially tiresome example of the kind of "art" horror that's so unattractively eager to make sure that we Get the subtext that it decides to maybe just do away with having text in the first place. Evil Dead Rise is better than that, but it suffers from a version of the same problem: it talks its themes at us constantly in the first two-thirds, until thankfully the sheer muchness of the stage blood and rotting flesh latex effects drown it out.
And that is, to be fair, a great strength of the film: it absolutely has the goods as a violent horror movie. And not just violent: there's a lot of the first act that is downright good at being scary, something that hasn't always been a priority for this series (I would, in fact, suggest that Evil Dead II is the only for which "scary", rather than "shocking and horrific", is ever actually a goal). Cronin's writing skills need some work, but his handling of tone is pretty great, and his knack for showing off the make-up effects his crew have presented remains strong right up until the very last scene. Sort of: probably the single worst thing about Evil Dead Rise is that cinematographer Dave Garbett has concluded that the best way to make a rotting apartment look spooky is to simply not light it, resulting in a film that is too dark for a simply ludicrous amount of its running time, "too dark" in the sense that it's literally tough to be able to make out what we're looking at, sometimes. It's no longer atmospheric at that point, it's just frustrating, and it's probably the biggest reason that Evil Dead Rise tops out at "sturdy" rather than "actually a pretty good horror movie, if you can ignore that it's got some trivial, by-the-books character boilerplate going on".
Which it does, no question about it. The best version of the motherhood material would still never be fresh, and this isn't the best version of it by any stretch of the imagination. Both because it is rather flatly written, but also because the cast is having some trouble navigating their dialogue: Evil Dead Rise was shot in New Zealand with an almost entirely Australian cast (the crew is split between those countries for the most part, while Cronin himself is Irish), and this already raises some questions. Like, okay, so why Los Angeles, if there's absolutely nothing in your film that looks like Los Angeles, and nearly all of it is set in the one apartment set? But I digress. The point is, the entire cast is struggling with their American accents, to a degree that is honestly kind of film-breaking; it's one of those things that feels uncharitable and petty to notice, but when it's literally everybody and it's in most of their scenes, this ceases to feel like a nitpick or bullying a given actor, and more like a sign of some actual dysfunction in the filmmaking process. It sort of works for the sense of unease that none of the actors ever feels comfortable in their interactions, especially once Sutherland switches over a digitally-augmented deadite voice, and suddenly becomes much more adept at delivering lines; but it also makes it feel like this is happening to a bunch of thinly-sketched movie characters rather than people. And that's certainly not one of the elements from the original The Evil Dead that needed to be brought back
Reviews in this series
The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
Evil Dead II (Raimi, 1987)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)
Evil Dead Rise (Cronin, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
