Cast: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher
Director: Lee Cronin
Writer: Lee Cronin
The term ‘cult classic’ gets thrown around a lot today, often to be misapplied to broadly popular films that were released more than ten years ago. Strictly speaking, I’m not even sure the term applies to The Evil Dead anymore, not in an age where it’s widely regarded as a horror classic and has spawned two sequels, a remake, a TV series, comic books, video games, and an off-Broadway musical. But while the movie, made on a shoestring budget by Sam Raimi and his friends, was a critically acclaimed box-office success, the film did inspire controversy upon its release and it took a good while before it was accepted as a mainstream classic. Until that time, The Evil Dead owed its success to the ‘video nasties’ market, whereby low-budget B-horrors could be swiftly distributed on VHS in countries like the UK and be viewed at home by dedicated horror heads. In many ways, this gross and goofy cult movie was ahead of its time and now that the rest of the world has caught up with it, it’s easy to forget just how unique and groundbreaking it was in its day. It’s so easy in fact, that even the movies made today with Evil Dead in their titles don’t seem to get what people love about these movies and what makes them so distinct in the horror canon.
The cold open shows promise. A trio of young, attractive people have retreated to a cabin in the woods, a tense mood is immediately established by the use of the series’ signature whooshing dolly shots (that turns out to be a drone), and then a deadite appears to wreak havoc in creatively gory fashion. Then the movie rewinds to a day earlier and introduces us to Beth (Lily Sullivan), a guitar technician who has spent most of her life living large on the road. An unexpected pregnancy prompts her to pay a visit her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a tattoo artist who is more together than her little sis, but is struggling right now between her absentee husband and upcoming eviction from her condemned flat. She’s doing the best she can for her three children, teenagers Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and little Kassie (Nell Fisher), but life hasn’t seen fit to giver her a break. Beth’s appearance provokes deep-seated tensions and grudges, but then just as the viewer starts to wonder “Hang on, isn’t this supposed to be an Evil Dead movie?”, an earthquake erupts around the apartment building where the remainder of the films is to be set. Danny stupidly climbs down a hole that appears in the car park and finds a trove of forgotten artefacts that could be worth a pretty penny. But, as Bridget correctly observes, weird shit like this usually gets buried for a reason, and the unfortunate family is about to learn that lesson the hard way.
What follows is a pretty straightforward chiller with decent make up and effects that sees a host of paper-thin characters get slaughtered in gruesome ways. And if that’s what you want from your horror movie of the week, then fine. But as with the 2013 title, there’s an essential aspect of the experience that’s missing because The Evil Dead and its sequels were anything but generic horrors. They were horror movies of a different breed, one that crossed the macabre grotesquerie of Lovecraft with the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. The movies were scary, but there was an anarchic glee to those scares, the kind that makes it blatantly obvious it was all masterminded by a couple of guys in their early twenties. But there is no humour to Evil Dead Rise, it’s just a paint-by-numbers flick that anybody could have made. There’s a rule in criticism that you’re supposed to review the movie that you saw rather than the movie that you wished you’d seen and there certainly was no obligation on Cronin’s part to make his movie a horror-comedy, but my question is why would anyone choose to disregard the template of the first three movies in favour of something less fun and interesting? If Evil Dead Rise ended up being it’s own kind of horror masterpiece then that would be something, but it’s just a generic horror with little to set it apart.
In fairness, generic is not synonymous with bad. Though Evil Dead Rise possesses little of the inventiveness and inspiration present in the Raimi-directed titles (Raimi, for whatever it’s worth, is a producer on this film), it is performs its function at a serviceable level. The performances for a start are uniformly good, with Sullivan and Sutherland lending greater depth to their sisterly relationship than is present in the material. It still doesn’t amount to much, the relationship only informs the horror to come on the most superficial level, but their efforts do serve to make the plodding first act more bearable. There are also choice shots where Cronin allows himself to show a little panache. As well as the clever reversal with the opening drone shot there is also a fisheye sequence that sees bloody carnage unfold through a door’s peephole and a climatic image that pays homage to The Shining (you’ll know it when you see it). And on the gory front, the movie certainly doesn’t let up; pools of blood, ooze, and vomit are spilt in every which-way direction and the film keeps it coming for pretty much the entire duration. In comparing this movie to those of The Evil Dead past, there’s certainly more of a Raimi-like flair to this title than there was in 2013’s dreadful offering.
But that still doesn’t make it a match for the franchise at its strongest. Again, it’s not that this movie must be beholden to tradition and expectations and cannot offer it’s own take, but there is a give and take involved. If you want to pull back on the comedic leanings of this series, you need to offer something new in its place. Evil Dead Rise is not a new spin on an old favourite, it is a stale retread. The content is the same, but instead of a different style or personality, it offers none at all. There is proficiency to the execution, yes, but no wit or originality. There’s one instance where a deadite plucks a poor victim’s eye right out of its socket and hurls it at a screaming bystander so that it becomes lodged in its throat and chokes him to death. It’s precisely the kind of thing you can imagine Raimi dreaming up, only here it doesn’t feel appropriate. The movie has been so glum, drab, and serious up to this point that even this absurd moment doesn’t feel like it was intended to be funny in the twisted way that was so characteristic of the previous movies. It just feels flagrantly out of place, like it belongs to a different cut and was left in by mistake. Maybe someone should start a movement to release the Evil Dead cut.
★★★
Aled Warren Films 