I’ve never gotten on the hype train for the Evil Dead series. I certainly appreciate the legacy of the films themselves (a world without Evil Dead is a world without Braindead, and that would be a sad world to live in), and I don’t think any of them are bad necessarily. I just can’t seem to get into them as much as others have. The first Evil Dead just doesn’t do much for me (tree rape doesn’t exactly warm me up to a film), and while Evil Dead II is quite fun, I struggle to consider it more than just alright all things considered.
Army Of Darkness… yeah, okay, that film goes hard, I
can’t front. After truly hitting his stride with Darkman, Sam Raimi really cut
loose to deliver a properly gonzo and aggressively goofy bit of medieval
fantasy action-comedy ridiculousness. But even with how much I enjoyed it, considering the sharp change in setting and tone, part of me thinks that I got into this because of that change, rather than anything to do with the shared IP.
Now for the tricky bit: As an overall entertaining movie, Army Of Darkness is the franchise’s peak. But in terms of a proper scary film, I liked Fede Álvarez’s reboot/sequel thingy from 2013 more than either the original or Dead By Dawn. I really got into how it toyed with the franchise formula, using the Deadite possession angle as metaphor for addiction and withdrawal, making the astoundingly blood-soaked finale feel genuinely cathartic in how much progress Mia had made to get to that point. I’m also just a fan of how Álvarez handles atmosphere in films like that, really bringing the dread out of the situation.
With all of that in mind, I went into this latest addition to the franchise on a mixed note. I may feel a bit left out as far as the entertainment value of this franchise as a whole, but Evil Dead 2013 had me hoping that this could give me more of that expansion on the original material that could get me on-side with it. And yeah, it certainly did its own thing with the franchise lore, but I once again find myself a bit underwhelmed by the result.
For a start… well, there’s the start. It opens with a classic gory death isolated out in the woods, as per the franchise standard, and then suddenly transitions to "One Day Earlier" for the actual story. And then swings back round for the epilogue. Now, as an idea, I get why it’s here: Subverting audience expectations before settling them in with the film’s actual setting, that being an LA apartment building on the brink of literal collapse. But the execution only manages to convey that the film needed an opening kill, so… ta-da! Drone shot!
Once we get into the main story, though, things are quite promising out the gate. We follow single mother Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her kids Danny (Morgan Davies), Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher) as they get mixed up in Deadite horrors after Danny summons them with a dusty vinyl recording. The setting works well in establishing a tense mood, transplanting the ‘middle of nowhere’ isolation of the traditional woodland cabin setting to something more domestic, familiar, and eventually even more unsettling. It fits with the general idea of the Deadites corrupting ordinary people into perverse parodies of themselves, along with making just about any object in that house inspire dread out of fear of if it will be used on someone later. And oh boy, does a lot of it get used; expect to wince at the sight of cheese graters for a while after seeing this.
It also toys with the parental paranoia that codified writer/director Lee Cronin’s debut The Hole In The Ground, showing a familial relationship turn dark and twisted. This is the kind of shit I wanted to get out of a film like this, using the Deadites as shorthand for something real but no less terrifying. Here, that takes the form of an internal fear that, despite your best efforts, you could raise a child to be a monster, or even become a monster yourself in the process. That nagging feeling that any attempt to do right by those in your care will only result in repeating the same mistakes your own parents made, turning love into abuse wearing the face of love.
Well, that’s the subtext of the narrative, at least, and it doesn’t end up going much further than that. The relationship between all the family members, including Ellie’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan) who gets pulled into the whole mess, and even the characters on their own are unfortunately thin, so the impact of that underlying idea never becomes as truly unsettling as it could have been. Part of that is down to the Deadites still being all ‘your mother sucks cocks in hell’, when there isn’t really that much of a comedic vein in the film as a whole to make it work, but there’s this odd feeling that either character-building moments didn’t survive the final edit, or Cronin just didn’t put them in to begin with.
Of course, as much as I subscribe to the idea that, if something is brought up in a film, there should be a point to it, I get that this kind of development isn’t necessarily the reason why fans would check out this film in the first place. Mainly, it would be the scares and the gore, both of which are admittedly well done. The tension in the setting and the character dynamics allows for quite a few breath-holding moments, and there’s some solid creativity in the set pieces to do with the broken-down elevator, the aforementioned kitchen utensils and other items around the home, and a fittingly bloody finale. It even features a Deadite variant that, for a creature summoned by a Lovecraftian tome, actually looks like something out of a Lovecraft story. It’s arguably not as creepy as the idea of it, but all the same, points for originality.
Even considering my lukewarm feelings about the franchise as a whole, and the sticking points I’ve brought up in this review, I still can’t bring myself to feel that negatively about this film when all is said and done. As a straight-up horror film, it gets the job done, both in creating suspense and delivering on wince-inducing wreckage to the human body. I can even see how it would appeal to fans of the series as it stands, since it sticks to the formula while experimenting with the locale and general group dynamic of the main cast to show it has potential for even further expansion. But man, after how much I surprisingly went to bat for the 2013 reboot, I can’t help but see unfulfilled potential in how it handles parental fear in relation to the horror aesthetics.
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