Review: EVIL DEAD RISE

After a horror prologue which gets right down to it we change scenes for a real opening scene under the title One Day Before. Beth is in the loo backstage at a massive sounding rock gig doing a pregnancy test. She's a guitar tech. Cut to L.A. where her sister Jessica is handling her young family (two girls, one boy) after the departure of her partner. When Beth knocks on the door, wanting help and advice, Jessica sends the kids out for pizza. When they come back the whole block is shaken by an earthquake. The kids in the basement carpark find a basement that has been exposed by the damage. The boy goes down to investigate and retrieves some dodgy looking old records and an even dodgier looking book. This is an Evil Dead movie. If you don't know what is about to happen, just go and watch the peerless first one from 1981.

If you have seen the original and its immediate sequel you might enjoy the subversion of the speeding low shot here which is cleverly subverted or the callback to the card reading scene or even smile at the spectacular title sequence. There will be plenty of things to enjoy along these lines which I won't be going through. There are even a couple of quotes from Kubrick's The Shining. Spoiler: no one says, "groovy". I'm getting this out of the way now as any fan of Evil Dead movies will be wondering how much they will be expected to smile or groan at in advance without spoilers. The answer is that the references are many but you can let them happen without getting too distracted by them. A moment with an elevator features a cute detail which made me wince. If you don't find yourself recognising these references, there's still plenty of movie to enjoy.

If I have a problem with this respectful and efficient late entry it is that it takes far too long to establish its theme of motherhood (that's a borderline spoiler considering how late it comes in). Before that, between the generic establishment of characters and the eventual gaining of gravity there are a lot of very good effects. There are so many and they follow so rapidly that you wonder if that's all there is going to be. It feels like a direct connection between the writers room and the screen with a massive list of "oh let's try this one" moments before a dialogue exchange clarifies stakes that were so incidental and localised that it was getting very hard to care about any of them.

But that theme is established and served with lean writing and big loud action. From that point the newer ideas enter, the drive to resolution speeds and the tightening and falling motion of the climax happens the way it should if it is to do what it said on the tin and it does. Then we get a coda which provides a circular closure.

While that makes it a satisfying horror film (when it gets going) how does it stack as a film with an ancestry? This is where the snags in the current start appearing. The Evil Dead from 1981 is acknowledged as a horror classic. It has a raft of fans that recall it for its comedic elements. Those are unambiguously part of it but that is too often used to mask how much genuinely eerie scenes there are, all the gore and thick atmosphere. This is complicated by the sequel which is essentially the same as the first with the comedy more pronounced. The third, Army of Darkness, takes it way out of the cabin in the woods and plays more as a macabre action movie. It's the 2013 remake that Evil Dead Rise most closely resembles and it does this while offering repeated DNA samples from the complete family tree.

So, we get a lot of references, wry or reverent, to the history of Evil Dead but when the movie plays as a horror piece it really only emulates the desaturated severity of the most recent one. While I would tend to argue against the shoehorning of comedy into horror cinema, there is a warmth missing here which echoes the lack of it in the 2013 version. Why? There's no Ash. Bruce Campbell and his iconic creation makes it into a seconds-long post credits cute bit in the remake but the first three, however far they journeyed away from their origin, were centred on Campbell's natural stardom which swung between hapless victim to absurdist action hero rapidly. This is the warmth of the original sequence and its absence from any revisit beyond it is felt acutely. As sturdy an action hero as this film's Lily Sullivan is (and she is rock solid) she is given nothing of Ash's opportunities to charm. It means she can't win for her audience as while you might be able to describe this story as an Evil Dead film it will only ever really be one in name only. And then its clear merits (see also the remake) will be lost.