Review of EVIL DEAD RISE: Maternal Mayhem

May 9, 2023

Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) was a single mother raising three spirited kids in an old apartment building in Los Angeles  teenagers Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and the youngest Kassie (Nell Fisher). One night, Ellie's sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) came for a visit when she learned that she was pregnant. The children went to buy pizza for dinner and when they parked their car in the basement, there was a strong earthquake. 

Danny saw a hole on the floor of the parking area. He went down and saw that there was an old bank vault underneath, where he picked some old photographs and vinyl records. Inside a cracked old church altar there was a mysterious old book with spooky drawings inside. When Danny played the old record on his turntable and the demonic incantations were heard on the speakers, a malevolent spirit was summoned to terrorize their building.

This new film written and directed by Lee Cronin is the fifth and latest installment of a horror franchise that was born in 1981 from the fertile imagination of writer-director Sam Raimi, who helmed the first three films -- "The Evil Dead" (1981), "Evil Dead 2" (1987) and "Army of Darkness" (1993). In 2013, there was a reboot simply entitled "Evil Dead," written and directed by Fede Alvarez. All these previous entries received good reviews from critics and fans.

Of the five, I had only seen the Alvarez reboot so I do get the essence of the franchise -- demons revived by eerie incantations from a cursed book of the dead wreaking mayhem on the teen occupants of a cabin in the woods. The Alvarez reboot was criticized for stripping the franchise of the slapstick humor of the Raimi trilogy, especially with the absence of Ash (Bruce Campbell), the wisecracking original hero.

This Cronin version replaced Ash with a female protagonist Beth, and brought the "Deadite" action from the woods into the city of Los Angeles. The elevator of the apartment building will the be setting for a couple of remarkable horror scenes which were callbacks to older horror classics -- with tree branches attacking a female victim and the gallons of blood that gushed out of it. The comedy unintentionally came from the awkward acting of the lead actors.

The style of the kills make or break a film like this. Here, the kills were gory and bloody. A girl got scalped. A man got his eyeball bitten out and spit out. All the victims possessed by the demons coalesce into one giant monster called the Marauder. From the very start, we already see a machine called the "Tree Surgeon" parked in the basement, so we already know that it will play a major role in the grand bloody finale. 7/10.