John’s Horror Corner: Evil Dead Rise (2023), a worthy sequel to the distinctly superior Evil Dead (2013).

MY CALL: Yes, I miss the cabin in the woods setting. And yes, Fede Alvarez’ film was much better and captured the meanness of it all so perfectly. But you know what? I still thought this was a well-made, goretastic, brutally insidious delight. So there! MORE MOVIES LIKE Evil Dead Rise: Like a lot of gore and a lot of feistiness? Here’s a stylistic mix for you… The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Final Destination 5 (2011), Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010), Drag Me to Hell (2009),and of course Evil Dead (2013), Evil Dead 2 (1987) and The Evil Dead (1981).

Boldly following in the footsteps of Fede Alvarez’ Evil Dead (2013), writer and director Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) approaches our belovedly brutal franchise for his second feature film. The cinematography boasts eerie shots of trees converging upon a triangular cabin in an otherwise gorgeous, sunny forest. Possessed vomiting (Anna-Maree Thomas); a brutally abrupt hair-clump-yanking scalping (Mirabai Pease); and an eye-twitching disembodied head (Richard Crouchley) give our cold open the fleshy exposed skulltastic wildfire that the franchise deserves. The director of photography, the scoring, the effects… are all on fire setting the dire yet feisty tone. Even if this sequel leads us to the big city, it naturally had to start with a cabin in the woods.

Horror in the big city SIDEBAR: If you want more confined skyscraper, hotel and apartment building horror, consider Shivers (1975), The Shining (1980), Demons 2 (1986), Dark Tower (1987), Poltergeist III (1988), Shakma (1990), Gremlins 2 (1990), [REC] (2007), 1408 (2007), Devil (2010), The Belko Experiment (2016) and Mayhem (2017).

Cut to the city in California, where Beth (Lily Sullivan; Picnic at Hanging Rock, Monolith, Dark Place) is dropping in on her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland; Blood Vessel, The Mist, Vikings) and her kids Danny, Kassie and Bridget, who live in a condemned building scheduled for implosion. When an earthquake exposes cursed possessions of generations past, the book and recordings of Evil Dead fame are among them. Cue evil!

Much of Evil Dead’s iconography continues through Evil Dead Rise. The Book of the Dead is harrowing as always; we summon a Kandarian demon; the POV of evil forces torpedoes via shaky cam whilst roaring through city streets and hallways; and the infamous “tree scene” is recreated with electrical wires in the elevator… but this time, it’s less of sex crime.

Now with the elevator no longer functioning and the stairs collapsed from the earthquake, Beth and the kids are trapped on the 14^th floor with Ellie, who is… just not feeling herself. Once possessed, Ellie becomes a slinky, crawly, contorty fiend capable of vomiting more gobbledygook than any human body could possibly produce. It’s deliciously gross.

From here the horror violence is mean and bloody, and the dialogue is a bit insidious. We enjoy some face-biting madness leads to an eyeball gag reminiscent of Henrietta’s eye-popping from Evil Dead 2; the cheese grater gag was vicious; so much more vomit and blood and mean stabbery; the bloodiest elevator scene I’ve seen in a long while; and an evil-spirited Dead by Dawn chant. Oh, and then there was the many-limbed abomination reminding me of The Church (1989), Zygote (2017) or The Color Out of Space (2019) followed by a groaty meat-grinder finale.

I must admit that having an Evil Dead movie not take place in a remote cabin in the woods feels more than a bit off, and I did rather very much prefer Evil Dead (2013) to Evil Dead Rise. But at the same time, just how many times did we want to see that old yarn reimagined in such confines? Okay, maybe a bunch. And while Rise never really reached the dire OMFG atmosphere of the original or rebooted Evil Dead (2013), it still does an impressive job if you can resist comparing them so directly… which, I know, is hard.

Ultimately this was VERY entertaining, VERY flesh-laceratingly brutal, extremely bloody (as well it should be), and generally well made. It was definitely missing something for me—not a lot, but that extra Evil Dead layer of mean hopelessness that wasn’t gripped as tightly as I wanted. But it also was definitely awesome to watch and it scratched a very itchy Evil Dead itch for me. So having issued my biggest criticism of the film, I hope they keep making more. This was dire and feisty, my favorite combination of horror flavors.