Review: ‘Evil Dead Rise’ is a Twisted Delight
★★★
Life hasn’t been easy for Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). For starters, her husband left her a few months back and she is stuck raising three kids, Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). Adding salt to the wounds, they are being kicked out of their decrepit apartment and Ellie is now scrambling to find a new place to live and packing up everything they have ever owned while also juggling two teenagers and a 10 year old with little to no help whatsoever. There comes a point, very early on, where you feel really bad for Ellie and her family and hope things get better for them, but Evil Dead Rise isn’t that kind of film.
There are two things Ellie and her family know about the old high rise they live in. First, that it is being demolished in less than a month and second, that it was built over the remnants of an old bank, of which the owner is said to have committed suicide in a rather spectacular fashion and according to a supposed legend told by Kassie, still haunts the premises. What they don’t know is beneath the foundation, the bank’s vault still remains and contains a deep, dark secret that is about to be unleashed.
When Ellie’s estranged sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), comes to visit, she sends the kids out for pizza so they can talk privately. But an earthquake interrupts the kids’ return and opens up a hole in the parking garage. A hole that despite its foreboding qualities is too alluring for the most arrogant of the bunch, Danny, not to investigate. What he finds are a couple of vinyls and a book bound in flesh with sharp teeth locking its fore-edge. A clear sign of the thing that shouldn’t be taken and meddled with, he of course takes and meddles with it.
I think you can guess what happens next. Blood. Guts. Demonic possession and other sorts of carnage like characters choking on eyeballs, cheese graters being used as weapons and imagery straight out of The Shining and John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Directed by Lee Cronin, Evil Dead Rise is the relentless, nail-biting sort of bad time you want to see in a movie about maniacal demons that possess the souls of the living and turn them into homicidal ghouls. Every word and phrase you can think of to describe a horror film — shocking, twisted, sadistic, diabolical, brutal, gory, a grotesque madhouse of insanity — it is that. But most of all, it is unforgiving.
Following in the footsteps of Sam Raimi and Fede Alvarez, Cronin punishes not just the characters but the audience too as he runs us through the usual gauntlet of manic violence, abuse and other forms of sadism these films typically, and often gleefully, depict. And he does so with such grinning enthusiasm that you cannot help but feel like a masochist because I will be damned if this movie is not fun to watch.
Cronin and his Director of Photography, Dave Garbett, stage the terror through effective visual storytelling and uses the wide 2:39:1 aspect ratio to their advantage. Rarely letting one inch of the frame go to waste, Cronin and Garbett play around with split diopters, fish-eye shots through peepholes, reflections in windows, out of focus monsters in the background and in keeping with tradition, floating POVs, dutch tilts and lots and lots of blood.
The cast is worth mentioning too. Sutherland brings pathos to Ellie. She has such little time as a “normal” character in the film, and yet through her performance, paints such a specific image in your head, you know exactly who she is even before she speaks a single word. Tired, exhausted and raising three kids alone, Ellie is the definition of “persevering.” But it is when Ellie becomes possessed by a deadite that Sutherland’s performance truly comes alive. Watching this self-defeated single mother morph into a crooked monster and turn on her own children is quite a sinister transformation. The aforementioned pathos of who this woman was before never goes away. In fact, it only strengthens as you watch in horror as Ellie become the antithesis of what she stood for as a mother and endangers her family. Sutherland has many creepy moments in the film. This includes a scene where she holds a chainsaw to her daughter’s head and threatens to cut it off and another where she removes one of her neighbor’s eyes out of his socket with her teeth. But by far her creepiest is when her family locks her out of the apartment and she tries to coerce her youngest child, Kassie, into letting her back in with a slimy story about their father coming back.
While she doesn’t have the illustrious dual role Sutherland as well as her predecessors, Jane Levy and Bruce Campbell, had to play with, Sullivan still owns her role as the prodigal sibling who is forced to become the surrogate mother figure and eventual shotgun-wielding hero in order to protect what mattered most to her late sister. It is in the final act where she truly shines, evoking a dash of both Campbell and Levy but also a hint of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens as she serves as not purely a survivor fighting for her life but a protector as well.
Evil Dead Rise is the fifth film in the Evil Dead franchise and the second to be only loosely connected to the original films directed by Sam Raimi. Naturally, as a franchise approaches its fifth entry, it runs the risk of growing stale. But Evil Dead Rise has at least two things going for it. The first is its setting. Now this isn’t the first time a horror series has gone to the city (Scream VI is a more recent example of this) and it definitely is not the first sequel to contain its horror to a single high rise apartment building (raise your hand if you remember Critters 3) but I will be damned if it isn’t a perfect fit for the Evil Dead franchise’s signature mayhem.
Garbett, who also worked on Ash vs Evil Dead, lights the building with a foreboding sense of hopelessness. The musty rooms and dreary hallways that seem so tight and claustrophobic but house infinite darkness. The fact that you can practically smell the dust and mold growing within the walls and another odor, that of rotting death, begins to seep in even before anyone has died, as if there was always some form of evil there, even if just bad management and shady landlords. And then there is the contradiction of seclusion, the seemingly lack thereof coexisting with an abundance of it. There is community there, but at the same time, isolation. Not the same kind of isolation as an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods; more of a psychological isolation. There are people around you, but at the same time, there might as well not be. It is not explicitly stated, but you can feel it in the air. This is the place where life abandons you. In other words, a reflection of Ellie and her family’s situation before anyone gets possessed by Deadites. And when that shit does go down, the characters are forced to barricade themselves in the apartment with salvation so close they can look out the window and see it. Man, it is right there — right freakin’ there — but they are trapped with no way out. That is a different kind of scary from being miles away from safety in the woods.
The second thing that makes Evil Dead Rise stand out in the series are the characters Cronin opts to terrorize. A single mother, her sister who recently found out she was pregnant, two teenagers played by actors who actually look like they are in their teens, and a child around 10 or 11 years old? This is certainly fresh territory for the Evil Dead franchise which in the past has opted to torment college-aged adults or older, portrayed by actors in their twenties or older, a more typical cast of characters that the general audience is accustomed to seeing in horror films. What makes this cast interesting is these are all characters who would otherwise be considered safe in a mainstream horror film. The mother who is working her butt off but struggling to make it? No way. There is a clear through line for her story. She’s got to survive and find a better life for her and her kids. So she’ll live, right? What about the children? You can’t kill children in a horror movie. And of course the sister must be safe too. She is pregnant, d’uh! Some believe there to be an unspoken rule that characters such as these don’t die, they can’t die, in horror films. That would be immoral, right? You keep telling yourself, You don’t have to worry. They are safe. But quite the contrary, they are not safe; you can kill off these sort of characters and it happens more often than you may think. But while numerous examples can be cited (Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws, Halloween Ends to name a few), it is still seemingly rare enough to the general moviegoing public that much of the audience — including those looking for casual thrills — expects them to live. So when this supposed rule is broken, as is the case in Evil Dead Rise, it can be quite jarring. Regardless of whether such a rule actually exists, you can rest assured, they are not safe here. No one comes out unscathed; not even the audience.
In some circles, you can still hear pleads for a “true” Evil Dead 4 starring Bruce Campbell and directed by Sam Raimi but I think Alvarez and Cronin have carried the torch beautifully with these two well-crafted films. They are inventive, scary, tense, a little bit funny and effective in making audiences cringe with their carnal delights. This, I imagine, is what a moviegoer desires most from these films.
