Evil Dead Rise

 Year:  2023

Director:  Lee Cronin

Screenplay:  Lee Cronin, based on characters created by Sam Raimi

Starring:  Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher

Running Time:  97 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Guitar technician Beth (Sullivan) goes to visit her sister Ellie (Sutherland), who is a single mother to teenagers Bridget (Echols) and Danny (Davies), and pre-teen Kassie (Fisher).  Following a minor earthquake, a hole opens up in the ground of the underground parking garage of Ellie's condemned apartment building.  Curious, Danny investigates and discovers an abandoned subterranean bank vault in which he finds three phonograph records from 1923 and a strange old book.  When Danny plays the phonograph records he discovers that they have been made by a strange priest, who has discovered one of  three surviving volumes of the Naturom Demonto, a book bound in human flesh and inked in blood, which has the power to resurrect evil demonic forces.  The priest thoughtfully recites these spells on the records, and the family soon find themselves assaulted by terrifying supernatural forces.

This is the fifth film in the Evil Dead franchise.  While Sam Raimi's original The Evil Dead (1981) was a fully fledged horror film, the sequel Evil Dead II (1987) was more of a comedy film influenced by Raimi's enthusiasm for the Three Stooges, and the third film in the series, Army of Darkness (1992), was pretty much a full on fantasy comedy with lead character Ash (Bruce Campbell) transported to the Middle Ages. In 2013 director Fede Álvarez released Evil Dead, a reboot of the series which returned it to its gruesome, horror original.  Evil Dead Rise continues this approach by being a full on horror film.  The blood doesn't so much flow here, as gush, pour, rain and flood.  It opens with a prologue, set in the familiar Evil Dead territory of a bucolic woodland, however the bulk of the film is set a day earlier in an unnamed rain soaked city.  The grim setting of a condemned, decaying, sparsely occupied apartment building works for the material.  It also takes it's time to set up the characters, particularly the tension between Ellie, a financially struggling tattoo artist, due to be evicted in a month, raising three children on her own, and her sister Beth, a freewheeling guitar technician, who is seen as the "cool aunt" by her nieces and nephews, but is frequently dismissed as a "groupie", a description which she angrily rejects.  It is Ellie who becomes possessed by the demonic forces, forcing Beth, who has just discovered that she is pregnant, to step into the maternal role and protect the children.  While there are some nods to the earlier Evil Dead films, this is a stand alone film, and can be watched even if you've ever seen any of the other films.  The performances are good, and the horror, when it comes in, is unrelenting.  It is graphically violent, in the best Grand Guignol tradition of splatter films, and will surely be a late night favourite for horror fans.

     Mother isn't quite herself today:  Alyssa Sutherland in Evil Dead Rise