Evil Dead Rise 4K 2023 Ultra HD 2160p

Beth (Lily Sullivan) finds out she's pregnant and goes to visit her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie is a single mother raising three wayward children. Circumstances confront the family with a secret vault in an apartment building scheduled for demolition. It is in the basement rests a stack of deadly vinyl records and the book Necronomicon, inadvertently opened by a child and launched a series of nightmarish events. Demonic forces have been unleashed, have taken control of Ellie, and now plan to destroy the entire family trapped in the house.

Evil Dead Rise 4K Review
Beth (Lily Sullivan) finds out she's pregnant and goes to visit her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie is a single mother raising three wayward children. Circumstances confront the family with a secret vault in an apartment building scheduled for demolition. It is in the basement rests a stack of deadly vinyl records and the book Necronomicon, inadvertently opened by a child and launched a series of nightmarish events. Demonic forces have been unleashed, have taken control of Ellie, and now plan to destroy the entire family trapped in the house.

Ten years have passed, and the Necronomicon has reopened - in a calibrated version of "The Evil Dead," which fate has presented already the third incarnation. Fans seem to have stopped frustrating and reconciled: from Sam Raimi new "Dead Men" can not be expected, as in the 80's, definitely will not be, but the franchise has taken another turn after the remake of Federico Alvarez. When you think about it that way, regularly reinventing the horror bicycle isn't new at all - the same variety of lives "Scream" recently faced, much less the legendary and macabre horror franchise that coexisted with curses, zombies and the heroic Ash with a chainsaw. "Evil Dead Rise" by Lee Cronin is a "family" film, without any Ash, kitschy masculinity or even the seemingly indispensable forest cabin.

The new version is rightly ruled by women, an entire family of alternate-girls, among whom the mother and her transformation into a deranged infernal entity is certainly central. Alyssa Sutherland is a fortunate find, an actress who has shown by example how quickly one can go from compassionate patroness to a redheaded beastie driven by an evil force. Just as importantly, all this bacchanalia now unfolds in a high-rise building - that is, the writers have at their disposal not forest thickets and swamps, but endless corridors, parking lots and elevators on which you can experience all the wonders of camera-traveling.

Of course, you can't weed out the hackiness from the new Dead Men in places - the spirit of the franchise doesn't settle into Cronin's film, but rather is reproduced in the nominal rituals. The redesigned book ruins people's lives again, demonic entities break through doors, and the film implements its main model of communication with the viewer through audiovisual terror - intense sound and kaleidoscopic frame changes. But Evil Dead Rise feels much more at home outside of the franchise, opening up on its own to themes Raimi didn't want to touch - the vicissitudes of motherhood and family preservation as a matter of paramount importance. Now there's no place in the chain of damning events for Ash, slashing dead bodies left and right: keeping your child safe at all costs is heroism in terms of modernity, running away from the brutal kitsch of the '80s. The mother-sister dynamic has its place, but once the film gets into a bloodbath, the dramatic dimension takes on a tertiary importance - Cronin, echoing Raimi's sequel, suggests enjoying slapstick and meaty choreography. It's not as funny and gutsy as we'd like it to be, and modern horror is a strange monster, trying to sit on two chairs: seriousness and uninterrupted irony. In the case of Raimi and even Alvarez's remake, there were no such difficulties: in the former, irony reigns supreme over the material, in the latter, the ringing seriousness of realism. The main problem: Cronin spends the entire hour and a half looking for his cozy place between Raimi and Alvarez, never really figuring out what his "Evil Dead" is.

In terms of genre tools Cronin's reboot certainly did not fail - all the decorative possibilities in creating infernal horror "Dead Men" were successfully implemented: gallons of blood were used as much as probably no modern horror has ever spent, at one point all the living things in the frame turn into the likeness of meat dolls - a successful bridge to Brian Yuzna's propscene nightmares. There is even his own answer to Kubrick's "The Shining" with a blood bath in an elevator, and Cronin in general does not hesitate to play with the vocabulary of American horror of the 70s, winking at "The Exorcist" (with a half-parody scene with a hint of exorcism), or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The best argument is still the good old chainsaw that sets up the grammar of the plot, but it doesn't stop there: all the necessary stabbing and cutting objects, from kitchen grates to scissors, are scattered throughout the timeline. The nonstop, somewhat slack-jawed narrative gossip brings the story to the level of a body-oriented aesthetic, where only two things matter - how and where it's best to cut.

On the whole, "Evil Dead Rise" looks like a grunge work, frankly uncomfortable, shot almost like a perfect music video for alt-rock performers. To some extent, Cronin's film was also supposed to be an alternative, going to streaming services instead of cinemas (Dead Men was originally planned to be released on HBO Max), but the film was given a chance to enter the big theater arena. The critics were favorable to it - well, maybe the new spell will really work and there will be no need to restart Dead Man.