Evil Dead Rise, in theaters Friday, puts a different enough spin on the Evil Dead franchise to justify another entry. It also retains enough familiar elements and homages to the previous films to ensure it still pleases the fans.
Beth (Lily Sullivan) visits her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Ellie's three children, Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). An earthquake opens up an old bank vault under the soon to be condemned apartment complex.
Danny finds a bound book that looks like a reprint edition of the Necronomicon. Evil Dead Rise reveals there were actually three Necronomicons, so there's still a third that has yet to appear in an Evil Dead movie.
The book also comes complete with vinyl records of a priest reciting incantations, which unleash the Deadite demons who possess Ellie.
Sutherland gives a bravura performance as the possessed Ellie. Having a Deadite use a mother's body to attack her children is a new level of Evil Dead terror.
Ellie's threatening insults to her family are way more personal than in previous Evil Deads, where groups of friends got possessed while vacationing in a cabin. Deadites also use modern appliances as implements of torture.
Each of Ellie's victims becomes another possessed monster. So the threat grows exponentially as the deadites soon outnumber the survivors.
Blood becomes a uniform the survivors wear. They get doused with way more red fluid than a single human body contains, or a dozen bodies, but that's also Evil Dead tradition.
Director Lee Cronin and cinematographer Dave Garbett find some fun angles on the apartment mayhem, yet never ape the exact angles of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy.
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Even the trademark shot from the Deadite point of view has its own distinct rhythm. Careening through a high rise also gives it a different flavor than zooming through the woods.
One sequence unfolds in the hallway but seen only from the point of view of a character looking through the eyehole of the front door. Cronin essentially stages the mayhem in front of a proscenium, with Ellie and her victims coming in and out of view.
The Deadites do use some familiar tactics. They destroy the building's stairwell, just like they destroyed the only bridge to the cabin in previous movies.
This actually makes Evil Dead Rise feel more consistent with the series. Sure, the Deadites can adapt to an apartment building but why wouldn't the Evil Dead use similar tactics to trap, mutilate and terrorize all their victims?
Other homages, like references to character or actor names, are simply callbacks that don't weigh on the plot either way. They're funny if one gets the reference but don't require homework to understand the plot.
The Evil Dead franchise was never as prolific as Freddy and Jason. Evil Dead Rise is only the fifth movie, although there were also three seasons of the Ash Vs. Evil Dead TV show following the 2013 movie remake.
Still, Evil Dead never spread itself thin. Evil Dead Rise shows there may actually be a franchise in transposing the Deadites to other environments besides remote cabins or castles.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.