InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

FILM REVIEWS
Bruce Campbell through the wringer without the benefit of a
stuntman, often had more in common with the Jackass movies
than your typical horror film — replaced with photo-realistic
gore, CGI effects, and a cobalt and gunmetal gray color palette. In
other words, the film is slick-looking and hits its marks, and
when a possessed character begins masticating a wine glass,
shards of glass poking through their esophagus as they swallow,
it’s genuinely disgusting. As it is when another character has a
cheese grater raked across their calf, and yet again when
someone has one of their eyeballs sucked out of their skull. Is it
scary, though? Viewers' mileage will vary, but the more important
question is whether any of this is especially fun. The answer,
regrettably, is no.
Evil Dead Rise is under no obligation to match the punch-drunk
energy of the Raimi films — honestly, good luck even trying — but
its absence does underscore just how generic and kind of joyless
this all is. It’s yet another well-lit tour of an abattoir. The sisterly
angst and anxiety over Beth becoming a mother are only
introduced to give assorted possessed characters something to
taunt the living over — although the latter does allow the film to
replicate the Ripley and Newt dynamic with Beth and Kassie,
complete with lifting chunks of James Horner’s iconic Aliens
score for its action finale. Nor is there much inspiration in the
high-rise setting: the earthquake knocks out the power and cell
reception, and takes out the elevator and stairs so that the
characters might as well be stranded in the middle of the woods
for all that the change of venue matters (you’d think some of the
tenants on the lower floors might try and investigate all the
shotgun blasts). Instead, Evil Dead Rise mostly gets its kicks by
sneaking Easter Eggs into the film, some of which are more
thoughtful (a gardener’s truck in the parking garage is attributed
to Dr. Fonda’s Tree Surgeon, a simultaneous nod to the
prominence of chainsaws in the franchise, malicious trees, and
even the actress Bridget Fonda who cameos in 1993’s Army of
Darkness) than others (Sullivan randomly repeating one of
Campbell’s catchphrases by telling a deadite “come get some”
before blasting it with a shotgun).
If there’s a saving grace to the film, it’s Sutherland’s performance.
An Australian performer, like nearly everyone else in the cast
(watching all the actors fighting a losing battle with their
American accents is often more diverting than the story), the
actress best known for TV’s Vikings does some of the best
physical acting in recent memory. A tall, spindly beauty in a red
Farrah Fawcett blowout, the actress — who’s the first to be taken
by the evil spirit and is ostensibly the primary antagonist —
spends the film alternating between ramrod rigidity and
contorting her body in inhuman angles, at all times wearing a
deranged perma-rictus (the actress spends much of the film
staring into a peephole lens, the fisheye effect only further
distorting her face). In a film where everyone and everything is
so dreadfully grim, Sutherland, finding a middle ground between
Mommie Dearest and Joker, comes the closest to capturing the
anarchic spirit of the films in whose footsteps it follows. Why so
serious, indeed? — ANDREW DIGNAN
DIRECTOR: Lee Cronin; CAST: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland,
Morgan Davies; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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