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MOVIE REVIEW
'Evil Dead Rise' Is Dark And Gory, But Lacks Good Storytelling
By Sal LoCicero | April 27, 2023 (UPDATED: May 15, 2023)
In 2013, Fade Alvarez rebooted Sam Rami’s ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy by presenting a much darker and grittier version of the story, now (ten years later), Writer-director Lee Cronin (‘The Hole In The Ground’) is telling a brand new story that doesn’t take place at a cabin in the woods, instead, it is set in an apartment located in a rundown area in Los Angeles.
The story follows a single mother, Ellie, and her three children who live in an apartment, one day on a dark and stormy night, Ellie’s reunites with her estranged sister, Beth, while two of her children stumble upon a ancient book that gives birth to bloodthirsty demons that threaten their families lives.
This movie has a lot of potential to be a great horror movie. It’s creepy, bloody, and dark. Cinematographer Dave Garbett helps the setting look even more twisted. Alyssa Sutherland is fantastic, she delivers a haunting performance so creepy that it will make you want to briefly look away. Lily Sulivan does the best that she can to make her character shine, despite the fact that her backstory is barely explained.
While ‘Evil Dead Rise’ succeeds in those aspects, it’s hard to get interested in the story if some of its major plot points make no sense. The movie is primarily set in an apartment complex, and buried underground is where the book of the dead has been hidden so it can never be opened again, however in a certain scene we can see that the curse is terrorizing group of friends who are visiting the cabin in the woods, which makes us think that the original setting will connect (somehow) to this new story, but does not happen, it leads to nothing. The book that the family eventually finds is randomly placed in the building without any context as to how and why that was ever there in the first place.
Lee Cronin seems to have been much more interested in setting up his own trilogy instead of making the most of this new entry in the Evil Dead franchise. The family who are the protagonists receive little to no storyline. The script doesn’t contain any character development for audiences to connect with them in any sort of way.
‘Evil Dead Rise’ delivers on the blood and gore that has remained relevant since the original cult classic, but fans of the franchise may be disappointed due to a lack of good storytelling.
Grade: C
What are your thoughts?
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