Horror is an all-time favourite genre, especially for the young. Unfortunately, in recent years ‘horror’ is for many producers synonymous with ‘gory violence’, of which the latest offering is Evil Dead Rise, the sort-of sequel to Evil Dead (2013), i.e. you don’t have to see the first to understand the second.
Directed by Lee Cronin, the film tells the twisted tale of two estranged sisters Ellie and Beth (Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan) whose reunion is cut short by the rise of flesh-eating demons. The siblings are thrust into a “primeval battle for survival as they face the most nightmarish version of family imaginable”. Not another Sunday afternoon get-together at grandma’s where relatives hate each other and take turns to poison the Dundee cake!
Of course, there is the mandatory young boy Danny (Morgan Davies) who finds a crack that leads him into an abandoned basement, where he finds an old book and some vinyl records. Rather than rush to the nearest second-hand dealer, he takes the book and the records to his apartment. His sister Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) insists that he put them back where he found them, but he opens the book and plays the records, which unleash the demons that had possessed his mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Don’t you wish he had taken them to the second-hand shop, and we could all go home in time for a decent horror film on telly? Suddenly, the building is plunged into darkness, but the electricity is still on in the rest of the block. Sound familiar?
All this happens in the first few minutes, then nothing much except that mother keeps attacking anyone she comes face-to-face with, even her own children and sister.
In one scene, two neighbors try to restrain Ellie, who pounces on one of them, gouging out his eye with her teeth and propelling it to his wide-mouthed, surprised friend. Guess where the optical organ lands.
Anyone attacked by Ellie becomes possessed, as if producer wants to win fans of magic and zombie movies by throwing a little bit of everything in the horror mix, including the occasional eye.
Another scene must have been inspired by the bleeding lift in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). In Evil Dead Rise, Beth (Lily Sullivan) tries to rescue her niece Kassie (Nell Fisher) by entering the elevator which fills with blood. They try not to drown until the lift doors open and tsunami of blood forces the occupants outside. Commercialised and tacky? I should say so. Indeed, there’s no comparison with Kubrick’s slow-motion take.
Plot: predictable and unoriginal. Nor is there much humour. Even Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) in The Shining can raise a smile after he has axed his way through the bathroom door with ‘Honey, I’m home!’
This film would be ideal on a 36-inch screen with the sound low as a background to that Sunday afternoon teatime with Grandma and the poisoned Dundee cake.
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