Everybody But Me Is Wrong About 'Evil Dead Rise'

The trailers for Evil Dead Rise looked pretty lame, but after weeks of positive reviews and word-of-mouth from the horror community – the only online fandom into which I am, to any degree, “plugged in” – I decided to put my doubts aside and check it out. After all, I avoided the 2013 Evil Dead remake for many years, assuming that the positive consensus that has developed around it was incorrect. In my defense, the director’s follow-up movie – 2016’s Don’t Breathe – was a complete fumble of what should’ve been a knock-out premise. But when I finally watched the Evil Dead remake, I found it to be a lot of fun, in a pseudo-camp, post-morality sort of way. Since it was the same general group of people advocating for both movies, I figured they might be right about this one, too.

A few nights ago, I left my apartment and walked a few blocks over to the Kent Theater to take advantage of the $6 tickets they offer every Wednesday. I love watching movies at the Kent Theater, even if I do check all of my clothes for bed bugs as soon as I get home. It’s one of the final standing artifacts of a time when film exhibition was profitable enough to support businesses that were run with obvious incompetence, and I say with nothing but love for the Kent.

On a related note, as much as I appreciate the Nitehawk Cinema, it’s a travesty that we’ve lost the transcendently shitty experience of watching a movie at The Pavilion, the dependably shitty theater that previously occupied the same space. Ah, The Pavilion: where the theaters were always kept at a balmy 90 degrees, half the seats were broken, and there were visible holes in the screens. I believe that watching movies in a shitty theater is a central part of the filmgoing experience, and I hate that we’re losing it – and this is to say nothing of the closing of the UA Court Street, an action so despicable it may qualify as actively racist.

Another great thing about the Kent is that it’s somehow fully staffed, in an era when even big-name chain theaters will regularly have the people at the concessions stand sell you tickets. I approached the ticket kiosk and purchased one ticket to the 10pm showtime of Evil Dead Rise, then proceeded inside where I was stopped by a velvet rope and a sign reading ‘Please Have A Seat, Someone Will Be With You Shortly.’ This turned out to be unnecessary, as one of the teenagers working behind the concessions stand quickly ran over to offer me admittance. This may be contradictory to what I said at the beginning of this paragraph, but I didn’t mind the concessions staff pulling double-duty as ticket takers, because even though the employee who assisted me ran over with enough enthusiasm that she clipped herself on the edge of the counter, I still had to wait for a few seconds, and I like that. I like a little ceremony.  

My ticket taken, I proceeded through the gloriously shabby lobby, which is about the size of a decent railroad apartment and is stuffed full of arcade consoles that hide the ten-year-old posters on the wall for things like the first Hobbit movie and Robert Downey Jr.’s The Judge. I took a seat in the dimly-lit Theater 3, stared up at the blank screen and listened to the endlessly repeating sounds of the Terminator 2 light-gun game that sits just outside the door.

A few minutes later, the lights went down and the preshow content began unceremoniously with a tourism ad for Boston (“Boston – it never gets old!”) followed by several curiously out-of-date trailers, including one for The Banshees Of Inisherin, a movie that has been out of theaters for six months. Then, at last… our feature presentation.

Evil Dead Rise starts off well, with a prologue set in that most Evil Dead of settings, a rustic old cabin by a lake, and even begins with an homage to the faux-Steadicam shots of the original films. This leads to a moderately clever fake-out where it is revealed that we’ve actually been following the POV of an in-universe drone piloted by an annoying man who will soon be decapitated. After a bit of low-key demonic hell-raising that makes effective use of a spooky passage from Wuthering Heights, the drone is brought back into the action of the film during a violent attack that leads into the movie’s much-lauded title card. 

I’m serious, people on the internet love this damn title card. And they’re not wrong! It’s a powerful image, a strong declaration of purpose, and overall just very cool. Unfortunately, nothing in the rest of the movie lives up to this moment. 

The main setting of Evil Dead Rise is a shitty 14-story apartment building in Los Angeles where Ellie, a rockabilly tattoo artist mom, lives with her equally improbable children: Danny, an aspiring DJ who plays LCD Soundsystem at insane volumes in his bedroom while waving his hands around in the air like a dumbass, Bridget, a teen activist who talks about protesting like it’s a job she hates and has a weird mind-fuck flirtation going on with one of her doomed neighbors, and Kassie, a cute little girl who somehow ends up as the most compelling character in the movie. The most excited I got during the movie’s climax was when the requisite chainsaw first came into play and landed at Kassie’s feet. If Evil Dead Rise ended with an 11-year-old chopping up her zombified family with a chainsaw, it would’ve improved the movie’s quality to such a degree that I would not feel the need to write this review. But it doesn’t end that way, so onward we must go.

Ellie’s sister Beth, ostensibly the main character, also shows up, and she’s a sound technician for a metal band or something, it isn’t clear and it hardly matters. What’s important to know is that this thing takes forever to get going. The movie is only 97 minutes long and I would swear that Ellie doesn’t get possessed until about the 45 minute mark, which, by my calculations, is way too fucking late. Eventually, it becomes clear that the movie is stalling because it doesn’t actually have a lot of ideas, but first we get to slog through a lot of really obvious set-ups for future violence (gee, I wonder if that pair of scissors that gets meaningfully tossed under the couch is going to be important later…) and character beats that circle the same few points over and over again but don’t satisfyingly pay off.

The other character detail that Beth gets (aside from being a bad sister) is that she’s pregnant. This is mainly used to set up a half-hearted through-line for the character, and it’s difficult not to compare this plot point to the main character’s drug addiction in Evil Dead (2013), which drives the plot and provides just enough thematic weight to make that movie’s endless stream of cruelty and violence feel like a plot. Beth’s pregnancy is mentioned a handful of times, and I guess she’s supposed to come to terms with motherhood by stepping up and saving Kassie, but I’m more interested in the moment when Ellie, in full demon-mode, presses her claws threateningly into Beth’s abdomen. This is supposed to be tense, but anyone who believes that it might actually lead to any taboo violence is a total mark. This isn’t À l'intérieur, ok? This is a movie that was supposed to premiere on HBO Max. This isn’t even The Mother, a Netflix action movie where Joseph Fiennes stabs a pregnant Jennifer Lopez in the belly in the first five minutes. Seriously, that movie is fucking crazy.

Getting back to the matter at hand: when we look at this movie in comparison to any of the other Evil Dead movies, it feels like a soulless IP cash-grab with none of the spirit, intensity or visual interest of those films. But is it really fair to compare this movie to Evil Dead? The original Evil Dead trilogy is legendary for a reason – they’re some of the best and most important American horror films ever made. Very few movies can stand up to that sort of comparison, and honestly, it’s a waste to even try. 

So, fine. Let’s toss that aside and look at Evil Dead Rise as a singular piece of work. But the trick here is that you can’t do that. The movie doesn’t want you to do that, which we know because it’s stuffed full of obvious Evil Dead references, it only exists as a continuation of the Evil Dead franchise, and the words ‘Evil Dead’ are right there in the fucking title. This movie had two paths for success: deliver the classic Evil Dead thrills, chills & spills, or deliver a fresh and updated spin on the material, charting a new path forward for the franchise. The movie is incapable of doing the first and seems uninterested in the second, which means that it’s… just a movie. And not a particularly good one.

The setting is a major problem. There’s no reason a movie like this couldn’t take place in an apartment building, but Evil Dead Rise fails to capitalize meaningfully on the possibilities that the setting presents. It might be more honest to say it doesn’t even try: the movie never bothers to establish the geography of the apartment in a way that can be used to craft suspenseful or frightening sequences. A lot of the action ends up revolving around whether or not Ellie is going to get through the front door, which is not particularly exciting or novel. You know what other kind of building has a front door? All of them! Don’t fact-check this, I’m making a point.

One thing an apartment building offers as a setting is other people. The classic Evil Dead movies usually revolve around a small group of characters, so the idea of an entire building full of people getting infected is actually kind of exciting. Oh, what’s that? The building is condemned, so there’s only about four other people living on this floor? Well, that’s fine! That still gives us a nice variety of characters to keep things dramatically interesting and provide opportunities for a lot of inventive kill scenes… or it would, if the entire rest of the cast was not killed off in one thirty-second span. Hey, that’s cool, that’s cool. We’re all here to see demons kill people. As long as they don’t do something stupid like shoot the entire sequence through a peephole and keep all the exciting parts off-screen. They wouldn’t do that, right? Right…?

Another tactic the film might have utilized would have been to create a ‘sense of place,’ tapping into the vast cultural history of Los Angeles to ground the horror in a recognizable and distinct real-world setting. The movie doesn’t do this, either. It takes a weak swing in this direction with the very labored set-up for the discovery of the standard demon-summoning evil book, but any effectiveness is blunted by the awkwardness of the specifics. Why were all those secret church meetings from 1923 pressed onto vinyl? How was the final message even recorded, considering that the person speaking on the record sounds like they are moments away from death? 

Again, it feels silly to complain about these elements, but these elements are really all the movie has. It doesn’t have any original ideas, just the stuff that people remember from the other movies: evil book, zombies, wacky voices, and tons of fake blood (to the movie’s credit, there is a lot of fake blood.) 

This points to a bigger issue, which is that, ultimately, Evil Dead is not a ‘franchise’ in the way other long-running horror series are. Halloween, for example, is one perfect film that was iterated upon in a dozen different ways by different people. Evil Dead is three movies, all directed by Sam Raimi, one TV series that was developed by Sam Raimi, a remake of the original movie also developed by Sam Raimi, and now, this movie (which was also developed by Sam Raimi). 

My point is not that Sam Raimi is too involved in the franchise he created – get your money, Sam – but that a new Evil Dead movie of this kind is doomed to fail. It can’t stray too far from the established tropes of the series without becoming just another zombie and/or demonic possession movie, but it can’t serve those tropes up straight, either, because to do that successfully, you’d have to be as talented a filmmaker as Sam Raimi, or at least Fede Álvarez,  and I’m sorry to say it, but Lee Cronin falls short on both counts.

In short: skip Evil Dead Rise, stream The Pope’s Exorcist.