Film Review: Evil Dead Rise will please fans of the legendary splatter series

Evil Dead Rise for Declan Burke weekend movie review

• Evil Dead Rise
• ★★★☆☆

Evil Dead Rise (18s) is the fifth movie in the Evil Dead franchise — as well as a TV series and a musical — and things keep getting more and more evil, if not actually more dead. 

The ancient Sumerian text that has caused all the bother since the original Evil Dead (1981), the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, shows up in the basement of a Los Angeles tower block after a minor earthquake; when aspiring DJ Danny (Morgan Davies) plays the dusty old vinyl records he discovers with the book, he unleashes a malign presence that possesses the body of his mother, Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), who immediately commences to chow down on her family — her daughters Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher), and sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) — all of whom are trapped in their apartment after the quake knocks out the power. 

Horror maestros and Evil Dead veterans Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are on producing duties here, with Irish director Lee Cronin in the hotseat, following up 2019’s The Hole in the Ground with a movie fully in step with the franchise’s excessive commitment to blood-‘n’-gore. Employing body horror, grotesque contortions and chillingly incongruous nursery rhymes, Cronin tosses in lashings of the old claret (there’s even a neat nod to infamous tsunami of blood in The Shining), although all the bloodletting fails to disguise the complete absence of motive or logic behind the evil’s relentless pursuit of ‘terror through total chaos.’ 

That’s unlikely to bother the franchise’s fans, of course, who will probably have a whale of a time cheering on all the severings, stabbings, skewerings and decapitations.

(cinema release)