Evil Dead Rise (R18+, 96 minutes)
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4 stars
When it comes to watchable horror, there's nobody quite like American filmmaker Sam Raimi.
There's no end of horror films where the filmmaker wants to dump buckets of blood on its characters or engage in torture porn, but with his film series Evil Dead, starting with his 1981 original and peaking with the 1992 film Army of Darkness, Raimi made horror watchable by intertwining his gore fantasy with smarts and big laughs.
That series followed Raimi's lead character Ash Williams, played by Bruce Campbell, through three feature films, three seasons of the television series Ash vs. Evil Dead, a comic book series and even a stage musical.
In 2013, Raimi and Campbell let a new generation of filmmakers at their franchise's story, taking on a producer role for Fede Alvarez's reboot, also called Evil Dead.
This time around, Raimi and Campbell produce a continuation of the story, though quite removed from any of those previous works, handing the director's loudspeaker to promising Irish independent filmmaker Lee Cronin, who made a bit of a bloody splash with his 2019 horror The Hole in the Ground.
Those previous films are concerned with an unholy book called "The Necronomicon", which called undead things called Deadites up from their graves to terrorise teenagers foolish enough to camp at a cabin in the woods. In Evil Dead Rise, we are given to understand that The Necronomicon was one of three unholy books, and another has surfaced in a rundown part of Los Angeles.
Discovering that she is unexpectedly pregnant, guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan) jumps on a plane to go see the big sister who always seems to have the answers to her problems.
When it comes to watchable horror, there's nobody quite like American filmmaker Sam Raimi.
When she gets to the run-down apartment building big sis Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) lives in with son Danny (Morgan Davies) and daughters Bridget and Kassie (Gabriell Echols and Nell Fisher), Beth discovers that big sis has more than enough dramas of her own. With the children's father having recently deserted, and their building being issued a condemned notice with a month to vacate, Beth's issues need to take a back seat.
When an earthquake rips open a hole in their building's garage, an old vault from the 1920s the building was constructed over is unearthed, and in it Danny discovers a box with an old book and some record albums. On the records is the voice of a priest reading an ancient incantation, and suddenly the book is calling an old evil that first possesses mum Ellie who, now an undead evil thing, declares that everyone it the building will be dead by morning.
Filmmaker Lee Cronin most unfortunately doesn't emulate Raimi's humour or tongue-in-cheek ethos - this is pure horror, not particularly new or inventive, but respectful to the expectations fans will have for gore.
Cronin's effects and makeup and creature design crew do him proud, creating a new set of undead abominations and un-prettying the photogenic cast. Greatest transformation amongst the cast is Aussie Alyssa Sutherland's Ellie, with Sutherland almost balletic in her broken and contortionist physical movement when she becomes the Deadite version of herself.
Filmed in Auckland with an almost-all-Aussie and Kiwi cast doing superb accent work - only a couple of slips - the cast are uniformly superb, but the young British future scream queen Nell Fisher gives a very mature performances.
Cronin does know how to build tension, and I jumped out of my seat more than once, though he won't have put the frights into the studio executives who funded this thing, who should all be quite pleased with the way Cronin has set up another half-dozen films for the franchise.