'Evil Dead Rise' Slinks into Theaters
by EG
As April winds down, so has the torrid pace of high-profile theatrical movie releases. This weekend sees the release of the fifth installment in The Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise. This reboot/sequel/whatever isn't expected to be a gigantic hit, but some observers think it could successfully tap into moviegoers' recent appreciation of horror comedies. Whether that's enough to challenge the current ruler of the box office, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, remains to be seen. Read on for details.
Via The A.V. Club.
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.
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.
A twisted tale of two estranged sisters whose reunion is cut short by the rise of flesh-possessing demons, thrusting them into a primal battle for survival as they face the most nightmarish version of family imaginable.
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.
Get the rest of the story at The A.V. Club.