movie review of evil dead rise

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, evil dead rise.

Now streaming on:

In terms of horror franchises, “ Evil Dead ” has accomplished something miraculous: There has yet to be a bad movie bearing its name. Much of this comes down to series creator Sam Raimi , who’s picky enough about who he lets play with his groovy blood-soaked baby that there have only been five “Evil Dead” movies over the course of forty-plus years. But there’s also something about the elemental simplicity of its premise—the totally loony “Army of Darkness” excepted, of course—that makes “Evil Dead” just work.

The latest in the series, “ Evil Dead Rise,” comes from Irish writer/director Lee Cronin , whose 2019 feature debut “ The Hole in the Ground ” also revolves around sinkholes and mommy issues. Cronin’s grimy sensibility is much closer to that of remake director Fede Alvarez than Raimi’s live-action cartoons. But he does share one key thing with Raimi, and that’s a diabolical imagination. 

Marketing for the film revolves around a key scene with a cheese grater, but “Evil Dead Rise” is packed with creative carnage. Eye trauma, hand trauma, vomit, bugs, broken glass, broken bones, decapitation, dismemberment, stab wounds, shotgun blasts, sharp objects going straight through the soft palate and out the back of someone’s head—name a form of grievous bodily harm, and this movie has it. And that’s not including all the blood, thousands and thousands of gallons of it, enough to recreate the elevator scene from “ The Shining ” and soak two of its leads from head to toe throughout the last 20 minutes of the movie.

This film shifts its location from a group of friends in a cabin in the woods to a family living in a run-down apartment building in downtown Los Angeles. And once single mom Ellie ( Alyssa Sutherland ) is possessed by a Deadite early on in the film, what happens next is made even more disturbing because Ellie is psychologically and physically torturing her own children. Her youngest, Kassie ( Nell Fisher ), is quite young, too—not that the fates of her siblings, Danny ( Morgan Davies ) and Bridget ( Gabrielle Echols ), are made any less painful by the fact that they’re teenagers. “Evil Dead Rise” squeezes a lot of sicko juice out of violence toward kids, which combines with the extreme gore to make it the grueling experience that a good “Evil Dead” movie should be. 

The downside is that more time and exposition are needed to set up the film’s deviations from the classic “cabin in the woods” formula, threatening to throw that elemental “Evil Dead” simplicity out of whack. This is mostly an issue in the first act, which also has to incorporate Ellie’s rocker sister Beth ( Lily Sullivan ) and an earthquake that opens up a hole in the floor of the parking garage, where Danny finds an old safety deposit box containing some mysterious records that unleash everything that follows. The building used to be a bank—one of several complicating details “Evil Dead Rise” has to roll out before it can get to the good stuff. 

However, once “Evil Dead Rise” really gets going, it doesn’t let up. This is a loud, giddy, packed-house-at-midnight type of movie, and its premiere at SXSW was accompanied by much hollering, cheering, and genuine screams of fright from the audience. Cronin unabashedly uses both jump scares and “look behind you!”-type of gags to punctuate this pummeling bloodbath, and one scene in particular in the film’s roller coaster of a middle section seems bound to inspire a lot of yelling at the screen in multiplexes around the world. 

Not everything in this film works: A pregnancy subplot plays like it was written by a man, which it was, and the cold open is so random that a scene has to be tacked onto the end of the movie to explain it. But for a relatively unknown cast led by a relatively unseasoned director, it does accomplish a lot, particularly in terms of its physical performances—think complicated rigging devices and ghastly prosthetic makeups—and gnarly gore. Once it gets out of its own way and gives the audience what they came to see, “Evil Dead Rise” is an absolute blast.

This review was filed from the world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. "Evil Dead Rise" is now playing in theaters. 

Katie Rife is a freelance writer and critic based in Chicago with a speciality in genre cinema. She worked as the News Editor of  The A.V. Club  from 2014-2019, and as Senior Editor of that site from 2019-2022. She currently writes about film for outlets like  Vulture, Rolling Stone, Indiewire, Polygon , and  RogerEbert.com.

Now playing

Asphalt City

Glenn kenny.

Sleeping Dogs

Brian tallerico.

The American Society of Magical Negroes

Robert daniels.

Love Lies Bleeding

Peter Sobczynski

We Were the Lucky Ones

Film credits.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Rated R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language.

Lily Sullivan as Beth

Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie

Morgan Davies as Danny

Nell Fisher as Kassie

Gabrielle Echols as Bridget

Mia Challis as Jessica

Jayden Daniels as Gabriel

Tai Wano as Scott

Billy Reynolds-McCarthy as Jake

Nedim Jahić as Ben

Cinematographer

• Dave Garbett
• Stephen McKeon

Latest blog posts

Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of Our Managing Editor Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com

An Incorrect Image Of Ourselves: Mike Flanagan on the Tenth Anniversary of Oculus

Ned Benson, Lucy Boynton, and Justin H. Min Want to Play The Greatest Hits for You

Until It’s Too Late: Bertrand Bonello on The Beast

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Explaining the News to Our Kids

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Evil dead rise, common sense media reviewers.

Kids in peril, extreme gore in horror series' fifth entry.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Perhaps the only real message here is a classic on

Auntie Beth is depicted as a troubled soul who mak

The cast is women-led, with two grown sisters and

Children/kids in peril. Countless gallons of blood

Drawings of female breasts depicted in Book of the

Strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "t-ts," "

Brief drinking (beer), cigarette smoking.

Parents need to know that Evil Dead Rise is the fifth entry in the classic horror franchise. It tells a new story with some references to the earlier movies. It's over-the-top gory, with children in peril as well as violence against women, but its sheer creativity is likely to entertain mature horror hounds…

Positive Messages

Perhaps the only real message here is a classic one, a warning about meddling in forces you don't understand. The punishment for that here is swift and merciless.

Positive Role Models

Auntie Beth is depicted as a troubled soul who makes one mistake or poor choice after another. But when she's called upon to defend her family, she steps up, showing courage and strength, if also employing violence.

Diverse Representations

The cast is women-led, with two grown sisters and three kids (two girls and one boy). The neighbors include Gabriel (Jayden Daniels, born in New Zealand and of Maori descent) and two younger boys who appear to be related to him (both non-White, the younger also born in New Zealand). One other neighbor is an older White man. Two more White women and one White man appear in the prologue and epilogue.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Children/kids in peril. Countless gallons of blood: An elevator fills up nearly to the top with blood. Characters possessed by demons. Deaths, gory corpses. Scary monster, plus icky, gooshy "creation of monster" noises. Shotgun. Possessed character's leg shot off. Character's scalp ripped from head, dripping blood. Severed head. Face torn up by drone blades. Vomiting liquids of various colors, types, viscosity, volume, etc. Black goop oozing from character's nose, eyes. Vomiting maggots. Intense, gory, unsettling drawings shown in Book of the Dead . Evil force viciously attacks woman, throwing her against wall, wrapping steel cables around her body, breaking limbs, etc. Woman and child survive an elevator crash. Teen threatened with tattoo needle to eye, cheek sliced open. Character's eyeball chewed off, spit out, swallowed by other character. Child thrown against wall, killed. Person's neck sliced open. Character stabbed in hand with shard of glass. Teen stabbed in arm. Brutal finale involving a wood chipper and a chainsaw. Possessed character chews on glass. Possessed character stabbed through head with wooden spike. Possessed character stabbed through nose with scissors. Possessed character stabbed in stomach with knife. Possessed character on fire. Characters completely covered, soaked in blood. Young girl falls, nose bleeds. Scary convulsing. Bleeding wounds. Jump scares. Choking. Earthquake.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Drawings of female breasts depicted in Book of the Dead .

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "t-ts," "c--t," "ass," "bastard," "oh my God," "hell," "slut," "screw."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Evil Dead Rise is the fifth entry in the classic horror franchise . It tells a new story with some references to the earlier movies. It's over-the-top gory, with children in peril as well as violence against women, but its sheer creativity is likely to entertain mature horror hounds who can handle the relentlessly graphic content. It has gallons of blood, death, bleeding wounds, stabbings, possessed characters, a shotgun, a scalp being ripped off, and a severed head. An eyeball is chewed off, spit out, and swallowed. There's neck-slicing; a chainsaw and a wood-chipper; unsettling, intense drawings; vomiting and/or dripping liquids of various colors, types, viscosity, volume, etc.; and that's not all. Infrequent but strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "t-ts," "c--t," "ass," "bastard," and "oh my God." Characters drink and smoke briefly, and there are depictions of women's breasts in the Book of the Dead . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (19)

Based on 8 parent reviews

Great if you can handle scares!

What's the story.

In EVIL DEAD RISE, Ellie ( Alyssa Sutherland ) is a newly single mom living in a dilapidated apartment building (soon to be condemned) with her three children: budding teen deejay Danny (Morgan Davies), activist Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and young Kassie (Nell Fisher). After getting some alarming news, Ellie's errant sister, Beth ( Lily Sullivan ), shows up unexpectedly. Not long after, an earthquake rocks the building, and Danny discovers an opening that leads to the old bank that stood on the site before the apartment building went up. He uncovers an old book and a few vinyl records. The book is filled with horrific images, and the records contain some kind of incantation that unleashes a horrible evil force. Soon Ellie is possessed and trying to kill her own family. It's up to Beth to protect her nieces and nephew from the unpredictable and chaotic force.

Is It Any Good?

This fifth entry in the classic horror franchise unfortunately relies on kids in peril, but it ramps up the terror with its great use of creepy settings, potent characters, and extreme gore effects. Written and directed by Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin (of the creepy 2019 horror movie The Hole in the Ground ), Evil Dead Rise starts confidently, with an excellent joke involving camerawork and a teasing prologue. Then the main story, set on the 13th floor of a truly impressive high-rise apartment building, makes full use of its physical space. Inside, the family apartment is cozy, full of art projects, but the hallways, elevators, and underground garage are all ominous, with stark, flickering lights and a sense of decay. (One sequence, shot entirely through the peephole in the front door, is inspired.)

The movie also takes time to set up its characters in a fully rounded way, upping viewers' emotional involvement. References to the earlier classics are handled slyly, both as a gift to fans and as a way of suggesting the eternal, ongoing quality of this brand of evil. The fact that the movie places children in danger -- especially Kassie, who, in real life, is only 11 -- creates a slight, unpleasant distraction from fully enjoying the wild ride, but overall Evil Dead Rise will make fans say "groovy."

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Evil Dead Rise 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the inclusion of teens and kids in this story change the way viewers might experience it?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of horror movies ? Why do people sometimes like to be scared?

Why has this franchise endured? What's interesting about its "evil force"?

Is Beth a sympathetic character? Is she heroic? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 21, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : June 27, 2023
• Cast : Lily Sullivan , Alyssa Sutherland , Morgan Davies
• Director : Lee Cronin
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Transgender actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Horror
• Topics : Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires
• Run time : 97 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language
• Last updated : July 21, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Ash vs. Evil Dead

The Cabin in the Woods

Best Horror Movies

Movie monsters, related topics.

• Monsters, Ghosts, and Vampires

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Evil Dead Rise Review

Evil Dead Rise opens in theaters on April 21.

Writing and directing a sequel to a beloved horror franchise is no cakewalk, despite how easy Lee Cronin makes it look with Evil Dead Rise. His continuation of the iconic series about Deadites and boomsticks is as vicious as Fede Alvarez's stupendously malevolent 2013 remake/sequel, opens the door for future entries to explore the lore in exciting ways, and owns its place in the series as a standalone horror bombshell. Cronin's ability to make signature Evil Dead staples his own (like the whooshy "Demon Vision" camera zooms made famous by Raimi) makes Rise its own three-headed beast. It's aggressively scary, it's sickly hilarious, and it's a stone-cold killer.

Rise finds a comfortable middle ground between 2013's rip-your-heart-out Evil Dead and Sam Raimi's more humorous trilogy of sequels. Cronin's special effects team challenges the whole series’ nastiest mutilation scenes with gnarly practical effects as swallowed glass protrudes from bodies or elevators gush waves of blood. Rise somehow keeps up with Fede Alvarez's reported 70,000 gallons of blood used in 2013's Evil Dead while keying into a more heartfelt, yet still traumatic battle against Deadites that reclaims some of Raimi's comedy chops, and uses that dark humor to contrast the darkest plunges.

Alyssa Sutherland maniacally teases victims as single mother Ellie, our new patient zero Deadite. After her brilliant transformation into this hellish, screeching vessel of evil, she manipulates her motherly playtime voice as a sick trick to mock whatever flickers of her soul still exist. Sutherland spews a handful of funny-yet-freaky lines like "Mommy's with the maggots now!" that hit even harder when chased by a nightmarish rotten smile. She puts on a Deadite acting showcase by enduring squeam-inducing body horror while cackling madly around discarded corpses.

Rise isn't as comedy-forward as Evil Dead II, though, and the setup is genuinely unsettling. Cronin's newly introduced Necronomicon, which is latched by jagged teeth like a venus fly trap, unleashes the same merciless Deadite obscenities on Ellie's three children and her visiting sister Beth. Neighbors stuck on the same floor as Ellie's apartment add themselves as body count fodder to keep the slayings plentiful, but it's her family who withstands the most physical, psychological, and surreal attacks that gorily weaponize everything from cheese graters to sharpened staffs with baby doll heads crafted by littlest daughters ("Staffanie" will be a fan-favorite prop). Lily Sullivan plays Beth as a strong hero to Ellie's Deadite villain, and together with Morgan Davies as DJ-in-training Danny, Gabrielle Echols as free-spirited protestor Bridget, and Nell Fisher as teeny-tiny Kassie they endure trials with performances that bravely meet any moment: pure fear, familial loss, and wherever the story veers.

What's the best Evil Dead (not including Rise)?

Cronin doesn't lose any of the ruthless Necronomicon action by leaving isolated woodland settings for a cluttered Los Angeles apartment complex. Much like how Scream VI uses New York City as a fresh metropolitan backdrop for familiar Ghostface assaults, Rise translates signature Deadite brutality to the claustrophobic confines of a boxy rental with just a few rooms. Instead of roads or bridges becoming unusable, the damaged building becomes a death trap of crumbled stairwells, broken elevators, and exposed wires that look like tree vines – that’s clearly a nod at a recognizable possession from Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Evil Dead (2013). Cronin's clever and precise about the ways he honors imagery from prior films without outright replication, as he dominates the challenge of problem-solving how the Necronomicon's demonic curse would wreak havoc in a more populated location.

As a standalone horror movie, Rise brings the thunder with an array of depraved Deadite extremes that ensure no scene allows us to catch our breath. When Ellie's inside her apartment, she's crawling out of vents with homage paid to the Hereditary wall scare or bounding around the apartment giddily trying to slaughter her loved ones. When she's locked outside, we watch through the front door's peephole as the possessed mamma dispatches floormates like she's out for a Tuesday stroll. Cronin keeps the pedal pressed hard as bodies eject all sorts of colored fluids or gallons upon gallons of blood pour from fresh wounds, all while Ellie does the Necronomicon's bidding with a joyful skip in her step. Rise hardly relents as the ferocity of unspeakable violence only becomes gorier and more graphic – and that's even before Cronin throttles into a third act that births a brand-new canon “final boss” that highlights the morbid imagination this franchise encourages.

16 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Evil Dead

When Rise stumbles it’s with minor storytelling choices, like introducing Beth as an expecting mother (Cronin borrows some moody motherhood tension from his first film, The Hole in the Ground) and religious symbolism that tees up this new Necronomicon. It's not that either aspect fails, but both feel underserved once the familiar Evil Deadiness kicks into gear and heads start rolling.

Those unserious dings aside, Rise delivers everything Evil Dead fans will want and more. Cronin tosses in plenty of Easter eggs on pizza boxes and tree-cutter vans parked in garages as tokens to those who worship Ash Williams, but does his best to veer Rise away from being "just another Evil Dead," with minimal hiccups. What you expect from an Evil Dead movie is delivered through chewed-up carnage, spit-out flesh chunks, and demonic excess that pushes the franchise forward with an attitude of reinvention for future decades of creative Evil Dead supremacy.

Any way you slice this sticky-gooey-bloody charge into the next chapter of Evil Dead storytelling, it's a success. Evil Dead Rise is a fantastic blend of franchise adoration, fresh storytelling, and all-out horror entertainment. Lee Cronin delivers an Evil Dead film that's disgustingly slathered in gory bits and offers the fun-loving vibes. Whatever stumbles there are while developing newer Necronomicon lore or leaning into motherhood themes barely break its momentum, as performances hold strong through thick blood eruptions and thinner moments of storytelling (which are few and far between). Rise plays the hits, takes risks that pay off, and leaves us salivating for more — everything an Evil Dead sequel should.

More Reviews by Matt Donato

Ign recommends.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Evil Dead Rise review – solid horror reboot brings the gore

A well-made new chapter in Sam Raimi’s splatter series delivers some impressively nasty violence but fails to leave much of a lasting impression

T here was a surprisingly straight face attached to 2013’s bracingly nasty Evil Dead reboot, a surprise given both the knockabout humour of Sam Raimi’s original films and the genre landscape at the time. A visceral demonic body horror performed without a knowing wink and with a decent budget was not exactly run-of-the-mill back then and isn’t exactly commonplace now, despite the genre’s ever-increasing churn, and could explain why its robust box office performance didn’t immediately translate to more Evil outings.

A decade later at a time when dead franchises are coming back to life with more gusto than arguably ever before, Evil Dead Rise is an inevitable resurrection, following on from recent revivals of Scream, Hellraiser and Halloween and before we see more of The Exorcist , The Thing and Friday the 13th . Originally slated for an HBO Max premiere, it’s been wisely upgraded to a theatrical release, smart because of the genre’s consistent theatrical success and deserving because, unlike so many other straight-to-streaming productions, it looks and feels like a real movie. Irish writer-director Lee Cronin, whose debut, The Hole in the Ground , received polite acclaim back in 2019, has made an impressive leap to studio fare and while his film doesn’t have quite the horrifying impact of the last installment, it’s a solid stab.

Like his last film and for the first time within the Evil Dead series, Cronin focuses on a family unit: Beth (Lily Sullivan), sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Ellie’s three kids. Beth is taking a break from life on the road to visit them, grappling with an unwanted pregnancy while Ellie deals with a recent break-up. But family troubles are soon made insignificant when an earthquake releases a familiar cursed book and a violent struggle to stay alive ensues.

An Evil Dead film is known for a formula so set that it served as the most obvious inspiration for Drew Goddard’s fun-poking comedy The Cabin in the Woods: a group of youths experience hell when they head to … a cabin in the woods. Cronin starts off with a nod to this, a cold open showing just that but then rewinds a day and takes us to a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building in LA, something of a challenge as a writer trying to create believable constraints for a survival horror. Why wouldn’t they just … leave? His script does a decent enough job at explaining that away – the building is in a state of disrepair and so the earthquake manages to easily affect the elevator and stairs – although given the extremity of the situation (mum turns into masochistic demon early on), one wonders if they could have tried a little harder to escape.

As visually sleek as the film looks, and in the flattened world of cheaply cobbled together streaming content, it really does look rather pretty, Cronin never quite manages to create enough of the claustrophobic suspense such a setup requires. It’s all entertainingly deranged and mercifully brief but we’re never lured from the back to the edge of our seat by any of his frantic set pieces. There’s more than enough cutting and slashing and decapitating for the gorehounds and at times the violence can be inventively nasty but it’s also a little too other for it to cut that deep, a little too fantastical for any injury to feel like it’s happening to a body we can recognise as human. While the last film toyed with the theme of addiction, it came out before the horror genre at large had been infected by the obsession with making every story, no matter the fit, really about something more substantive (usually trauma ). Cronin’s follow-up is loosely about motherhood, and in an ultimately, and I believe unintentionally, sort of pro-life way, but it feels as though he’s merely including it in an almost obligatory manner, a nod to where we’re at right now, but without the heavy hand that so many other horror films have recently employed. He’s far more concerned with seeing how much blood he can use in one movie ( apparently more than 1,500 gallons ). Sullivan and Sutherland are committed as the good and bad sisters although Cronin’s script requires the former to sell some eye-rollingly dim-witted decisions, one involving a pair of headphones at a time of emergency that would be a struggle for even Meryl Streep to convince us.

Evil Dead Rise is a decent little splatter movie which contains just about enough to justify the franchise resurrection although perhaps not quite enough to demand that much more of it. For all of its gristle, we’re left very little to chew on.

Evil Dead Rise is now showing in the US and UK

• Horror films

Most viewed

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Civil War Link to Civil War
• Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
• The First Omen Link to The First Omen

New TV Tonight

• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Conan O'Brien Must Go: Season 1
• Our Living World: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• The Spiderwick Chronicles: Season 1
• Orlando Bloom: To the Edge: Season 1
• The Circle: Season 6
• Dinner with the Parents: Season 1
• Jane: Season 2

Most Popular TV on RT

• Fallout: Season 1
• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• Parasyte: The Grey: Season 1
• Sugar: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Franklin: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• The Sympathizer: Season 1 Link to The Sympathizer: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming

30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

20 Special Presentations and Guest Appearances to Check Out at the 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival

Weekend Box Office Results: Civil War Earns Highest Opening Weekend for A24

• Trending on RT
• Play Movie Trivia

Evil Dead Rise Reviews

Evil Dead Rise is certainly a throw back to the good old school style of horror and the result is a film that delivers what horror fans have been calling out for – good old-fashioned gore within a creative story.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2023

…whatever this used to be, it’s deader than dead now…

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 26, 2023

Evil Dead Rise is sleekly modern, emotionally gripping, and absolutely brutal, gory and appalling, but still fun. Cronin goes there and goes all the way.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

This is an enormously fun thing to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 12, 2023

If you'd told me and my friends as we were watching that grainy Thorn EMI Evil Dead videotape that not only would the franchise continue into the 21st century, but it'd actually be thriving, we'd have pelted you with Cool Ranch Doritos.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 8, 2023

The action in Lee Cronin’s film moves from the ubiquitous cabin in the woods to an urban setting without losing any of the blood, guts, gore or giggles along the way

Full Review | Aug 27, 2023

Evil Dead Rise packs everything I love about Evil Dead: Grotesque kills blended together with dark humor. I loved every minute of it.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

It did a thing that a lot of franchises that get rezooted don't get to do. Which is have fun while also nodding to the past. Because a lot of them get stuck nodding.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2023

Evil Dead Rise is as perfect of an Evil Dead movie you can get in todays climate. A definite improvement over the 2013 re-imagining.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 1, 2023

It's a strong entry in a strong franchise. I hope Raimi does the next one.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 28, 2023

Evil Dead Rise makes an already-solid horror franchise even stronger and introduces fresh, demented nightmares to the psyche. As the blood flows, the fun seems to have only begun.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Just go with the flow and you’ll be rewarded with one of the most sanguinary and gory films in the whole franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2023

Evil Dead Rise left me wanting more Surely an awesome time in a lot of ways! specifically the third act which goes HARD, but a lot of the film just didn’t give me that magic feeling that the rest of the franchise has

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 22, 2023

While Evil Dead Rise definitely knows the series it's in, it's no mere exercise in blasting expected targets.

Full Review | Jul 22, 2023

Evil Dead Rise retains just enough of the core elements from the original, a touch of the extravagant excess from the previous one, and an over-the-top, devil-may-care attitude that would make PG-13 horror films look like kids' movies

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

Evil Dead Rise doesn’t necessarily add anything new or exciting to the formula, but it does deliver the bloody chaos that fans have come to expect from the franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 14, 2023

Evil Dead Rise doesn’t add much that’s new to the franchise, but it does deliver on entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 12, 2023

Remember: Magical incantation is best left to the experts, and they died a long time ago.

Full Review | Jul 12, 2023

Ten great minutes followed by an hour and a half of moderate thrills doesn't exactly a must-see film make. Still, it's interesting to see the franchise's magic so perfectly encapsulated, and then immediately tossed away.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2023

The biggest problem with Evil Dead Rise is that it’s critically missing the sense of fun that powered the original trilogy.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 5, 2023

Evil Dead Rise Review

Evil Dead Rise

For four decades, the Evil Dead has been the twisted Teddy Bear’s Picnic of horror — a black-humoured, blood-soaked saga in which young people go down to the woods one day, and find themselves in for a big surprise. Writer-director Lee Cronin ’s new addition to the franchise breaks that tradition like a bone. Where previously all hell would break loose in the bowels of creaky cabins, deep in the moonlit woodlands of rural America, this fifth entry in the big-screen Evil Dead canon redirects its flesh-devouring demons to inner-city LA. Not everyone was sold on the move when the film’s first trailer dropped late last year. Would an Evil Dead movie still feel like an Evil Dead movie, some fans worried, without the isolation that powered past instalments? Were Cronin, plus producers Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell , in danger of taking a chainsaw to the very thing that made the original Evil Dead groovy?

The answer, it turns out, is an emphatic, “Hell, no.” Evil Dead Rise — in which two estranged sisters, Beth ( Lily Sullivan ) and Ellie ( Alyssa Sutherland ), reunite just in time for an ancient Sumerian text to doom them and their entire family — is a rare horror sequel-cum-reboot that refreshes and reinvents rather than simply retreading. Yes, the film replicates the schlocky spirit of Sam Raimi’s 1981 original , blurring the line between horror and humour by dropping 6,500 litres of blood on that line and scorching the ground on which it’s drawn. Yes, it’s a story that once again begins with unwitting teens accidentally unearthing a copy of the ‘Necronomicon Ex-Mortis’ — an unholy tome that summons screaming hordes of the damned and wreaks havoc every time it’s opened, like Prince Harry’s memoir. And yes, it features a spirited hero rising to the occasion, hacking through Deadites like there’s no tomorrow, wielding a familiar weapon or two in the process.

Packs more inventive scares than you could shake an Ash Williams boomstick at.

But Evil Dead Rise also takes the series to exciting new places beyond just its new digs in La La Land. Cronin — a vital new voice in horror, as anyone who saw his 2019 chiller The Hole In The Ground can attest — is a filmmaker who thrives on finding fresh ways to fright, and his second feature film packs more inventive scares than you could shake an Ash Williams boomstick at. Each scene expertly exploits the claustrophobic domestic environment its story unfolds in, leading to set-pieces involving various cooking utensils that’ll have you shuddering at the sight of your cheese-grater next time you open up your kitchen drawer. And prepare for your step count to go through the roof in the weeks following your first viewing of this movie: a truly gruesome scene trapping viewers inside an elevator with an unseen, earring-snatching demon means you’ll probably be taking the stairs for the foreseeable.

The character work in Evil Dead Rise is on a par with the series’ best, with Beth and Ellie each battling their own personal demons long before any actual demons awake. But that’s not the main draw in this series, and Cronin knows it. That honour belongs to the Deadites, the movie’s hideous, shit-talking ghouls, who are magnificently mischievous and malevolent here. Evil, you see, doesn’t just rise in this movie, whatever the title may promise. Instead, it teases and torments. It decapitates and disfigures. It crawls under the skin of the film’s characters and audience alike, and chews them up like glass between molars, spitting you out in a bloody mess.

Is the film perfect? Not quite. Story beats are often detectable from a mile away — it’s how it happens rather than what happens that propels Cronin’s screenplay — and the film’s one-apartment setting arguably hinders as much as it helps, keeping the tension cranked high but leaving the movie feeling small in scale after the fact. But these quibbles are exactly that, especially given the context around this revival of one of horror’s most beloved treasures. It’s been a long time since the Evil Dead last graced the big screen, and an even longer time since a tale that truly bottled the brutal magic of the original trilogy. A 2013 reboot titled Evil Dead , produced by Raimi and directed by Fede Álvarez, was an admirable attempt that had everything except the series’ lashings of zany humour. And the well-received but recently cancelled Ash Vs Evil Dead never left the confines of its small-screen home. In Evil Dead Rise , the Evil Dead franchise has gorily got its groove back.

Related Articles

Movies | 15 03 2023

Movies | 14 03 2023

Movies | 13 03 2023

Movies | 05 01 2023

Movies | 04 01 2023

Movies | 19 12 2022

‘Evil Dead Rise’ Review: More Scary Stuff as Supernatural Creatures Once Again Play by the Book

When the lights go out, the body count mounts in Lee Cronin’s effective urban nightmare.

By Joe Leydon

Film Critic

• ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ Review: Passable Historical Drama Imagines an Early Adventure of the Legendary Frontiersman 1 month ago
• ‘Accidental Texan’ Review: Amiably Old-Fashioned Dramedy Showcases Appealing Performance by Thomas Haden Church 1 month ago
• ‘Outlaw Posse’ Review: Mario Van Peebles’ Uneven but Diverting Mix of Blaxploitation and Spaghetti Western Tropes 2 months ago

Just a skosh more than a decade after Fede Alvarez’s carnage-crammed “Evil Dead” reboot jump-started the horror franchise spawned by Sam Raimi’s low-budget 1981 cult favorite, writer-director Lee Cronin has delivered his own imaginatively scary take on the “Book of the Dead” mythos with “ Evil Dead Rise .” A kinda-sorta sequel, it offers incontrovertible evidence that predatory and possessive bogeymen are just as frightful when their hunting ground shifts from a cabin in a dark corner of the woods to a gone-to-seed apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.   

Popular on Variety

Naturally, there’s a power outage that requires the apartment to be dimly lit with candles and flashlights — and enables Cronin to spring at least two shamelessly efficient jump scares by framing characters in the foreground blissfully unaware of bad things popping up in the background. In keeping with “Evil Dead” tradition, there’s also an abundance of bloody mayhem that increases exponentially until a hugely satisfying and splatterific climax. And yes, to answer the inevitable question: A chainsaw figures into the mix, as does the iconic phrase “Dead by dawn!” 

“Evil Dead Rises” — which, like Alvarez’s “Evil Dead,” premiered to an extremely receptive audience at SXSW — may well be a one-off for all parties involved. Still, Sullivan and Sutherland handily establish their scream queen bona fides, so it shouldn’t be surprising if we see both actors making return appearances in the horror genre. Nor should it be surprising if we don’t have to wait another decade before the franchise carries on.

Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (Headliners), March 15, 2023. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 96 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of a New Line Cinema/Renaissance Pictures presentation of a Pacific Renaissance, Wild Atlantic Pictures production. Producer: Rob Tapert. Executive producers: Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, John Keville, Macdara Kelleher, Richard Brener, Dave Neustadter, Romel Adam, Victoria Palmeri.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Lee Cronin. Camera: Dave Garbett. Editor: Bryan Shaw. Music: Stephen McKeon.
• With: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher.

More From Our Brands

Trump reportedly nods off while attending first day of criminal trial, nascar legend tony stewart relists his 415-acre indiana ranch for $22.5 million, angel reese gets drafted 7th by wnba’s chicago sky, be tough on dirt but gentle on your body with the best soaps for sensitive skin, the ncis-verse’s 1,000th episode: how many easter eggs did you find, verify it's you, please log in.

Filed under:

Evil Dead Rise pours pure, unhinged glee into a horror movie made for sickos, by sickos

With all the fun that implies

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Evil Dead Rise pours pure, unhinged glee into a horror movie made for sickos, by sickos

This review of Evil Dead Rise was initially published after the movie’s SXSW debut. It has been updated and republished for the film’s public theatrical release.

In terms of sheer scare factor, your mileage may vary with Evil Dead Rise . This spinoff of Sam Raimi’s iconic franchise upholds the manic glee of Sam Raimi’s original 1980s Evil Dead movies, but the violence falls somewhere between Fede Álvarez’s 2013 remake and Raimi’s comedy-heavy Evil Dead 2 . The kills are absolutely brutal and gnarly, the emphasis on child endangerment gives the action a new edge, and the tone is generally bleak and cruel.

And yet it still finds moments of levity. Though it’s far from a comedy, there are a lot of laughs in Evil Dead Rise — like a gag about an eyeball getting ripped out, then landing on someone’s mouth. Writer-director Lee Cronin has a solid handle on the scale between scary and funny, servicing both without undermining either. This is a film best seen with a massive horror-loving audience that takes the gruesome horror along with the silly jokes, that screams and cheers along with the action.

Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun — and worth fitting into your schedule. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch .

A big part of why this movie’s more straightforward horrific take works is the change of formula. Instead of centering on victims in a cabin in the woods, it moves to the big city, where it follows a family being tormented by Deadites , the Evil Dead movies’ signature antagonists. There is no army of the undead here: Like the 1981 original, this film operates on a smaller scale — in this case, one Deadite. It plays more like a possession story than what modern moviegoers might expect from a “zombie movie.”

The role of the villain falls to Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie, a mother of three who winds up on the receiving end of a demonic possession after one of her kids — or as she puts it, her “titty-sucking parasite” — finds the Book of the Dead . Soon enough, she turns on her own children, trying to horrifically murder them in the worst ways possible using every tool in the house. (A cheese grater becomes a star.)

On the other end is Beth (Lily Sullivan), Ellie’s sister, who returns home when she freaks out over an unexpected positive pregnancy test. Once at the apartment, she’s forced to fight her own sister as everyone in her family turns on each other. Sullivan is fantastic, with Cronin giving her depth through hints of past trauma that make the character more rounded without taking away from the dumb fun of an Evil Dead movie. This isn’t “elevated horror” — don’t expect an A24 horror film about exploring grief — but the family aspect creates a dynamic with heavier emotions that connect viewers to the characters while still prioritizing the gross-out scares.

Once Ellie is possessed, the film catches its second wind and goes fully off the rails in the best way. Ellie immediately turns on her family, threatening, scaring, and hunting them, but also insulting them. At the same time, even Deadite Ellie still loves her children, and she often begs to be stopped.

Cronin uses his location to its maximum potential. Everyday objects take on new and more sinister vibes as they make their way to the characters. There’s a feeling of claustrophobia throughout the film, with characters given little chance to escape the apartment. Cronin and his team have a clear love for practical effects, seen in the sheer amount of tactile, physical blood on screen. He also has a love for the Evil Dead movies: Cronin packs the script and screen with as many visual references and homages to the original Sam Raimi films as he can, overloading the film with fan service, from iconic weapons to lines of dialogue and even the choices of shots.

Evil Dead Rise is a movie made by sickos for sickos. It’s a fantastic update to the iconic franchise, filled with humor but bringing in Álvarez’s taste for the disgusting and upsetting. The refreshing change in scenery and cast, plus Sutherland’s breakout performance, proves this undead franchise still has a lot of life and fight in it.

At 97 lively minutes, it does feel like it’s over almost as soon as it begins. It’s a perfect onboarding movie for newer audiences who’ve never seen an Evil Dead movie, but for longtime fans, it breathes new air into a classic horror-comedy franchise, mixing Raimi’s old-school approach with the new school of gruesome horror. It proves there’s still a lot to color in within the old dead-lines.

Evil Dead Rise is in theaters now.

Five Nights at Freddy 2 hitting the big screen next year

Horror fishing game dredge being adapted for live-action movie, american horror story: delicate is back to do what ahs does best, loading comments....

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘evil dead rise’ review: a wonderfully sick new installment in the beloved horror franchise.

In the latest entry in Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell's series, a mother and her children must fight the demonic forces in their apartment.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Email
• Show additional share options
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Pinit
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Tumblr
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Print
• Share this article on Comment

In Evil Dead Rise , Lee Cronin shows the depth of his twisted mind and a commitment to the spirit of Sam Raimi’s franchise.

Evil Dead Rise

Related stories, 'evil dead rise' filmmaker lee cronin launches doppelgängers banner, signs first-look with new line (exclusive), rachel sennott-starrer 'i used to be funny' lands at utopia (exclusive).

In some ways, Evil Dead Rise is as much an homage as it is a corrective to Raimi’s original low-budget treat, which has been called out for its shallow and misogynistic treatment of women. They are not only widely considered underwritten, but also endure the most sadistic scenes. The women who populate Cronin’s film don’t suffer any less at the hands of the demonic spirits, but at least they have the chance to lead the charge in their own salvation.

Fans of the franchise can guess what happens when an earthquake reveals an underground tomb beneath Ellie’s soon-to-be-demolished building. Curiosity overtakes her kids, whom she sent out to get pizza. Danny is especially keen on exploring the mysterious lockers and dusty artifacts in the cavern. Against his sister Bridget’s protests, the audiophile grabs a few records and the Necronomicon , that familiar flesh-bound book. Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) uses the full capacities of FX to elevate almost every element of Evil Dead , including the book, which contains pages of blood-inked drawings and whose incantations are only revealed with the accompanying vinyl discs.   

Cronin sets his version of Evil Dead in in Ellie’s city apartment, creating a more claustrophobic, chamber drama-esque horror. His style — a destabilizing mix of camera tilts and zooms, a color palette dominated by an eerie blend of navy, berry, cobalt and indigo — conjures an atmosphere of fear and distrust. There’s also a haunting, staccato experimentation with the sound design (by Peter Albrechtsen), which seesaws between brash noises and complete silence.

A possessed Ellie drags herself back to the apartment, her steps creating menacing thuds, and heads straight into the kitchen, where she methodically cracks eggs into a cast iron skillet. Cronin’s screenplay is light on character development, but there’s a deep interest — in the tradition of Rosemary’s Baby or the more recent Huesera — in teasing out the terrors of motherhood. The satanic spirits inside Ellie manipulate the bond between mother and children to trick Danny, Bridget and Kassie. Cooking, singing lullabies and bath time all adopt sinister undertones because of Sutherland’s limber and frightening performance.

Cronin’s skilled direction extends beyond his actors. It wouldn’t be an Evil Dead installment without maximum gore and blood, and the director doesn’t disappoint. He ratchets up tension by making each act of torture more inspired than the last. Cookware and other kitchen finds become perverse tools for maiming flesh and wreaking havoc. Each room in the apartment teeters between safe haven and battleground. Blood is everywhere — penetrating the walls of an elevator and dripping from various orifices. Evil Dead Rise is unrelenting in this way, even with the touches of pressure-alleviating humor. Cronin’s film is a wonderfully sick series entry, deftly calibrated to satisfy fans and traumatize the uninitiated.

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Ron thompson, actor in ‘no place to be somebody’ and ‘american pop,’ dies at 83, ‘jurassic world’ eyes ‘wicked’ star jonathan bailey for lead, ‘deadpool & wolverine’ plotting (bleeped) in-theater spot asking people to silence cellphones, original ‘blair witch’ team reacts to not being involved in new movie: “it’s bittersweet”, ‘civil war’ sound editor on balancing “oppressive” battle noise with abrupt silence, keanu reeves joins ‘sonic 3’ as shadow.

'Evil Dead Rise' Review: Lee Cronin Carves His Bloody Mark In Deadite History

While not as as revolutionary as the previous franchise installments, Evil Dead Rise is still one hell of a good time and an unmissable horror movie.

Few franchises can claim to have revolutionized cinema, but Sam Raimi’ s Evil Dead is definitely one of them, having pushed forward practical effects and given horror comedies the prestige they deserve. The franchise was also smart enough to reinvent itself at each new installment, keeping things fresh while staying true to its core values, gathering a faithful fan base over the decades. Written and directed by Lee Cronin , Evil Dead Rise understands what makes Evil Dead so beloved and delivers a horror movie that'll make any fan rejoice. What's even better is that Cronin's movie is also made for newcomers who have never followed the franchise, offering some bloody good fun that anyone can enjoy.

Evil Dead movies are always about a desperate fight for survival in confined spaces. Even when Raimi took the franchise out of the cabin in the woods for 1992’s Army of Darkness , Ash Williams' ( Bruce Campbell ) medieval adventure revolved around finding the right tools to defend a castle from a horde of undead. Cronin is well aware that Deadites thrive within set boundaries, so he spends the first arc of Evil Dead Rise carefully taking us through the different locations of the apartment building where the dead will wage war on the living. Each frame is also filled with small nods at the weapons that'll be used in the upcoming battles, teasing the bloody ways the Deadites will torture their victims for the following hour. Keen-eyed fans eager to find what horrors Cronin has hidden in Evil Dead Rise will rejoice to look at sharp objects and know how they'll be used. Even so, that doesn't take away from the movie's shock value as Cronin never shies away from showing flesh getting ripped in detail.

RELATED: Why 'Evil Dead Rise' Is the Franchise's Last Chance to Step Out of Bruce Campbell & Sam Raimi's Shadow

While the Evil Dead franchise has always been about blood, goo, and dismembered limbs, there's also a comedic levity to how Raimi approaches gore. For many decades, we thought Evil Dead movies could only work when leaning heavily on the funny side of the Deadite-killing business. That changed thanks to Fede Álvarez ’s Evil Dead , which reinvented the franchise in 2013 by using unrelenting violence capable of turning even the strongest of stomachs. Evil Dead Rise learns from this lesson and offers the best of both worlds. Like Álvarez, Cronin wants his Evil Dead experience to be as disturbing as possible. However, when organs are flying in the most unbelievable ways, he also knows how to laugh about the absurdity of the spectacle.

The main issue with this approach is that Evil Dead Rise only has a handful of funny scenes. As a result, they are too few to set the movie's tone. In addition, they can interrupt the flow of the nerve-wracking extravaganza Cronin has crafted. Fortunately, this pacing issue happens sporadically, and for most of its runtime, Evil Dead Rise delivers on its promise of good scares and brutal action. Still, its presence can be noticed and chips away at what could have been a perfect cinematic experience. That’s even more evident since Evil Dead Rise ’s practical effects are constantly being used to make the bloodiest moments of the movie look as real as possible. Some confrontations with Deadites are too heavily edited and feel like missed opportunities. However, most of the time, Evil Dead Rise focuses on open wounds and oozing perforations that are brought to life by a fabulous practical effects team. And it's just beautiful to see the most unnerving moments of Evil Dead Rise in ultrarealistic detail while our body flinches and our eyes are tempted to hide from the horrors. That would be reason enough to crown Evil Dead Rise as a worthy successor for Raimi’s franchise, but Cronin is still fortunate with a terrific cast.

The star of the show is Alyssa Sutherland 's Ellie, a single mother of three children who becomes a Deadite after a freaky accident. Once she's turned into a demon-possed undead, Sutherland metamorphoses into a grotesque creature that instills fear into our hearts but is still human enough to be disturbingly recognizable. That’s another staple in the Evil Dead franchise as Deadites mix the memories of its victims with terrifying threats to break the minds of those closest to the demons’ victims. They are pricks who enjoy playing with their food and pushing people to attack those they love the most. Sutherland is a phenomenal actress that steals every scene once she gets unleashed in Evil Dead Rise , and it’s delicious to watch the star having the time of her life while saying profanities and torturing children.

On the other side of the conflict, Ellie’s sister Beth ( Lily Sullivan ) must rise to the occasion and protect her nephew and nieces, Danny ( Morgan Davies ), Bridget ( Gabrielle Echols ), and Kassie ( Nell Fisher ). The presence of children usually makes horror movies more predictable, since most filmmakers are too scared of destroying innocence. However, no one is safe in Cronin's story, a fact that deserves to be praised on its own. It’s also worth mentioning Evil Dead Rise ’s young cast is being asked to engage in challenging scenes while drenched in fake blood, and they still deliver poignant performances that help to keep the movie grounded. Due to these high stakes, no other installment in the franchise packs the emotional punch of Evil Dead Rise .

Decapitated heads come and go, but what makes the Evil Dead franchise so enthralling are the human characters that are forced to become heroes. In a tight 97-minute runtime, Cronin makes us care for each member of Ellie's family, cheering for their success or sharing the pain of their failure. That’s a huge achievement for a horror movie, which helps Evil Dead Rise to carve its mark in the franchise’s immaculate history. Sure, there are some hiccups along the way, as Cronin doesn't always manage to balance the dark tone he wants to give his movie with the comical tradition of the Evil Dead franchise. Still, Evil Dead Rise 's scares and gore are so effective, and its cast so committed to the story, that it's easy to be completely enthralled by Cronin's movie.

Evil Dead Rise is in theaters starting April 21.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Evil Dead Rise’ Review: Mommy Issues

The matriarch of a family ends up demon-possessed in this blood-drenched entry in the long-running horror franchise.

By Jason Zinoman

The horror movie, a genre known for sparsely populated locales like cabins in the woods and outer space, has been spending more time in the city.

Some of the most creative scary movies of the past decade have taken place in an abandoned Detroit (“Barbarian,” “Don’t Breathe,” “It Follows”). In the recent “Scream,” Ghostface moved from the suburbs to the subway. And now the latest entry in the “Evil Dead” franchise spills swimming pools of blood mostly inside a dilapidated high-rise apartment in Los Angeles.

One might explain the rise of urban horror as working on fears rooted in rising crime or the pandemic’s emptying out of downtowns, but that focuses more on content than form. And the pumping heart of the “Evil Dead” movies has never been ideas, but aesthetics. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy made stylish Grand Guignol gore that evoked Jean-Luc Godard’s response to a question about why he used so much blood. “Not blood,” he corrected. “Red.”

Lee Cronin, who directed “Evil Dead Rise” with many more colors of bodily fluid, is a meticulous creator of stunning shots. His camera doesn’t move. It dances, shifting, spinning, occasionally knocked on its side like a running back in a collision. He avoids clichés like a face suddenly appearing in a mirror but finds new ways to scare with the reflection of an image. And the way he mixes the foreground and background is pleasingly disorienting. For him, clearly, the city offers a new palette. He does wonders with the warped view through a keyhole of an apartment. The trees that come alive and tie down victims in the original “Evil Dead” are replaced by rusty and aggressive wires from a rickety elevator.

As for the plot, who cares? As with every “Evil Dead,” a creepy book is found and demonic hell breaks loose. That’s all that matters. This time, the characters are not a group of friends but a family, including a tattoo-artist mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), her kids (Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher) and their chain saw-wielding aunt (Lily Sullivan). But this shift also doesn’t make that much of a difference. There are so many horror movies these days that dig deeper into the anxieties and fears of family and motherhood; though still, bravo to whoever came up with the tagline: “Mommy loves you to death.”

Character and story are secondary to an atmosphere of industrial gloom, clanking heaters, ambient neighbor noise and the clutter of families cramped together. There is a spectacular new monster at the end, and the most disturbing set pieces involve ordinary household objects like (gulp) a cheese grater.

The previous “Evil Dead” movie from a decade ago was a more direct reboot, while this one pays homage to the past, but not too much. It opens with the signature shot of the franchise, a racing camera, low to the ground, but this sets up not a scare, but a joke — one I won’t ruin, but that pokes fun at the original, breaks the fourth wall and announces a new day. And yet, with a few exceptions, largely from the performance of Sutherland, who captures some of the borscht belt swagger of Freddy Krueger, it’s the last moment of arch comedy.

With the original “Evil Dead” and particularly its sequel, Raimi didn’t just make splatter beautiful. He proved it could be hilarious. The two recent movies are far more grim. Even though there is an inherent absurdity to the excess on display, they seem less interested in the humor of horror. The absence of Bruce Campbell, the hammy protagonist of the original trilogy, is felt. Scary villains are a dime a dozen, but a funny hero? They’re hard to come by.

Evil Dead Rise Rated R for elevators of blood and sharp objects near eyeballs. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.

Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for The Times. As the paper’s first comedy critic, he has written the On Comedy column since 2011. More about Jason Zinoman

Inside the World of Comedy

Kevin Hart became the 25th comic  to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center.

The joke writers for awards shows like the Oscars are a corner of the showbiz work force that tends to remain in the shadows. The job requires skill, self-awareness and even diplomacy .

Comedians, no strangers to tackling difficult and taboo subjects with humor, are increasingly turning their attention to the climate crisis .

Delivering a deluge of hard jokes, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler tried stand-up for the first time as a double act, aiming directly for the nostalgic pleasure centers of their fans .

Dave Chappelle assumes we’re already offended in his new Netflix special , “The Dreamer,” which predictably includes trans and disabled jokes.

Was a scandal the best thing to happen to Hasan Minhaj ? It repositions him less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic.

Evil Dead Rise review: A return to bloody good fun for the demonic franchise

Director lee cronin pays homage to sam raimi’s groundbreaking evil dead trilogy while updating the basic concept.

It can be argued that 1981’s The Evil Dead , made on a shoestring budget when director Sam Raimi was barely 21, kicked off the 1980s boom in horror comedy, which would include Ghostbusters , Return Of The Living Dead , Re-Animator , The Stuff , Beetlejuice , Gremlins , and (in the early ’90s) Peter Jackson’s wonderful breakthrough film, Brain Dead (aka Dead Alive ) which could be considered the best of the lot. The Evil Dead also had a direct influence on a whole string of Hong Kong films, some involving hopping vampires and others more directly borrowing Raimi’s high-speed tracking shots and tree demons.

Related Content

Raimi’s original trilogy, which also featured Evil Dead 2 and its successor, Army Of Darkness , set a high bar for any director tasked with continuing the franchise, even with Raimi and original star Bruce Campbell serving as producers on the ensuing projects. Indeed the 2013 Evil Dead remake was a more or less humorless repeat of Raimi’s first feature, and it failed to measure up to its predecessors. But with Evil Dead Rise , the fifth film in the franchise, writer-director Lee Cronin puts the Evil Dead universe back on solid footing. His blood-drenched film is scarier, his characters are far more engaging, and he offers up an abundance of goofy comedy, though not the kind of Three Stooges goofy that Raimi increasingly indulged in during his trilogy.

The most noticeable difference with Evil Dead Rise compared to the previous films is the setting: After four outings in the woods, the body, as it were, of Evil Dead Rise takes place in a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. (There is a slightly distracting framing device that does have a cabin in the middle of nowhere.) As with the 2013 Evil Dead , there is no Ash in sight, not even a cameo from Campbell, who was the heart and soul of the franchise. So the new film feels more like a sequel to the remake than part of the canonical Raimi films.

The characters here are almost all women, with only one major male role. Beth (Lily Sullivan) is a rock ‘n’ roll techie, footloose and always on the road, frequently disparaged by her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), as a groupie. When Beth discovers she’s pregnant, she goes to visit Ellie, a mother of three already at a crisis in her life. Ellie’s husband has left her, her building is slated to be demolished, and she has limited resources to find a new place. She also resents Beth’s abdication of contact and responsibility in family problems.

When a brutal earthquake opens a hole in the building’s foundation, Ellie’s adolescent son Danny (Morgan Davies) finds—you guessed it!—the Necronomicon , a supernatural book whose spells unleash demons that are nearly impossible to vanquish, as well as some 78rpm recordings of an apparently demon-freeing chant. Danny has apparently never seen an Evil Dead movie, so he blithely plays the records. All hell breaks loose ... literally.

In short order, loving mother Ellie is possessed by a demon and starts attacking her own family. “I’m free from all you titty-sucking parasites,” she screeches. Then, in the tradition of evil high-rise movies ( Poltergeist 3 , for example), this not-tree demon has taken control of the building. As the woods conspired to trap the protagonists in a cabin in the earlier films, the hallways and elevators trap them even more effectively in their apartment. You can feel a reference to The Shining being set up with the elevator, and Cronin does not disappoint.

It’s hard to quantify, but the amount of fake blood spilled this time around certainly feels like a record for the franchise, which is quite an accomplishment. If you have even the slightest queasiness at the sight of gallons of spurting blood or outlandish mutilations or, toward the end, a grotesque multi-limbed, demonic hybrid of what were once characters we cared about ... you should definitely give this a pass. But for fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago.

Evil Dead Rises opens in theaters nationwide on April 21

Cinephile Corner

Movie Reviews, Rankings, Film News and More

Evil Dead Rise Movie Review: A Horror Movie Hit That Perfectly Reimagines the Sam Raimi Original

Evil dead rise is directed by lee cronin and stars lily sullivan and alyssa sutherland.

Review: Evil Dead Rise is the horror movie we’ve been waiting for so far in 2023. It’s daring, gory, mean, and funny in a way only the Evil Dead movies can be. Sam Raimi has to be pleased with how Lee Cronin pays homage to a handful of the classics while still carving his own path.

There aren’t many horror franchises able to reinvent themselves as often as Evil Dead does while still maintaining relevancy and quality. Maybe it’s because Sam Raimi holds his creation so close to his heart that only a select few are able to take on the premise, or maybe it’s because the premise seems simple and malleable enough to make nearly anything work. It can shoot for the downright zany and ludicrous with Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness , or it can strive to be like Lee Cronin’s newest spin Evil Dead Rise – a movie so sick and twisted that you can’t help but give it its dues by the time the credits roll.

Evil Dead Rise may not be the most talked about horror release coming in 2023, but it sure is the most unique and will surely garner a strong word-of-mouth from hardcore fans of the genre. Not just because it manages to pay some subtle (and not-so-subtle) homages to the old-school pillars of the genre, but because it also comes up with some of the most inventive scenes of body horror and spine-tingling chills that I’ve seen in a nightmarish flick in quite some time.

The story follows a pretty straightforward narrative, as do all Evil Dead entities. Instead of taking place in an isolated cabin, Evil Dead Rise sets its sights on an apartment complex close to shuttering for good. Because of poor infrastructure, little maintenance, and a heavy earthquake that rattles through in the first leg of the film, single mother Ellie ( Alyssa Sutherland ) and her three children are trapped floors above the lobby with no way to make it down except a flickering elevator.

Unfortunately for the family, the earthquake releases a powerful book into the environment that spells doom for many of those living in the apartment building. What follows is an audacious and increasingly sinister takeover by the forces let out by the opening of the Necronomicon (the same book that unleashes hell in past Evil Dead films).

It’s hard to pick where to set my sights first in a review of Evil Dead Rise because it’s such an assaultive movie on your senses. It combines gothic voiceovers for those possessed with brutally nasty kills to create one of the meaner and gnarlier movies in the franchise. I was truly gobsmacked by what director Lee Cronin got away with doing in this film – especially considering how frequently it’s being advertised across live television and social media. I have a feeling many cineplexes are going to have walkouts due to how gruesome and overwhelming it can be at times.

Evil Dead Rise also has some thoughtful ideas about broken families and those living on the margins (two themes that I routinely find fascinating and engaging in movies, horror or otherwise). Ellie and Beth are two sisters both struggling with the relationships they’ve made up to this point in their lives, and how they can be caretakers for others given their circumstances. Ellie has three children that all seem like the antithesis of each other, even if they get along relative to standard relationships between siblings.

The movie shifts in the second half to become more about Beth, who reveals her pregnancy and struggles with the idea of trying to raise a child when she’s unsure of her own life choices. Lily Sullivan gives a powerful and vulnerable performance as a lost soul reconnecting with past relationships before all hell breaks loose. She cares heavily for Ellie’s youngest daughter Kassie. The young girl is played by Nell Fisher, and although I can’t speak much about parenting or subjecting your kids to certain experiences at specific ages – but bold move by Nell’s parents to allow her to be in a film where she nearly drowns in blood! Gotta start them at a young age!

Reviews for Films like Evil Dead Rise (2023)

There are some great odes to previous horror titans like The Shining , Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Fargo (although obviously not horror), and many others. It wears its influences on its sleeves quite heavily, but not to a point where it is distracting. It carves out enough ideas and images to make Evil Dead Rise still feel shockingly original and refreshing. These images may or may not include an edible wine glass, a cheese grater, a pair of scissors, and one single eyeball.

I’m not sure where Evil Dead Rise will sit for me in terms of horror in 2023. I thought quite a bit about Barbarian during my screening for just how surprised I was that nearly everything was clicking for me. The movie has a great sense of pacing and confinement – nearly the entirety of Evil Dead Rise takes place in one apartment and in one night.

Everything about Evil Dead Rise feels perfectly crafted and fits snuggly with previous Evil Dead installments. Beth becomes a great successor to Bruce Campbell’s Ash, and the franchise seems to be in good hands with the creatives behind this new reimagining. If they do decide to move along with another movie, this is the type of reintroduction that gets me excited to see more.

Genre: Horror

Watch Evil Dead Rise on Max, Prime Video, and VOD

Join our newsletter here

Evil Dead Rise Movie Cast and Crew

Lily Sullivan as Beth

Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie

Morgan Davies as Danny

Nell Fisher as Kassie

Gabrielle Echols as Bridget

Director: Lee Cronin

Writer: Lee Cronin

Cinematography: Dave Garbett

Editor: Bryan Shaw

Composer: Stephen McKeon

Recent Horror Movie Reviews from Cinephile Corner

• The Exorcist Review: William Friedkin Redefines Horror with 1973 Classic Possession Movie
• Saw X Review: A Gory New Approach to Jigsaw
• Night Swim Movie Review: New Blumhouse Movie Lacks the Scares
• Lisa Frankenstein Movie Review: Diablo Cody Pens Drab Teenage Comedy, Elevated Only Slightly by Kathryn Newton as the Lead

1 thought on “ Evil Dead Rise Movie Review: A Horror Movie Hit That Perfectly Reimagines the Sam Raimi Original ”

• Pingback: Alliance Lately: Issue No. 74 – The Minnesota Film Critics Alliance

Comments are closed.

Movie Reviews

New Movies Classics Best New Movies All Reviews

About Us Newsletter Sign Up

Lists and Rankings

Director Rankings Best Movies of 2023 Best Movies of 2022 Best Movies of 2021 All Lists

Latest News Essays

Movie Genres

Action Adventure Animation Comedy Crime Documentary Drama Family History Holiday

Genres (cont.)

Horror Musical Mystery Romance Sci-Fi Sports Superhero Thriller War Western

Copyright © 2024 Cinephile Corner

Design by ThemesDNA.com

Review: Deadite Mommie Dearest is a scream in ‘Evil Dead Rise’

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Not many horror franchises can keep the red stuff spurting without getting dusty and stale as a pile of bones, but Sam Raimi’s rollicking “Evil Dead” series has spent the last 42 years reanimating itself with persistent aplomb. (See: 1981’s seminal “The Evil Dead,” 1987’s campier “Evil Dead II,” 1992’s horror-fantasy “Army of Darkness,” the grimly serious 2013 reboot and Starz’s giddily unserious “Ash vs. Evil Dead.” ) Even in its scalp-ripping scream of an opener, the new “Evil Dead Rise” makes a cheeky feint toward the familiar, so you’d be forgiven for expecting more of the same from the fright franchise that’s inspired countless imitators.

A swift change of scenery, however, smartly trades the original’s cabin in the woods setting, now an overdone genre staple, for a new one: a decaying Los Angeles Art Deco apartment tower, where estranged sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Ellie’s three kids are about to have their lives upended by a certain gruesome grimoire. A fresh pivot that starts out strong before caving to fan service, this femme-centered installment at least doesn’t skimp on visceral horrors and black humor, finding inventive ways to make its audience cringe, cower and cackle as it puts its heroines through hell.

They’ve already got plenty to deal with, even before sinister forces come knocking at the door. Harried tattoo artist Ellie has been left high and dry by her deadbeat ex, and their crumbling building is set to be demolished. Beth, a rock chick roadie, has, alas, been saddled with the lazy screenwriter’s go-to plot device for female characters — an unplanned pregnancy! — and has finally come to ask her big sis for guidance. Everyone in this family is wrestling with their own baggage, while even the youngest daughter, Kassie (Nell Fisher), has resorted to impaling a doll’s head onto a stick she’s named “Staffanie” to keep herself company.

Untethered canonically from Fede Alvarez’s more serious and lore-heavy 2013 “Evil Dead,” which fleetingly featured Bruce Campbell as iconic hero Ash, “Evil Dead Rise” instead allows writer-director Lee Cronin (“The Hole in the Ground”) to selectively expand the universe around its signature hallmarks — including the semi-sentient Necronomicon, bound in human skin and razored teeth, which beckons to Ellie’s wannabe DJ son, Danny (Morgan Davies), from a long-buried tomb beneath the building cracked open by a pesky L.A. earthquake.

Records featuring mysterious incantations accompany the book, but like plenty of unwise “Evil Dead” characters before him, curiosity gets the better of Danny in an opening act that introduces intriguing details that get muddled and lost as the thrill ride ramps up. “Weird s— like this gets locked away for a reason,” warns his pragmatic sister, Bridget (Gabrielle Echols, bringing poise and main character energy to a middle-child role). Danny spins the cursed vinyl anyway, and before you know it, a familiar disembodied demon is speeding its way through the apartment complex in search of a human host.

Once the parasite worms its way into Ellie after a bone-crunching tangle in the apartment’s elevator, Sutherland, known for her roles on “Vikings” and “The Mist,” unleashes one of the more maniacal horror performances in years. Taking inspiration not from scary movies but Jim Carrey’s rubber-faced turn in “The Mask,” per the Australian actor, her Deadite Mommie Dearest becomes a terrifying vessel for chaos and destruction of the bodily and emotional kind, hilariously horrific as she levitates, expectorates, crab walks, crawls up the walls, menaces the neighbors and taunts her own children with quotable lines like, “Mommy’s with the maggots now.”

Mileage may vary for what audiences crave, and can take, when it comes to the gruesomely R-rated parade of stomach-churning gore, goo, barf and blood that ensues in and around this increasingly claustrophobic apartment, where a few neighbors have helpfully stuck around to contribute to the film’s body count. (Credit to special effects supervisor Brendan Durey and prosthetic makeup designer Luke Polti for top-notch wince-inducing work, buoyed by a 6,500-liter fake-blood budget.) Adding to Hollywood’s recent spate of boldly batty genre pictures, Cronin wields violence like a finely tuned instrument, with a wickedly funny sense for weaponizing sharp objects, kitchen appliances, fraught family dynamics — and, memorably, a cheese grater — for maximum impact.

Distinctive technical craft also goes a long way in helping this “Evil Dead” rise above its narrative shortcomings. Lush, moody lensing by cinematographer Dave Garbett, inspired by the eerily surreal photographs of Gregory Crewdson, create pools of light and shadow that lend the building an ominous life of its own. Production designer Nick Bassett’s jewel-toned interiors, cracked basement garage and long, forbidding hallway evoke a sense of dread and decay even before the supernatural nightmare begins, as if the past has already trapped its human inhabitants in a 14-story purgatory without them realizing it.

Even something as simple as the view through the peephole in the apartment door sets up one of the film’s best sequences. Cronin’s exceptionally ambitious visuals keep the proceedings interesting, creating a sense of adrenalizing, off-kilter unpredictability to match what his dwindling number of humans are experiencing as they inevitably fall to the Deadite swarm.

Magnifying every moment of tension and terror is the immersive sound design by Peter Albrechtsen and distressed orchestral score by Stephen McKeon, both of whom weave unsettling vocals into the aural tapestry of the film.

On-the-nose writing, unfortunately, emerges as the real bane of “Evil Dead Rise” as the story drags in its back half despite memorable kills and the introduction of a grotesque new monster that keeps the action going at an unrelenting pace. The movie doesn’t require a conspicuously out-of-place nod to “The Shining” or the many self-referential nods to its own franchise highlight reel to keep viewers hooked, but it can’t resist making characters and even swarms of the undead shout out its most iconic lines, forcing the absurdism of the original films into tonal dissonance with the rest of the film.

Not that Beth needs to be saddled with that tired old saw of impending motherhood, either, a shortcut to heroism made redundant and practically moot by the film’s end. It’s the kind of shoehorned-in detail that plays like a studio note, one Sullivan, in her committed and expressive performance, doesn’t need in order to make Beth a compelling or complex figure.

Try as it might to expand the “Evil Dead” universe beyond its most famous chainsaw-wielding character, the film isn’t permitted to escape his shadow. (Sharp-eared viewers may, however, recognize Campbell’s voice in one under-the-radar cameo.) Instead, it chooses the pandering route designed to get die-hards pointing at the screen in its big, bloody finale. Too many contrivances set up a final showdown, when a wood chipper and a chainsaw just happen to be lying around a deserted DTLA garage on a stormy night.

One can imagine what new life “Evil Dead Rise” could have injected into the franchise without those hamstrings, free of the creative tension between servicing an existing IP and reinvigorating it in the spirit of its renegade origins. Cronin, planting a virtuosic flag in his second feature as director, has at least given the “Evil Dead” franchise a crowd-pleasing new chapter that opens the door to a connected universe uniting the previous films and series. It really leaves us wondering how he’d build his own.

'Evil Dead Rise'

Rated: R, for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: Starts April 21 in general release

More to Read

Alive, she cried: What happens to ‘Frankenstein’ when you revive it with women in charge?

Feb. 9, 2024

Review: Looking for good boyfriend material? In ‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ try the cemetery

Feb. 7, 2024

Review: Abstract expressionism, espionage and Cold War history converge in John Ross Bowie’s ‘Brushstroke’

Feb. 3, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Jen Yamato is a film reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Company Town

‘Rust’ armorer Hannah Gutierrez sentenced to 18 months in prison

April 15, 2024

In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

Entertainment & Arts

‘Civil War’ unites moviegoers at box office

April 14, 2024

On ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Ryan Gosling can’t stop cracking up as guest host

April 13, 2024

Evil Dead Rise Review: Fifth Film in Horror Franchise Is Groovy

Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan star as two sisters who come into contact with the forces of evil in the upcoming release, Evil Dead Rise.

For Evil Dead Rise , the fifth film in the Evil Dead franchise, the action takes place not in a cabin in the woods but in a soon-to-be-closed apartment. Living there is a tattoo artist named Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), along with her three kids, Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and Kassie (Nell Fisher). They're soon joined by Beth (Lily Sullivan), Ellie's sister, who works as a guitar technician. However, their reunion is cut short after disaster strikes.

The horror starts after Danny discovers an evil book and a vinyl record containing some backstory and translations of the book's passages. He ignores Bridget telling him to leave those things alone and plays the vinyl. To Danny's credit, he tries to turn it off as soon as the 'demon resurrection passage' starts, but by then, it's too late. An evil force is unleashed upon the building, and starts turning its inhabitants into Deadites, starting with Ellie.

Callbacks to Past Evil Dead Movies

Fans will be satisfied by the fact that Evil Dead Rise is filled with references to the legendary horror franchise. During the scene where Ellie gets demonically possessed , she's in an elevator where wires come alive and wrap themselves around her neck and limbs in a manner evoking the trees of past Evil Dead movies. However, there's no sexual assault this time around, thankfully, and besides paying homage to the past, it also seems to be symbolic. Deadite Ellie's movement is noticeably more marionette-like than when she was a human.

Several of the characters who get possessed do so in accordance with the book's illustrations, which comes from the remake. Callbacks to the original trilogy include that trademark POV dolly shot, Deadites saying "I'll swallow your soul" and "dead by dawn," and Ash Williams. We won't tell you where he is, though, so that you can find him yourself (and maybe because we're afraid of being wrong, but mostly so that you can find him yourself).

RELATED: Evil Dead Rise Director Says Bruce Campbell Is Hidden Somewhere in the Film

Also, as you might have gathered from the trailers and promotional images, Evil Dead Rise doesn't abandon its rural setting entirely. The film starts at a very different cabin where a hair-raising incident occurs. It's there to give audiences a taste of what's coming and provide a couple more callbacks to the earlier installments, but it feels slightly pointless due to how little it has to do with the rest of the movie.

During Evil Dead Rise , it's stated that the book is one of three volumes of the Naturom Demonto or Book of the Dead, which is something that writer/director Lee Cronin has discussed in interviews. He said that this revelation goes back to Army of Darkness , where there were three books in the cemetery scene. So now each film director, Sam Raimi, Fede Álvarez, and Cronin, have their own book.

That's blatantly a retcon, as Army of Darkness implied those other two books were decoys. They also looked the same in that film, but don't anymore. The Book of the Dead in Evil Dead Rise , which one assumes is the book that bit Ash, looks more like The Monster Book of Monsters from the Harry Potter series . But whatever, willing suspension of disbelief and all that. Plus, it's been like over 100 years. Maybe it got a new cover.

Before its release, Cronin mentioned how incredibly violent this installment would be quite a few times. There are certainly some very graphic scenes. The trailer moment that went viral as quickly as M3GAN's dance scene is a cheese grater not getting used on cheese. However, the film isn't quite the "rollercoaster of blood" Cronin promised. Of course, take that with a grain of salt (or grated flesh). If you're a Terrifier 2 fan, your threshold for violent movies might differ slightly from most people's.

On a related note, Evil Dead Rise and Cronin's feature-length debut, The Hole in the Ground , are two very different movies. The Hole in the Ground is an original story that, while certainly having some grizzly moments, prioritizes atmosphere and building a sense of dread. Evil Dead Rise is part of an established franchise, and though not lacking in mood or suspense, is dripping in blood. It's similar to Álvarez going from Evil Dead to Don't Breathe , only in reverse. Of course, one thing that The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise have in common is that they're all about family.

The Family Dynamic

The heart of Evil Dead Rise is family , and the film shows the care and strife that are part and parcel of every filial relationship. For instance, Beth's flakiness has caused a bit of resentment, as has Ellie telling people that her sister's a "groupie." However, that doesn't stop either of them from showing concern for the other's well-being when they finally reunite after a long time apart.

In both the original movie, The Evil Dead, and its remake, it's the younger sibling that gets possessed. Here it's the oldest, which does play into their dynamic. Per the stereotype, Ellie has always been the responsible one who everybody can rely on, but now Beth has been thrust into the role of caretaker.

With some initial hesitation, Beth ends up taking on the role with gusto. After Bridget and Danny get into a fight over Bridget rightfully blaming him for what's happened, Beth's the one that breaks it up. She also forms a dynamic with Kassie that brings to mind Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Newt (Carrie Henn) in Aliens , especially towards the end.

Evil Dead Rise Spoilers

Up until this point, we've tried to avoid giving away anything that wasn't too big of a spoiler or something you couldn't have gleaned from the trailers. Luckily for us, the trailers give away quite a bit about the movie. The rest of this section is undeniably a major spoiler, but it's also too important to not go over, so you may want to skip to the conclusion now.

In her very first scene, Beth and the audience learn that she's pregnant, which is the whole reason she went to visit her sister in the first place. Her pregnancy is also something that the Deadites repeatedly torment her over. However, when Kassie asks, "Are you going to be a mom?" Beth responds, "Yes," which marks a turning point in both their lives. Because Beth's not just talking about being a mother to her baby.

RELATED: Evil Dead Rise: A Look at Lee Cronin's Filmography Ahead of its Release

The final monster of the film continues the family theme, as Deadite Danny and Bridget pull a John Carpenter's The Thing move and merge with Deadite Ellie. The superfamily then tries to shove Beth into a woodchipper, but Beth turns the tables on them with the assistance of a trusty chainsaw and Kassie. Even though she can't do much, Kassie does her best to help out when she can, instead of staying on the sidelines completely, which goes a long way in making her a more interesting character.

Before getting sucked in, Deadite Ellie tries to pull the 'don't kill me, it's me' trick, even referring to Beth by her affectionate nickname. Instead of falling for it, Beth very pointedly responds by saying that only her sister is allowed to call her that. As far as one-liners go, that doesn't beat "swallow/feast on this," but it's still pretty good.

With the rest of the family dead, we see Kassie, her eyes covered, seemingly crying. For a brief moment, it seems like there's going to be a cruel twist where Kassie gets possessed, forcing Beth to kill her too. That would have been daring. It also might have been too much of a kick in the teeth for Beth, whose whole character arc is coming to grips with motherhood. That might be why the movie doesn't go there.

What Makes it So Groovy

While some may take issue with Evil Dead Rise lacking much of the campiness that made the early movies so beloved, it's still very well-made. The characters are actually engaging, and the film somehow made an L.A. apartment feel as isolated as a cabin in the woods. Cronin's direction was on point, as were the performances of the whole cast. After this, Sutherland may very well join the likes of Jaime Lee Curtis and Katharine Isabelle as a great scream queen who isn't even a horror movie fan . There's also some stellar black comedy in the film, even if it's nowhere near the extent of Evil Dead II .

Produced by New Line Cinema, Renaissance Pictures, Pacific Renaissance, and Wild Atlantic Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures releases Evil Dead Rise on April 21.

site categories

Blake lively & justin baldoni romance ‘it ends with us’ will now begin in early august, ‘evil dead rise’ review: deadites cause high-rise havoc in lee cronin’s horror venture.

By Valerie Complex

Valerie Complex

Associate Editor/Film Writer

More Stories By Valerie

• ‘Mr. And Mrs. Smith’ Co-Creator On How Series’ Spies Are Like Us: “Anybody Could Be A John Or A Jane” – Contenders TV
• ESPN Films Greenlights 30 For 30 Documentary On Broadcaster Stuart Scott
• ‘Challengers’ Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Zendaya-Led Dramedy About Love And Rivalry Across The Tennis Court

Editors note: This review was originally published March 16 after its premiere at SXSW . It opens in theaters Friday.

Evil Dead Rise starts with a sweeping shot along a creek. This is the typical way a Deadite approaches its next victim — but no, that’s just a drone used by Caleb (Richard Crouchley), who’s hanging out with Teresa (Mirabai Pease) on a lake dock. Rounding out the trio is Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas), who is sick in bed and not up for activities. When Teresa checks on Jessica, she can see that her friend isn’t having a restful sleep. As she reads Wuthering Heights , Jessica pops up, falls to the floor, convulses and transforms into a Deadite demon. Her possession is connected to the events in L.A. that happened the day before as the film cuts to an apartment where Ellie (Sutherland) and her children Danny (Davies), Bridget (Echols) and Kassie (Fisher) live. Her younger sister Beth (Sullivan) shows up after finishing a tour in Bangkok and needs a place to stay, while being simultaneously informed that her family has one month left in the building before it’s demolished.

Related Stories

SXSW 2023: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews

Disney+ Sets Latest Korean Series ‘Low Life’ From ‘Big Bet’ Creator, Hulu On Board

The Deadites are one of the most comedic and charismatic of horror canon, causing its victims to act in strange ways while mocking itself and others. Cronin understands how to use these attributes and gives their actions and dialogue a modern flair. The director-writer also expounds on some the lore of this demonic force. Hearing this information lends credence to why a chainsaw will always be the Evil Dead universe’s most coveted weapon. Cronin also deploys familiar camera tricks and angles that are reminiscent of the original movies. However, it’s not a duplication of Sam Raimi ’s work but an appreciation because the director uses these elements to build a one-off that is wholly his own.

Thanks to stunt coordinator Stuart Throp, the cast of Evil Dead Rise look strong and agile as their bodies shift and contort in various ways to show the demonic hold on the characters’ mind, body and spirit. Physical acting has been a hallmark of the franchise since the first film in 1981, and everyone is on board no matter how uncomfortable it might look. That and the practical effects and stunning makeup are the reasons why the Evil Dead movies are some of the most revered in the genre.

What bothers me about the film is the same thing that annoys me about all horror tropes and how they’re deployed. Why is everyone standing around doing nothing? Why are people voluntarily exploring weird locations and bringing back artifacts they aren’t familiar with? Why are they loud and making noise? Why, why, why? There has to be smart and innovative ways to execute these ideals without making the characters look like fools. These tropes are the worst way to move the narrative forward — though, to be fair, it’s not an Evil Dead movie without people bringing death upon themselves because of their nonsensical actions.

The 2013 Evil Dead pic was a bit more self-serious than the films before it. Maybe that was Raimi and Rob Tapert ’s effort to shift things in a new direction, but it didn’t quite work. Although this premise takes place in the city as opposed to the woods, Evil Dead Rise feels like a real return to form. It’s funny, absurd, gory, bleak and will keep viewers on edge — just how fans like it.

Title: Evil Dead Rise Distributor: New Line Cinema Release date: April 21, 2023 Director-screenwriter: Lee Cronin Cast: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher Rating: R Running time: 1 hr 37 min

Must Read Stories

How writers are reacting to industrywide cost-cutting: hollywood contraction.

Jonathan Bailey Circles Lead Role In Ramping-Up ‘Jurassic World’ Movie

Armorer sentenced to 18 months in prison for halyna hutchins’ death, robert downey jr’s ‘sympathizer’ roles “america as a whole”: backstage.

Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.

Read More About:

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Evil Dead Rise (United States/New Zealand, 2023)

Evil Dead Rise , the fifth big-screen outing for Sam Raimi’s Deadites (they also had a three-season run on cable TV) tries to answer the question of whether The Evil Dead are strong enough on their own right to engage the viewer without the dominating presence of Bruce Campbell’s Ash. This represents the first time an installment in the series has bypassed Ash altogether (although his appearance in Fede Alvaraz’s 2013 remake was limited to a post-credits cameo). The jury is still out because, even though there’s a shotgun and a chainsaw, the new characters aren’t quite able to fill the Campbell-sized hole in the screenplay’s fabric. As was the case with the reincarnation, an Evil Dead movie probably needs its human star more than the other way around. At any rate, Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise take on the Deadite universe is better than Alvarez’s but remains considerably below that of Sam Raimi, who helmed the original trilogy ( The Evil Dead , Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn , and Army of Darkness ).

Although the movie opens in a cabin by the lake, the majority of the story transpires within a dilapidated Los Angeles tenement building that’s about to be torn down. One of the units is occupied by the cheerfully chaotic fatherless family of Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies), Kassie (Nell Fisher), and their mom, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Into this mix comes Beth (Lily Sullivan), Ellie’s ne’er-do-well sister, who is home from touring the world as a band’s audio technician with a stain on her soul and a baby in her belly. When an earthquake hits, a hidden vault is revealed deep under the parking garage. Embracing the inherent horror movie stupidity expected in an Evil Dead movie, Danny climbs down to see what’s what and discovers the Necronomicon and a series of old records. Of course, he feels compelled to open the Book of the Dead and play the records. This unleashes a demon and Ellie becomes the first unfortunate victim.

For the most part, Evil Dead Rise follows the formula Raimi established in the 1980s for Deadite films. That means that, by the final scenes, everyone has been thoroughly doused in blood, the hero/heroine is in full possession of a chain saw, and most of the supporting characters are dead. The body count isn’t high for a horror film with this much violence but that’s primarily because the setting limits the potential number of victims. So, instead of worrying about quantity , Cronin opts for quality . And even the Ash-replacement ends up getting sliced and diced (just like Ash, who lost an arm when it became inconvenient).

Comments Add Comment

• Halloween (1978)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• Blair Witch Project, The (1999)
• Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
• Captivity (2007)
• Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
• (There are no more better movies of Lily Sullivan)
• (There are no more worst movies of Lily Sullivan)
• (There are no more better movies of Alyssa Sutherland)
• (There are no more worst movies of Alyssa Sutherland)
• (There are no more better movies of Gabrielle Echols)
• (There are no more worst movies of Gabrielle Echols)

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

• DVD & Streaming

Evil Dead Rise

Content caution.

In Theaters

• April 21, 2023
• Lily Sullivan as Beth; Alyssa Sutherland as Ellie; Morgan Davies as Danny; Gabrielle Echols as Bridget; Nell Fisher as Kassie

Home Release Date

• May 9, 2023

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

So, consider this scenario and ask yourself, “What would I do here?”

You’re living in a rundown apartment building in Los Angeles, one that’s scheduled for demolition soon, in fact. And when an earthquake shakes things up, you and your siblings—just back from getting pizza for your world-weary single mom and her sister (who just showed up at the door)—find a hole in the parking garage under the building.

Huh. Wonder what’s down there? you think. So you climb down to discover a bank vault and a … crypt, for lack of better word. One with crosses—a lot of crosses—hanging over it.

That’s weird , you think. Hey, what’s in here?

Rummaging through disgorged safe deposit boxes you find a very creepy-looking book and four records, as in, vinyl records.

You take the book up to your room, and even when your smarter-than-you sister suggests maybe you shouldn’t try to open it, you do it anyway.

But the book—hint: it’s called The Book of the Dead —is sealed shut with … fangs . Yup, real interlocking teeth. Long ones.

Huh. That’s weird, you think, as your sister again implores you to stop, more desperately now. And even when the book then bites you, drawing huge drops of blood from your wounded hand and weirdly absorbing it instantly into ghoulish looking drawings, you don’t stop.

Because, you know, curiosity .

Well, curiosity, as the saying goes, killed the cat. And it’s likely to kill a few people here too.

Should’ve listened to your sister.

Positive Elements

I’ll unpack the film’s spiritual elements in more detail below. Suffice it to say here that a demon is inadvertently unleashed, and it intends to kill everyone it encounters. Most of the victims we meet and care about belong to one dysfunctional-but-likable family.

Ellie is a single mother whose husband recently abandoned her for another woman. She’s struggling to raise three kids—young Kassie, and teens Danny and Bridget—even though she can barely pay the rent on their decrepit apartment. Ellie’s younger sister, Beth, shows up near the beginning, too. She’s a guitar tech who’s unexpectedly pregnant, and she’s looking for her sister’s advice.

Once the plot really gets rolling, the demon commences its ghoulish plot to wipe out this struggling family—and everyone else trapped on the same floor of their apartment building, thanks to damage from that earthquake I mentioned.

None of that’s positive, obviously. But here’s what is: As the casualties climb, Beth, especially, mounts a sacrificial and heroic defense as she seeks to protect the children from the devilish and violent proceedings that follow. And while there are plenty of those, we see a family trying its best to come together, to help one another and to resist as best they can the malevolent entity that’s stalking them one by one.

Along the way, a few plucky-but-unlucky neighbors do their best to help, too.

Spiritual Elements

The whole spiritual mess here is unleashed, as I hinted at in the introduction, by Danny’s irrepressibly unwise curiosity. When the earthquake opens a hole beneath the apartment building, he quickly scrambles in and comes back with The Book of the Dead and those four records—the combination of which unleashes the demon.

The records play back the voice and the warning of a priest who last encountered this spiritual entity in 1923. The last of the vinyl warns that his own insatiable spiritual curiosity led to utter ruin, and that the demon he unleashed cannot be stopped—though perhaps the myriad crosses hanging above the crypt below the apartment were at least partially effective in keeping the nasty spirit at bay for 100 years. (That scene also involves a spooky jump-scare involving a life-size crucifix with Jesus on it, complete with a crown of thorns.)

Once the demon is out, well, it’s pretty much not a good thing for anyone. It first possesses Ellie, the family’s mom, often using her voice to entice people into thinking that maybe everything’s going to be OK after all.

Well, it’s not. And Ellie’s hardly the first victim. In fact, even after it inhabits her body (and then other people’s), it tells the family, “Mommy’s with the maggots now.” Lines like those throughout the film aim at dark laughs as much as spiritual terror–which has been true of this franchise since its inception in 1981 in Sam Raimi’s film The Evil Dead .

The film posits that the evil that’s been unleashed can’t be contained, and that the only response is to run away from it, which is exactly what an ever-dwindling group of people try to do here. Someone says a very nice prayer, in fact. But it doesn’t accomplish anything.

One odd positive note here: When the demon senses that Beth is pregnant, it hears her preborn child’s heartbeat and says that it relishes the chance to devour not just one soul, but two. Obviously, the devouring part is disgusting, but it recognizes the fetus’s personhood even though it is unborn.

Sexual Content

Early in the film, Beth is at a concert and takes a pregnancy test in a bathroom. We see the test in her hand, which then dips below the screen as she urinates on it. Her stressed and disappointed face tells us that the result is positive.

As the film progresses, it’s suggested that perhaps this has happened before (though that’s not absolutely clear). The demon, once it possesses Ellie, hurls seriously filthy accusations at Beth about her promiscuity.

Violent Content

The story commences at a remote cabin in the woods near a lake (a familiar setting for this franchise), where a young woman has been possessed by the story’s demon. She rips her cousin’s scalp off and drops it on a dock, then decapitates her boyfriend underwater and offscreen. We know what happened, though, because she tosses his head (lips still moving) onto the dock next to the bloody scalp.

From there, the story jumps backwards one fateful day to explain how the demon got to said cabin. As mentioned, Danny’s discovery of the Book of the Dead—complete with all manner of creep-out images of devils and demons and such—is what sets things in motion here. Once the demon gets loose, it torments and ravages Ellie, her family and everyone unfortunate enough to be trapped on that floor of the apartment building.

After a surprisingly slow set-up to the entire story, the demon gets bloodily to work, possessing Ellie and then others.

Really, really bad things happen. A partial litany: Someone’s eyeball is bitten out, then spat into the throat of another character, who chokes on it and dies. Various limbs are stabbed with shards of a mirror and a large steak knife. One character’s skull is impaled with a stake. Someone has scissors rammed down her throat and into her face.

Shotgun blasts gorily obliterate a person’s limbs, one by one. Bones get snapped. Inhabited bodies move in grotesque, unnatural ways, popping like popcorn as they do. Someone eats glass, complete with bloody crunching. A cheese grater is used to devastatingly squeamish effect on one character’s exposed forearm.

Blood—tankerloads of blood—flows ever more frequently. Two people nearly drown in it, in fact. A skull and a chainsaw have an altercation: the chainsaw wins. Even more grotesque things happen with random body parts that have been removed.

And … there’s a woodchipper.

There’s more, but you get the picture.

Crude or Profane Language

Three f-words, seven s-words, one use of the c-word. Other profanity includes four uses of “a–,” two of “b–ch” and one of “b–tard.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

A boyfriend brags about giving his girlfriend the drug Klonopin to calm her down. (It fails to sedate the demon she’s been possessed by.)

Other Negative Elements

As is often the case in movies about supernatural infestations, we get some of the insectoid variety, too. After someone vomits up maggots, she says eerily, “I gotta kill the creepy crawlies that I got inside my tummy,” before eating glass. Multiple scenes involve vomit of varying viscosity and color. A fly crawls on a dead person’s eyeball. Etc.

You might think that demons would eventually just get bored possessing people, killing them, then finding more victims to inhabit and dismember. You know, that maybe they’d one day wake up and decide that it would be a great day for something like, I don’t know, Parcheesi or shuffleboard.

Yeah, not really. They never seem to get tired tormenting poor, unsuspecting humans in the most disgusting ways you can imagine (and, probably, a few that you haven’t imagined).

And so it is here.

The latest iteration in this long-running franchise delivers yet another jolting dose of blood-drenched demonic assault. The best that we can say of it is that most of the characters are actually people you’re rooting for. And, spoiler warning, not all of them die.

Just most of them. And they die really, really badly, all courtesy of a maniacally wicked demon whose appetite for flesh, blood and souls cannot be sated.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

Latest Reviews

Arthur the King

Love Lies Bleeding

Forty-Seven Days With Jesus

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

EVIL DEAD RISE

"bloodthirsty demon".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: A demon-possessed mother lies to her young daughter but really wants to wound her and make her demon-possessed too, and the family in the movie is dysfunctional, partly because the father has abandoned them.

More Detail:

EVIL DEAD RISE is the fifth in a series of supernatural horror thrillers that began in 1981, but this time a young transgender teenager unwittingly unleashes a demon who terrorizes the teenager’s mother, two sisters and the mother’s sister in a rundown apartment building. Like the first movie in 1981, which was originally rated X, EVIL DEAD RISE is an ultraviolent, super bloody gore fest, but with a little torture porn thrown into the mix, and only two humans escape from the demon, so the plot is depressing and sickening rather than satisfying.

The movie opens with a sequence where some campers at a cabin in the woods are attacked by their demon-possessed friend. It then flashes back to show how the demon got freed and came to the cabin.

Separated from her husband who suddenly left her, a mother named Ellie and her children are living in a rundown apartment. Ellie gets a visit from her younger sister, Beth, who’s just found out she’s pregnant. The children, teenager Bridget, her young sister, Kassie, and their young transgender teenage “brother,” Danny, take the family car to get pizza.

On the way back, an earthquake strikes and reveals a hole in the first-floor parking garage. The hole leads to the underground bank vault that used to be part of the property before the apartments were built.

Despite orders from Bridget, Danny climbs into the hole and enters the bank vault. The vault is pretty much empty except for a large safety deposit box containing some old vinyl records and a strange-looking “leather-bound” book. Danny sticks two records and the book into his backpack.

Back in his room in the apartment, Danny opens up the book, which has a bunch of old, scary drawings of people in pain, being tortured and being killed. He starts playing one of the records. He has to physically speed up the record because it’s in 78 speed. On the record, a priest from the 1920s says the book appears to be part of a series of books on magic and sorcery. For some odd reason, he thinks the spells in the book can be used for the good of humanity. So, he starts reciting one of the spells.

Danny’s sister Bridget tries to stop the recording from playing, but it’s too late. A demon is released and possess the body of their mother, Ellie. Ellie starts attacking Beth. People from next door come to help, but she attacks and kills some of them.

Beth and the children manage to lock out Ellie into the hallway. However, Ellie eventually manages to sneak her way back into the apartment. Bridget becomes the first of the children to be physically wounded and possessed by the demonic force that’s possessed her mother. Beth and Danny manage to kill Bridget before she harms them.

So, the question becomes, will Beth, Danny and Kassie survive?

Like the first movie in 1981, which was originally rated X, EVIL DEAD RISE is an ultraviolent, super bloody gore fest, but with a little torture porn thrown into the mix. For example, the demon-possessed older teenage sister starts eating glass before she starts attacking her siblings and her aunt. The occult movie has a light moral premise only because the humans are trying to stop the demon-possessed humans. Just two people escape the demon, however, which means the monster is never banished, just avoided. So, EVIL DEAD RISE is depressing and sickening rather than really satisfying. The only other good news about the movie’s content is that the foul language is limited, though not absent.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.

You can make a difference with as little as $7. It takes only a moment. If you can, consider supporting our ministry with a monthly gift. Thank you.

Movieguide® is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible.

Screen Rant

Will new evil dead movie connect to previous stories spinoff director gives cautious response.

Exclusive: Director Sébastien Vaniček offers a cautious response to whether the new Evil Dead movie will connect to any previous franchise stories.

• Director Sébastien Vaniček has a cautious response about his new Evil Dead movie connecting to past installments.
• The most recent movie installments have taken more standalone approaches to the franchise, allowing for fresh stories and characters to shine and expand the universe.
• Vaniček's best path may be to follow in Evil Dead Rise 's footsteps and avoid any direct connections to the previous movies, instead offering subtle Easter eggs and nods to hint at other such characters as Bruce Campbell's Ash.

With the past two movies taking a separate approach to keeping the franchise alive, director Sébastien Vaniček is careful about addressing whether the new Evil Dead movie will connect to previous installments. The French filmmaker, who recently made his feature directorial debut with the spider-focused horror movie Infested (titled Vermins in France), was announced as the next helmer of the Sam Raimi franchise in February 2024, nearly a year after Rise broke multiple records. In addition to directing, Vaniček will also be co-writing with his Infested partner Florent Bernard.

During a recent interview with Screen Rant for the Shudder premiere of Infested , Vaniček was asked about the development of his Evil Dead movie . In addition to praising Raimi's willingness to give him full creative control and break the rules of the franchise, the co-writer/director was cautious in responding to whether the spinoff will connect to any previous installments, confirming that everything is on the table for them, but that they are in " the early process of the writing " and, as such, are still nailing down the specifics of what the movie will be. See what Vaniček shared below:

I would love to answer this question, but we are in the early process of the writing, so we have so many questions. We just wrote stuff with my co-writer, it's the same co-writer I wrote Infested with, so I'm working with my team, I'm really glad. But we are in the process of building our story, our characters and everything, and we are chatting with each other. There's so many ideas coming from everywhere. For the moment, we are in the sandbox, and we haven't started to build a castle, we are just gathering the best sand, and as soon as I have the best sand, I will start to build a castle.

The Next Evil Dead Movie Should Continue Rise's Best Trick

Though Ash vs. Evil Dead ultimately returned the focus to Bruce Campbell's iconic horror hero, the franchise's return to audiences has largely leaned on focusing on new characters within the world, all of whom discover the terrors that lie within the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis . Some audiences lamented the loss of Ash as the focus character, and yet, still ultimately approved of the new stories expanding the universe of Raimi's creation. Check out how the various Evil Dead Rotten Tomatoes scores compare below:

With a variety of potential directions to choose from, Vaniček's best path for the new Evil Dead movie would be to follow in Rise 's footsteps. The 2023 movie confirmed the existence of multiple Necronomicons in the world, as previously teased by Army of Darkness , and a variety of people in the past who had encountered them. Evil Dead Rise writer/director Lee Cronin even previously indicated that Bruce Campbell's vocal cameo in the movie could have been Ash himself, thanks to the character's time-traveling shenanigans:

There is a Bruce Campbell cameo, and that cameo potentially is actually Ash Williams. Think about how time works for Ash as a character, and that voice that you may hear is captured on something that was recorded 100 years ago. And the fact that his particular line is a warning showcases somebody that knows more than the other people in the room… I know that sounds very cryptic, but it's supposed to.

Where the 2013 movie sought to reintroduce the franchise to new audiences and establish the potential for Campbell to return in an Army of Darkness 2 and crossover with Jane Levy's character , Evil Dead Rise smartly did away with any of these direct sequel setups and left things more open to audience interpretation and hope. Should Vaniček avoid making his Evil Dead movie directly connected to any previous installments, he could continue this path of telling new and subversive stories for the franchise that keeps the door open for other up-and-coming filmmakers to bring their take to the property.

Created by Sam Raimi, Evil Dead is a horror-comedy franchise that began with the release of the original film, The Evil Dead, in 1981. The series follows protagonist Ashley "Ash" Williams as he and his friends venture into a cabin for a vacation only to discover it harbors a demonic book that can summon terrifying creatures known as Deadites, hell-bent on torturing and slaying them all. As the series progresses, Ash becomes more of a masculine B-movie action hero until the soft reboot helmed by Eli Roth occurs, which shifts the franchise deeper into its horror roots.

Review of Evil Dead Rise

Recently viewed.

Ciel Melina

Explore ideas, tips guide and info Ciel Melina

Evil Dead Rise 2024 Review

Evil Dead Rise 2024 Review . By lou thomas full review. More scary stuff as supernatural creatures once again play by the book.

Evil dead rise 2024 full movie. It’s the fifth entry in the film franchise after the evil.

Peacock (Us), Amazon Video (Au, Uk) Blumhouse Earned Its Stripes Making Scary Blockbusters For Peanuts,.

It is actually a real heaven of horror!

Alyssa Sutherland And Lily Sullivan Star As Two.

Evil dead rise opens in theaters on april 21.

Reviewed At Sxsw Film Festival (Headliners), March 15, 2023.

Images references :, evil dead rise movie review., evil dead rise (2023) review..

April 02, 2024 02:21 pm | updated 02:21 pm ist.

Related Posts

Coptic fasts and feasts 2024.

Coptic Fasts And Feasts 2024. The following is a list of coptic feasts, fasts and […]

Olive Garden Coupon Code December 2024

Olive Garden Coupon Code December 2024. Get today's best discounts & promos available for apr […]

Phil Wickham 2024 Tour

Phil Wickham 2024 Tour. Phil wickham and brandon lake might currently be helming the “i […]

Barb Marice

Evil Dead Rise 2024 Rotten Tomatoes

Evil Dead Rise 2024 Rotten Tomatoes . The evil dead director is a big fan of barbarian. Post will be edited as more reviews come in.

In the late 1970s, sam raimi, bruce campbell, and a few more childhood pals picked up a camera to fulfill the. Mar 20, 2023 6:44 pm.

'Going To Knock People's Socks Off' By Cameron Bolton.

Katie rife april 21, 2023.

View Hd Trailers And Videos For Evil Dead Rise On Rotten Tomatoes, Then Check Our Tomatometer To Find Out What The Critics Say.

5 new movies on netflix in april 2024 with over.

Evil Dead Movies And Series, Ranked By Tomatometer.

Images references :.

Evil dead rise opens in theaters on april 21.

In Terms Of Horror Franchises, “ Evil Dead ” Has Accomplished Something Miraculous:.

Critic reviews for evil dead rise:.