Evil Dead Rise is a kindred unholy spirit to , and A Nightmare on Elm Street (the last of which is overtly referenced) substituting for originality.
Once Ellie is inhabited by the malevolent demon, her mouth becomes frozen in a deranged grin that’s the spitting image of the one from Smile, and she pummels her relatives with sub-The Exorcist profanities. Somewhere buried in Evil Dead Rise is an interest in motherly devotion and resentment, as well as a related fascination with bodily invasion and desecration.
Cronin, however, doesn’t make even a passing effort at developing such ideas; throughout, his prime focus is on rehashing sights and sounds that lost their vitality right around 1992’s Army of Darkness. More damning still, he refuses to enliven his proceedings with personality. Together, Beth, Ellie and their pre-adult charges don’t have an iota of the dashing cockiness or goofy charm of Campbell’s iconic series hero, so when Beth eventually performs Ash cosplay (replete with a chainsaw and a “Come get some!”), the contrast between the past and the present is depressingly stark.
Warner Bros. Pictures
At least Cronin doesn’t pull his punches on the gore. Evil Dead Rise has no qualms about putting kids through the ringer—or, per the garage’s convenient vehicle, woodchipper—which leads to a few passable instances of gruesomeness. Nonetheless, dim-witted character behavior neuters any sympathy for these characters and, worse, stymies engagement with their ordeal. When Kassie opens the front door to let her mom back inside, this despite seeing that she’s become a cut-up ghoul with crazy eyes and a wicked voice, the film resorts to head-smacking idiocy to generate suspense. And when that doesn’t work, it merely falls back on tattered genre shout-outs.
Evil Dead Rise is confirmation that—like so many that have come before it—Raimi’s legendary horror saga has run out of steam, continuing onward only because its easy-to-market IP value remains relatively high. With Cronin’s dreary installment, it’s become an undead beast with no purpose except to brainlessly feast on audience’s goodwill and destroy memories of more thrillingly evil times gone by.
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