Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Rated R and I'm genuinely shocked that something like this doesn't earn an NC-17.  Maybe there is no NC-17 for gore because thse are a subculture of movies that take gore to the next level.  The violence and horror are aimed for being as disturbing visually as can be imagined.  Also, the language transcends most movies in terms of language.  Still, for some reason, this happened to sneak in under the R-umbrella.

DIRECTOR: Lee Cronin

I tell myself that I'm not going to watch movies like these.  There are movies that are so over-the-top and uncomfortable that they don't seem appealing.  Probably back in high school, I would have been all over movies like these.  I can imagine this being a movie that I would rewatch and show my friends, probably priding myself on not only tolerating disturbing gore, but laughing at it.  I'm an old fart now and I can see that my tastes in gore have changed.  But does this mean that I didn't enjoy Evil Dead Rise?  Oddly enough, I kind of dug it.  I mean, I have to really stress that I don't want to watch this movie ever again.  But I did enjoy it.  

I feel bad for Lee Cronin.  Lee Cronin is in that weird place where he was inspired by the original Evil Dead and all of the disturbing things that Ash went through in the original trilogy.  Cronin wouldn't really exist if it wasn't for Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert.  But there was this one shot that existed for the very few.  Raimi and Tapert, along with a handful of other filmmakers, were able to capitalize on a market that needed something like The Evil Dead.  Honestly, I was thinking about how things have changed so fundamentally in the past couple of decades that something like Evil Dead Rise just becomes another movie.  I feel bad.  Cronin made something here that should be lauded as one of the most disturbing horror masterpieces in history.  But even me, who was kind of jazzed to hear about another Evil Dead movie, left a movie that really made no mistakes, with a meh attitude.  And I realize that Cronin didn't have a chance because streaming has changed things.

I don't want to take anything away from Raimi and Tapert from their original film.  The legwork that everyone involved in that movie (yes, including and especially noting Bruce Campbell) is nothing short of mindblowing.  But there were all of these outside forces that made The Evil Dead the cult classic that it is.  Mind you, there are a hundred benefits to being a cult classic while simultaneously having a million downsides.  In terms of lore and cultural impact, being a cult classic is a way to secure a legacy.  Sure, you don't make the money you wanted to from the movie, but these movies weren't made to make a billion dollars.  Those movies, today, have probably paid for themselves both in home video sales and in job opportunities.  But at the time, they just did better than expected, recouping the costs of the production.  But living in a post-home video marketplace, something happens that makes cult classics near impossible to appreciate.  The Evil Dead made its marks from whispers after it was out of theaters.  It was a movie that people would whisper about.  One guy had a rough copy on a Betamax that he might pass around.  Having seen that movie paralleled the story.  A lost story that contained unspeakable evil was discovered and people had to view it to understand.  The real film became a meta story mirroring the plot of the movie.

But Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise, despite being one of the most upsetting pieces of cinema I've seen in a while, will come and go with the tide.  It's all because it is available.  The closest that today's audience can get to matching the original Evil Dead is recommending it to friends.  But they're also recommending this forbidden film amongst the accessibility to every other upsetting film that is instantly available, including the original Evil Dead.  That's kind of depressing.  I mean, I'm being a real elder millennial right now, but this might be one of the downsides of streaming.  I honestly am getting the vibes that cinema isn't being something precious anymore.  While film has had entertainment as one of its purposes, it is becoming something far more disposable.  Cronin didn't make a mistake in Evil Dead Rise.  I hinted at that earlier.  Evil Dead Rise is fundamentally an Evil Dead movie through and through.  He manages to find the balance of adding new things to the franchise without divorcing himself from the tenets of the series.  It's the perfect balance of new and old and that is impressive.  Maybe the tone is a little more intense, but I think that just comes with the fact that this is a big budget movie more than anything else.  There's the line from Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard says you can make no mistakes and still lose.  Yeah, that's a lot of what is happening with Evil Dead Rise.

One of the things that Evil Dead Rise made me realize is that Deadites don't really have rules.  I think the folks writing this movie also had the same epiphany.  In the original trilogy, Ash fights these monsters and a lot of them seem afraid of him.  He's a Deadite slayer.  Yet, sometimes Deadites just do their own thing.  If the movie is done with a Deadite, it stays dead.  If the movie wants another scare, the Deadite comes back.  I would have to go back and watch carefully, but I think that someone becomes a Deadite by somehow having some kind of blood swap.  That's what Evil Dead Rise plays with.  But I'm a guy that's all about rules.  I want to yell at the screen and tell them what to do from the safety of my home.  But Deadites don't have those rules.  

I'm going to give the people behind this script props.  One of the biggest complaints I have with horror and suspense is when it comes to kids.  The movies become about protecting the kids.  Adults can die Willy-Nilly.  But kids keep surviving.  It is meant to accentuate the potential loss.  But kids surviving actually takes the edge off the story.  But the people behind this movie decided to make the mom the bad guy and surrounded it with almost all kids.  Honestly, this is a horror movie where it's mom versus kids.  For the sake of grounding the movie in some kind of plausibility, we have a young aunt there.  I mean, lo-key spoiler alert: a lot of the kids die.  Not the youngest.  I suppose that we have to follow that contrivance.  The teenagers die some horrible deaths.  The little one and the aunt survive.  But I mean, they did have to kill some of the kids in this one.  This makes me seem like a sadist, wanting this.  But I just like the idea that you shouldn't make characters unkillable.  If the story is questioning who is going to survive, why even include them?  

There's a theme here that I have to unpack.  This is a story about a mother being a monster and the children having caused her to be the monster. Per Evil Dead standards, someone has to evoke the beast that causes the horrors to unfold.  In this case, Caleb, against the pleading of his sister, opens the door to the undead and mom is the primary antagonist of this movie.  Okay, cool.  Love it.  But Mom isn't abusive.  Ellie has recently divorced from her husband and is playing it way too cool considering that trauma that her family has experienced.  Now, this could just be a story about a supernatural presence killing a family.  Sure, that's what is literally going on.  But I like the idea that her kids have placed too much pressure on mom and now she's not the same person anymore.  Ellie is weird, even when she's not demon-Ellie.  She's a perfectly nice person, but considering that the movie treats itself like a horror movie from moment one, there's always something a little off about Ellie.  But if the movie is a metaphor, we have to look at Ellie as a person unable to be a person because of the creatures that made her this way.  Ellie, pre-demonizing, is someone who is defined by her solitude.  While she is surrounded by family, she seems to be holding up the world by herself.  Her sister has neglected her in her time of need and she has three kids who need help constantly.  It's not necessarily the Book of the Dead (the new name, I forget) that transforms her.  It's the earthquake.  It's this element of chaos on a dangerously unstable Jenga tower of stress.  As dark as this is, Evil Dead Rise might be a commentary on mental health.  

Part of that breakdown comes from the setting of the film.  I love that this high rise is the antithesis of the cabin in the woods.  I mean, Poltergeist III did it first, but whatever.  But Ellie's family living high up in this building that is destined to fall, both metaphorically and literally, at the end of the month, is such a great image for stress.  Yeah, we need Ellie to be a literal demon in this movie for it to have a modicum of fun.  Then it would just be a story about a woman living in America in a country that loves guns.  But this movie feels stressful.  While the original movie is about a bunch of kids fleeing responsibility and having a good time, only to have adulthood thrust on them with the possession of their friends, Evil Dead Rise is about my generation and the collapse of whimsy.  (Note:  there are a few really fun moments that remind me of the original Evil Dead, even though the film is way more intense than normal). Life isn't a fun time at the lake.  Life is finding a new house and divorce and kids hating you.  This is the horror movie that's a gorefest exploring that life is terrible and it just keeps getting worse.  Maybe making Deadites unkillable is a reminder that stress is unkillable.  I love the ending monster, the amalgamation of all of the Deadites (mainly because it's just the right level of silly and gross).  It's the perfect storm of all of life's problems needing to go into the woodchipper.

It's a bummer that Evil Dead Rise won't have the shelf-life of the original Evil Dead movies.  Heck, even the Evil Dead remake didn't have the staying power of the originals.  But that seems to be part of the dead that people have made.  It's probably easier to make an Evil Dead movie at a major studio today.  But it won't be something that transcends cinema.  No one is going to talk about this movie given time.