Groovy
Lee Cronin heads to Deadite territory and for an urban spin through the bloody, mucky, veiny ‘Evil Dead’ world.
Evil Dead Rise
Director: Lee Cronin • Writer: Lee Cronin
Starring: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher, Jayden Daniels, Mark Mitchinson, Billy Reynolds-McCarthy, Anna-Maree Thomas, Mirabai Pease, Richard Crouchley
USA / New Zealand / Ireland • 1hr 37mins
Opens Hong Kong May 11 • III
Grade: B
I don’t know about you but there’s little I like better in my gory B-horror than a good ol’ split diopter. Yeah, it’s a classic, possibly hoary, technical signal for creepiness and pressure but it’s a classic for a reason: shit works. So on top of possessed skittering, buckets of blood, guttural voices and, yes, a chainsaw, Irish writer-director Lee Cronin throws some split diopter into Evil Dead Rise. Bring it.
If you’re unfamiliar with genre king and Spider-Man 2 director Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking, gloppy, 85-minute (!) The Evil Dead (and/or Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn) it’s the ultra-low budget horror, then horror-comedy, that inspired a ton of 1980s and early-’90s lunatic horror or horror-comedy – among them Basket Case, Re-Animator, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, and to a degree more polished product like Gremlins and Ghostbusters. After realising the magnificence of Army of Darkness could not be topped, the franchise was dormant until Fede Álvarez’s even gorier reboot in 2013, Evil Dead (playing with “the” like Suicide Squad did) and then the Ash vs Evil Dead series. The latest to try his hand with Deadites is Cronin, who has dispensed with allegory (Álvarez’s film was about addiction) and returned to the series dumber roots and practical effects. Let the demonic games begin.
I said clean your room!
Not only does Evil Dead Rise crib from itself, it borrows generously from approximately a million horror sources, among them The Shining, The Descent, Haute Tension, Smile (poster art), Carrie and The Babadook, but for some reason it never feels like Cronin is ripping anyone off. Sure, he isn’t quite as determined to carve out subtext as Álvarez was, but there’s as vivid maternal instinct running through Rise that propels the narrative momentum. Never has making eggs for the children looked so sinister.
The cold open sees some horny … youths, they’re too old to be Friday the 13th-style teens, in a cabin by the lake have a run-in with a Deadite before switching to a grungy dive bar toilet where guitar tech Beth (Aussie TV regular Lily Sullivan) is testing positive for a case of the babies. Next thing we know, she’s on the skeevier side of LA, ringing her sister Ellie’s (Alyssa Sutherland, Vikings) doorbell inside a nearly condemned apartment tower. Cronin the writer sets up the family dynamic with quick brush strokes: Beth is fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants sister, always running off to more responsible Ellie when shit hits the fan. We know Ellie is one of those relaxed, non-traditional mothers because she’s a tattoo artist who indulges her kids’ creativity. Danny (Morgan Davies) is a budding DJ, Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) is prepping a sign for a protest, and youngest Kassie (Nell Fisher) is cutting off her doll’s head (preach, gurl). It’s LA, so an earthquake opens a hole it the basement garage revealing a hidden vault where Danny finds – what else – the (gorgeously rendered) Necronomicon, or the Book of the Dead, or the Naturom Demonto as it’s called here. Cue chaos ghouls.
At a push, Cronin positions Beth and Ellie as novice and paragon of motherhood, complete with insecurities and heretofore unknown fortitude, but like I said: at a push. Sullivan and Sutherland both do great work in creating a relationship that’s underdeveloped on the page. The actors clearly know these kinds of sisters, and so manage to make us believe them. And that’s good, because unlike the friends in the woods, Cronin pivots the story on a family destroying itself; there’s no safety in blood bonds in Evil Dead Rise, and kudos to Cronin for it. It also helps that the kids (with the exception of Kassie’s requisite dumb-ass door decision) are good kids. They’re loosey-goosey and rebellious in a normal teen way, but they’re fundamentally decent people who look out for each other. It means something when they get mutilated, a beat too many horror movies forget to ensure in the mad rush to shocking violence. The tension builds nice and slowly, and the stakes are upped in lockstep with that tension. Hearing Ellie vow to eat everyone’s soul and see her family “dead by dawn” is the basis of the horror. This is essentially a chamber piece, but make no mistake: Rise is lean and efficient, and does not skimp on gruesome, creative kills and “Oh, DAMN!” moments. Deliberately murky images and muddy colours to go with claustrophobic angles and long stretches of dead silence put this more firmly in the horror section of the video store, but there’s just enough levity to keep it darkly funny. Ellie the Deadite does not mince words about her “groupie whore” sister. Ouch. By the time Ash’s trusty chainsaw makes its appearance (but no Ash, except for some voice work by Our Lord and Saviour Bruce Campbell) Evil Dead fans will have been convinced the Deadites are in good hands with Cronin. Because yeah, that cold open? Just the beginning. — DEK