There was a surprisingly straight face attached to 2013’s bracingly nasty Evil Dead reboot, a surprise given both the knockabout humour of Sam Raimi’s original films and the genre landscape at the time. A visceral demonic body horror performed without a knowing wink and with a decent budget was not exactly run-of-the-mill back then and isn’t exactly commonplace now, despite the genre’s ever-increasing churn, and could explain why its robust box office performance didn’t immediately translate to more Evil outings.
A decade later at a time when dead franchises are coming back to life with more gusto than arguably ever before, Evil Dead Rise is an inevitable resurrection, following on from recent revivals of Scream, Hellraiser and Halloween and before we see more of The Exorcist, The Thing and Friday the 13th. Originally slated for an HBO Max premiere, it’s been wisely upgraded to a theatrical release, smart because of the genre’s consistent theatrical success and deserving because, unlike so many other straight-to-streaming productions, it looks and feels like a real movie. Irish writer-director Lee Cronin, whose debut, The Hole in the Ground, received polite acclaim back in 2019, has made an impressive leap to studio fare and while his film doesn’t have quite the horrifying impact of the last installment, it’s a solid stab.
