Why Assume Benevolence from the Dead?

Beware books made of human skin locked in the basement for a hundred years. No such warning reached the protagonists of 2023 Evil Dead Rise to prevent undead mayhem from being unleashed. Director Lee Cronin helms this latest in the long running Evil Dead franchise and he seems to at least understand the best qualities of the series even if he can't completely deliver them. Still, this film is better than most of Ash versus Evil Dead.

The film was shot in New Zealand and for some reason Irish director Cronin found himself with a cast of almost entirely Australian or New Zealand actors playing Americans. The two leading actresses manage to keep American accents but many of the supporting actors fail so consistently--including one of the first onscreen--that for a moment I really thought, "Is this film set in Australia?"

But actually it's set in a decrepit, if improbably sprawling, L.A. apartment. A young mother called Ellie lives there with her three kids and they're visited by her sister, Beth, who works as a sound technician for a rock band. Ellie calls her a "groupie" and one of the film's attempts at giving Beth something like an Ash-ish personality is to make her really sensitive about it. If the film really knew what it was doing, it would have provided a name and some details about the band which would have been a good way of deepening Beth's character.

Actress Lily Sullivan as Beth gives a decent performance but the movie never really decides who she is. She's given a couple of classic Ash lines but they don't take because she's not the common schlub driven to madness by circumstances, she feels more like just another average Final Girl. Although she's not the Final Girl, which is another problem with the film. The body count wasn't high enough.

Part of the problem is that women still aren't generally allowed to be common schlubs, especially not lately.

Hiring a genuinely creepy looking woman to play Ellie was a good idea, though. Even before she becomes a Deadite, actress Alyssa Sutherland looked more than a bit like the Joker. The film turns into a cruel mockery of a corny "family is togetherness" story and, if you're not too uptight, you'll find yourself laughing along with the Dead as they pick the wings off these cartoon characters.

They don't really hit the sweet spot Raimi managed in Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. He managed to make Ash someone we could at turns root for and enjoy watching in torment. It wouldn't be a good idea to replicate Ash but if the new films want to play in the same ballpark they need a protagonist with more personality than Beth. Still, Evil Dead Rise isn't so bad.

Evil Dead Rise is available on Max.