In the Flesh: Evil Dead Rise

More than Raimi’s Looney Tunes camerawork or Bruce Campbell’s hammy, preposterously handsome stupidity as chainsaw-wielding protagonist Ash, it’s a certain streak of nastiness that defines an Evil Dead movie. Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise certainly has that going for it. The possessed Ellie’s (Alyssa Sutherland) hatefully faux-sympathetic “Mommy’s with the maggots now” is a wonderful piece of knife-twisting, and a scene in which likewise-possessed teenager Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) takes a cheese grater to the back of her aunt’s calf as a look of incredulous delight breaks like sunrise across her scabby, deformed features, as though she’s just stumbled into the discovery demonic penicillin is just pricelessly horrible. Cronin’s flick is at its best when it’s at its meanest, but it’s held back by uneven pacing and a weak, clunky script.

Right from the jump we’re treated to characters walking up to each other and saying things like “Hey, cousin”, a kind of awkward narrative hand-holding which serves only to disrupt immersion. The script isn’t confident in itself or in its viewers, relying on shopworn shorthand to convey basic information it might instead have gotten across organically with a little effort. There’s an attempt at a prologue-button sandwich set at a secluded cabin in a homage to the original film, but its connection to the events of the film is so cursory it might as well be a much shorter and less effective movie in its own right that’s been tacked onto the main feature. There’s a lot of lumpy, unleavened exposition, and while the lush sound design on the cursed records eldest child Danny (Morgan Davies) foolishly plays in his room covers for some of this awkwardness, it can’t make up for just how much information the film is trying to dump on us at once.

The chemistry between Ellie, her itinerant sister Beth (Lilly Sullivan), and the kids is pretty solid stuff, and the film clearly has some thoughts on motherhood, generational abuse, psychosis, and various other heavy subjects, but it doesn’t do much with any of it. The characters are underdeveloped, basically a few soundbites each, and the neighbors — who exist mainly to flesh out the kill count — are even less interesting. Not only that, but Cronin makes the mistake of slaughtering most of them partially off-camera while we look on through a peephole. We aren’t seeing much, but there’s just enough onscreen that our imaginations can’t run wild the way it might have had Cronin trusted in his (excellent, very skilled!) sound designers to sell the bloodbath with only audio. Shit or get off the pot, you know? Some fun effects, some weak effects, a total non-entity of a protagonist versus a deliciously disgusting villain -- call it a wash, more or less.