evil dead rise

In Evil Dead Rise, we’re introduced to Beth (Lily Sullivan), a rock roadie who’s passing through Los Angeles and decides to drop in on her older sister, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland)… a tattoo artist and single mom with three children - would-be DJ Danny (Morgan Davies), budding SJW Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and cute-as-a-button Kassie (Nell Fisher). Beth learns that not only has Ellie’s husband recently split, but their apartment complex has been condemned… and they’re amongst the last remaining tenants, set to be evicted at the end of the month. An impromptu earthquake cracks open the floor of the parking garage, revealing a long-forgotten bank vault, which contains several vinyl recordings and a copy of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, or the Naturom Demonto - “The Book of the Dead,” a hellish tome bound in flesh and inked in human blood. If past Evil Dead films are any indication, it’s not difficult to suss out where this is headed…  

We need to have a frank and honest conversation about this franchise. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn - with its blended balance of splatter and slapstick, expertly anchored by Bruce Campbell’s deadpan looney tunes punching bag of a lead performance - would seem to epitomize the essence of the series… and its tonal approach was firmly carried over to the recent Campbell-led TV continuation that ran for three seasons on Starz. And yet the films - specifically Fede Alvarez’s 2013 reboot (which seems to have been bafflingly retconned in recent years into some sort of genuine masterpiece) and this latest offering - somehow landed creatively on the idea that they should be as unrelentingly brutish and nasty and unpleasant as humanly possible. Raimi’s kinetic and kooky alchemy (hardwired into the DNA of even his more straightforward original) has basically been replaced by sandblasting the viewer with spiritual nihilism.

Ellie is the first to be possessed by the Deadites and Sutherland, it must be said, commits to the role with unwavering zeal. “Mommy’s with the maggots now,” she declares, in the trailer’s most iconic line, before exploding out of the bathtub, contorting her body in midair, and unleashing a blood-curdling banshee shriek, her pallid flesh already starting to rot (if not quite a star-making performance, it certainly feels like it will be an iconic one). For those who deliberately seek out horror that’s gnarled to the core, Evil Dead Rise is arguably even more punishingly effective than its predecessor; director Lee Cronin is in full command of the rusty barbs of his craft, which might give you tetanus if you aren’t careful. One character munches on a wine glass, the jagged shards poking against the inside of her esophagus. A pair of shearing scissors are put to particularly gruesome use, while Beth has the flesh flayed from her leg with a cheese grater. Suffice it to say, gore junkies will feel as if their bloodstreams have been joyously flooded with a dopamine cocktail.​

And yet, one has to ask - why is any of this fun? It’s a question I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory answer to, and one that tends to involve a lot of deflection (“Well, what do you expect from a horror movie?”). To be clear, this isn’t a question of content - I’ve seen every torture porn film known to man and rarely blinked - but rather a question of context. As in - These are just kids, man. Cronin almost does too good a job engendering sympathy for the film’s down-on-their-luck but tightly-knit clan of characters - their familial bonds feel authentic, and we experience a sharp measure of protectiveness towards them. But Evil Dead is a world deliberately absent of hope - there’s no saving Ellie, no goal to work towards beyond basic, desperate, clawing survival. When she pins a whimpering Bridget to the floor and disfigures her daughter’s face with a tattoo needle, it’s a profoundly ugly moment in a profoundly ugly movie. Lily Sullivan - who looks a bit like Jane Levy’s Mia from the last film crossed with a young Clea DuVall - is an able heroine; when she picks up a chainsaw, her entire body saturated from head to toe with blood, it’s a viscerally charged moment - a reminder of the uniquely addictive high-fructose sugar rush of horror movies. But as she bisects her possessed sister’s head while feeding her through a wood chipper as a traumatized Kassie looks on, it begs the question - what exactly are we cheering for? The sad, soul-crushing demise of an innocent family? This sort of bleak barbarism was never what Raimi was about. There was always an impish glee to how he operated, as if his imagination were spewing unchecked all over the screen. This is just cinematic flagellation. Unlike most, I left the theater in a dreary, withdrawn mood. Evil Dead Drag would have been a more appropriate title.