Evil Dead Rise review: A return to bloody good fun for the demonic franchise (2024)

teageegeepea-av says:

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 […] 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 predecessorsThe original Evil Dead is not a comedy. The label “humorless” could also fit, unless you think a woman being raped by a tree is funny. I actually prefer the 2013 version to that original, and while I normally think less of horror-comedy for slighting the horror in favor of comedy, it was the right move for the original trilogy.

aliks-av says:

Wikipedia claims that Bruce Campbell does have a voice cameo as the speaker chanting on the record.

putusernamehere-av says:

I’m one of those weirdos who thinks the 2013 remake is better than the original.

bcfred2-av says:

“If you have even the slightest queasiness at the sight of…outlandish mutilations or, toward the end, a grotesque multi-limbed, demonic hybrid of what were once characters we cared about…”Oof. Body horror is the one thing that gets me because even if the good guys get away, they’re f*cked for life. Someone who’s become part of a demonic multi-limbed hybrid sure isn’t getting a happy ending.ETA: Grat image capture for the lead picture, though. Pretty much lets you know what you’re in for.

chickenwingfan94-av says:

I never liked the slapstick comedy of Army of Darkness…might be a hot take, but I much prefer the “humorless” entries of this franchise.

wrighteousg7g-av says:

I actually preferred the 2013 Evil Dead to the original film. I love the Ash comedy-horrors, but for straight “over the top” horror I think 2013 is really great.

ghostiet-av says:

Other people already pointed that out but yeah, the original Evil Dead isn’t a comedy. There are no real moments of levity – someone these days might think it’s supposed to be gross out funny but that’s really not the case, given how much of it is played horrifically straight and how downright depressing it gets. Raimi didn’t like horror too much and they pretty much made one because it was the most commercially viable route to take. Part of the reason why a lot of that film is so goddamn nasty and cruel is because they overcompensated for that exact reason – it ended up in this weird spot where the cheapness and insane gore made it feel more horrific than if they tried to play it subtle. Afterwards Raimi did lean into comedy and camp because that’s what he actually wanted to do with his career and the producers recognized that they can lean on that campiness going forward rather than hope lightning will strike twice.
Alvarez’s Evil Dead actually manages to strike a similar balance there, with the film being comparably cruel and gruesome while remaining very over the top, just with better special effects. It even pays homage to Ash’s whole deal as the subversive horror protagonist in the first one: the dude isn’t a quippy badass, he’s a clumsy geek getting stuck underneath bookshelves until all the other eligible male protagonists die and he has to step up. Levy’s Mia is a drug addict who spends most of the film as the unwilling antagonist, then gets saved by the decoy protagonist and basically has to navigate the finale with 0 context for what is happening, stepping up properly at the very end of the film.But anyway, looking forward to this still. It’s a bit of a shame we’re probably done with Jane Levy’s character though, she’s awesome and she deserves a proper big break. It feels like she’s been having it all the time between Suburgatory, that Evil Dead remake, Don’t Breathe, Castle Rock and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist but it just can’t happen for her properly.

coolgameguy-av says:

Good to see Lily Sullivan getting work – she’s great on Comedy Bang Bang! Especially that Australian character she does.

robgrizzly-av says:

I don’t think I knew what my threshold for horror was until these trailers came out. Nope nope nope! I cannot f*ck with movie.

mattthewsedlar-av says:

The original Evil Dead is NOT a comedy AND Bruce Campbell does have a cameo in Evil Dead Rise. Do you even Evil Dead?

jhhmumbles-av says:

I enjoyed the 2013 movie and feel the need to point out this website gave it the exact same grade as this new movie back in the day.

screwthatguy-av says:

This may be a potential spoiler: No, there is absolutely a Campbell cameo, albeit just an audio one. If you’re familiar with his voice, keep your ears open, it’s hard to miss.

stevennorwood-av says:

I *love* the original (not funny) and the second one (hilarious), but man, that 2013 update felt so mean-spiritedly grotesque, it really was hard to watch (of course, I’m getting older…certain depictions of violence are not “fun” at all these days). Knowing this has some sort of humor again will likely make me give it a try, but I am ready to wince.

monstachruck-av says:

A lot of wieners in here saying the original Evil Dead isn’t funny. Granted, I get it wasn’t made to be intentionally funny, but yall need to lighten up.

thefilthywhor*-av says:

I’d also like to argue that the first Evil Dead is not a comedy.*watches scene where Ash somehow finds another bookshelf to get trapped under*You know what? Never mind.

lugnuts22-av says:

Evil Dead Rise, not Rises, but I quibble. And I think the original is my second favorite horror flick of all time, after The Exorcist. It’s brutal and gory as hell and wicked as f*** and the remake sucked. The new one is gonna suck too. Yeah yeah yeah I love an insanely over the top splatterfest as much as the next gorehound but this one just looks like it’s trying too hard to be cutesy-horror. I will watch it online just for the splatter.

mrfallon-av says:

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)…That is an absolutely insane argument. If it ‘can be argued’, you sure as hell didn’t argue it, and I’d love to see you try.
You can’t just group things together and then say that because you’ve chosen to group them together, that’s an argument for a causal relationship.I’m not touching on the ‘comedy’ comment that others have – that’s actually the least weird suggestion, because a lot of people read the first film as a comedy, even if it doesn’t have a comedic tone baked in.I think that you could have done all of 5 minutes of research and you would have realised how unsound the argument that Evil Dead kicked off any sort of boom is. It’s influence on most of those films is pretty minimal, if present at all. I’ll grant you Dead Alive as the only one of those that probably wouldn’t have existed without Evil Dead.
Aside from that, absolutely baffling.
It’s also heartbreaking to me to think that we’re at the point in cinema history where “the 80s” is to young people what “the 40s” was to many people my age: it’s all just an amorphous blob of ‘the past’, rather than specific films made under specific circ*mstances, with varying relationships between them.
I know I sound like a fusty old guy but cinema history is important, man.

terranigma-av says:

Ticked the boring “oh so strong women” box PLUS totally cringe CGI… no thanks. Welcome to the golden raspberry awards

moggett-av says:

Bruce Campbell did voice work for this movie. That’s not a cameo but it was nice he was included.

cryptid-av says:

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.The influence of Evil Dead on Chinese Ghost Story seems hard to deny, especially once the camera starts swooping through the woods, in what must be the only Giant Tongue POV shots in all of the cinema (excepting the sequels). Arguably, producer Tsui Hark was already showing off horror imagery and wild camera movement in Butterly Murders (1979)and We’re Going to Eat You (1980), but neither of those movies is as Raimi-like as the Chinese Ghost Story series.I’m not as sold on the Mr. Vampire connection, but it would be cool if there was an interview to clinch it. Is there?Meanwhile, there’s another reason that these movies look alike: segment shooting. John Woo uses repeated camera positions in a western style, but many other HK directors (including Tsui and Ching Siu-Tung) tend to move fluidly from position to position with no master shot. Raimi has pointed out that Evil Dead didn’t use master shots because he was trying to save money on film, so in effect it’s HK-style segment shooting.

tollysdevlin-av says:

I believe that Sam Raimi who was influenced by those Hong Kong films rather than the way you describe it. One of our more astute movie critics here in Chicago at that time made note of the Hong Kong influence, particularly, of the work of Tsui Hark.

ohnoray-av says:

my theatre was packed and it was a tense viewing, it was very scary but still a lot of fun. One of the better horrors out in the last few years imo.

mrfallon-av says:

I watched the new film last night and, like a lot of the reprobates here, I’m a long-time fan of the original film, and the original two sequels (for different reasons).

I gotta tell you, this new film is the best bit of new Evil Dead content since then.

I didn’t like the remake, and I think the new film suffers one of the same flaws as the remake (I won’t spoil anything but I’ll leave it for the end of this post).
But overall, this movie does what I want an Evil Dead film to do: it feels most closely aligned to the original film but it does lift those aspects of the sequels that the tone is able to support.
Fundamentally it gets the beats right, and to me, one key trick a good Evil Dead film (or any good American horror film) plays is to tell the story so that the threat of trauma posed to the characters by the antagonist, runs parallel to the threat of trauma posed to the audience by the film. That’s why the first film doesn’t work for everyone, and why some people find the comedy as being more intrusive than complimentary to the horror: it can seem just a smidge too self-aware, to some sensibilities.
This new film balances that stuff really effectively, and for the most part, the pace and tone is really skilfully maintained. Everyone’s threshold lies in a slightly different place though, so there will still be people who feel that the balance isn’t right. All’s I can say is that I think it balances it at least as well as the first film.
The flaw I mentioned is that, like the remake, the climax is a bit, er ‘anticlimactic’. The film has done so much to torment the audience by that point, and the monsters have pulled so many tricks out of the bag to do the same to the characters, that the final fight sequence feels like less than what came before it: The Evil Dead have launched a full assault on the characters from all fronts up: physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological, so when the final form is just “a disgusting thing that chases you” it feels like less of a challenge than what we and the characters have already overcome. I seem to recall the remake had the same issue, with the climax being a kind of slasher-villain chase sequence? I could be misremembering as I only saw it once, but I do remember being left with that impression.
The new film gets away with it by just maintaining the ‘gruelling terror’ of it all, but in terms of what’s actually happening onscreen, you kind of feel like the physical mechanics of escaping it are less difficult than some of the other things that have happened.

ANYWAY, Evil Dead is back. I would really like it if the next one forms its own identity, rather than doing more of this, though. I don’t necessarily want to see the surviving characters back again, and I really don’t want to see the movies get bloated with lore. I just want more Books Of The Dead, new melodrama, new setpieces, and the same carefully sustained pace and tone. This film does have a wraparound ‘cabin in the woods’ story, so maybe we could get one more film out of that location, but this film ultimately proves that Evil Dead is capable of moving forward, and should do so, rather than, ahem, cannibalizing itself.

minsk-if-you-wanna-go-all-the-way-back-av says:

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 21You might want to get the name of the movie right.

joshuanite-av says:

For me it was a C+, not as balls-out as the 2013 remake-quel. Every single scene that might surprise you or make you flinch is in the trailer, which means this story could have been told in 3 minutes. I didn’t think it seamlessly blended humor and horror, either–it half-assed both and didn’t ever settle on a cohesive tone. I had a good time with it in the theater, but I won’t be seeking it out for a rewatch. It made me want to watch 2013 again.

jackstark211-av says:

Saw it Saturday and had a blast. I don’t think it was funny though.

ourmon-av says:

>Brain Dead (aka Dead Alive) which could be considered the best of the lot Yeah as much as I like “Dead Alive”, “Evil Dead 2″ sh*ts all over it on just about every level. That was an unneeded reach lol.

nekromar-av says:

I think the movie is a fantastic addition to the franchise. It’s probably my favorite one. I grew up with the old ones and watched the show and saw the remake. I liked the nods to other classic horror movies. This felt like a classic horror movie if that makes sense. While I don’t think they did much “new” I guess, I do think it’s more than the sum of its parts. This is the best horror film I’ve seen in ages. It’s got all the tropes, and I love the way they delivered it. There was no part in the movie that I called b.s. on. Nothing like Halloween kills (which was garbage) or malignant (which was ok but some parts, logic and delivery wise,I was disappointed in);I’m usually a very critical movie go’er. The character development was quick and easy to relate to these people as regular people and in general “good guys”. The whole thing was intense.