Evil Dead Rise Wants Us to Know That The Evil Dead Is Back, Baby!

If there’s anything that could have an entire audience cheering when a possessed pre-teen drags a cheese grater across her aunt’s calf like it’s a fresh block of cheddar, it’s an Evil Dead movie. The first film to grace the beloved franchise in a decade, Evil Dead Rise is everything you could ask for from an Evil Dead flick: It’s disgusting enough to make you physically recoil, it’s funny as hell and, perhaps most importantly, it might just wield more blood than I’ve ever seen in a movie.
Directed by Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground), Rise boldly ditches its familiar cabin-in-the-woods setting for a crumbling inner-city apartment building on the brink of being condemned. Living there is newly-single tattoo artist Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her three kids: Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher).
The film kicks into gear when Ellie’s sister, badass punk rock band tech Beth (Lily Sullivan), comes to visit after discovering that she’s pregnant. During Beth’s stay, there’s a lot of sisterly bonding, heart-to-hearts and, of course, gnarly torture. It isn’t long before Ellie is held captive by her building’s elevator in a clever take on Evil Dead’s woods scene, wherein the machine’s coils recall the original film’s vengeful branches.
After her time in the lift, it becomes clear that there’s something a little off about mom. She cooks an omelet garnished with a healthy dosage of eggshells. She offers her family a detailed account of a disturbing dream she had. She chases them through the apartment with a gigantic knife.
From that moment forward, Rise descends into utter, relentless, uncompromising carnage. I’m talking eyeball gore. I’m talking glass eating. I’m talking industrial grinding machines. Indeed, Cronin doesn’t take his chance to make a mark on the hallowed series lightly. He squeezes every ounce of blood out of these 90 minutes like his life depends on it, while also remaining faithful to Evil Dead’s wicked sense of humor (again, it takes a special kind of filmmaker to inspire such uproarious laughter at cheese grater torture).