Evil Dead Rise (18)

Guitar technician Beth abandons life on tour to visit her estranged sister Ellie, a struggling single mother with three kids Bridget, Danny and Kassie and an urgent need to find a new apartment. A 5.5 magnitude earthquake rocks the city, causing structural failures in the basement that expose an old bank vault and a copy of the Naturom Demonto, once safely entombed beneath crucifixes and other totems of protection. Danny secretly takes the tome and some vinyl recordings.

LondonNet Film Review

Evil Dead Rise (18) Film Review from LondonNet

The volume of blood in the human body varies depending on a person’s size, but can be around 10 pints. Writer-director Lee Cronin’s relentlessly grim horror thriller, the fifth chapter of the Evil Dead series, sprays every last drop of that glossy liquor across the screen as residents of a rundown Los Angeles apartment block fall victim to demonic forces which have been terrorising the big screen for more than 40 years. Anyone of a nervous or squeamish disposition will face a rollercoaster 97-minute ride of impressive make-up effects and splatter that treats the human body as a vessel for torture and evisceration…

The wanton carnage begins in a tense prologue set at a picturesque lakeside retreat where friends Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas), Teresa (Mirabai Pease) and Caleb (Richard Crouchley) read Wuthering Heights, fly a drone and take a dip in the cooling waters that none of them will forget. Cronin’s script rewinds 24 hours to focus on seemingly unconnected characters in peril, who have the misfortune to come into close contact with an ancient book of the dead, the Naturom Demonto, bound in human flesh.

Previous Evil Dead films have unleashed malevolent forces in isolated locations but the latest instalment transplants the terror into the heart of a bustling city in a similar fashion to Scream VI, which also found there is no safety in numbers – just a larger volume of potential victims. As an exercise in gratuitous gore, Evil Dead Rise utilises a multitude of sharp objects to flood interiors in glistening crimson and rapidly shorten the life expectancy of everyone on screen, including cherubic children and household pets.

Guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan) abandons life on tour to visit her estranged sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a single mother with three kids Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher) and an urgent need to find a new apartment. A 5.5 magnitude earthquake rocks the city, causing structural failures in the basement that expose an old bank vault and a copy of the Naturom Demonto, once safely entombed beneath crucifixes and other totems of protection. Danny secretly takes the tome and some vinyl recordings and unwittingly unleashes hell in the building with the family stranded on an upper floor without stairs or a functioning lift to spirit them away to safety.

Evil Dead Rise sacrifices nerve-shredding scares at the altar of slaughter, steadily increasing the body count with scenes of intense violence that fully justify an 18 certificate. Flecks of macabre humour (“Mummy’s with the maggots!”) are a welcome relief from the copious bloodletting as the cast scream and whimper through stomach-churning set pieces.

– Kim Hu