Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Evil Dead Rise forgoes the more comedic tendencies of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness and gives us a film whose tone is more in line with the 1981 original and the 2013 remake.

Evil Dead Rise is an excellent reboot of the original Evil Dead film that forgoes the more comedic tendencies of Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness and gives us a film whose tone is more in line with the 1981 original and the 2013 remake.

The film has a tendency to get very creepy and the gore effects are spot on. It also moves the action from the old cabin in the woods and moves it into a major city which opens up a whole new world of opportunities for any future films. As a horror film, the movie has a lot of creepy imagery that makes it feel at times like a haunted house film, and fits right in with great “apartment horror” movies of the past like REC. 

There’s also a lot of fan service and some Easter eggs for Evil Dead nerds. For instance, when Danny is in his bedroom we see a Three Stooges poster behind him, but rather than Curly the third stooge is Shemp, a reference to Sam Raimi originating the term “Fake Shemp” in reference to Joe Palma being an obvious double in Three Stooges shorts after Shemp Howard’s death but before the casting of Joe Besser. During the making of the original Evil Dead, a good chunk of the cast abandoned the production because of delays which prompted Raimi (an avowed Stooges fan) to use several friends and crew members as doubles, which he coined “Fake Shemps.”

The film has many callbacks to the original as well, with many of the set pieces from the original recreated here. I don’t want to go into too many specifics to avoid spoilers, but you do get a lot of the things you’d expect from an Evil Dead movies.

Personally, I like the original Evil Dead more than the more comedic sequels, and this falls in line with those. It’s definitely not for the squeamish.