‘Evil Dead Rise’ Review: More Scary Stuff As Supernatural Creatures Once Again Play By the Book
variety.comJoe Leydon Film Critic Just a skosh more than a decade after Fede Alvarez’s carnage-crammed “Evil Dead” reboot jump-started the horror franchise spawned by Sam Raimi’s low-budget 1981 cult favorite, writer-director Lee Cronin has delivered his own imaginatively scary take on the “Book of the Dead” mythos with “Evil Dead Rise.” A kinda-sorta sequel, it offers incontrovertible evidence that predatory and possessive bogeymen are just as frightful when their hunting ground shifts from a cabin in a dark corner of the woods to a gone-to-seed apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.
Said building — aptly described by one holdout resident as a “condemned dump” — just happens to have been built on the site of a long-closed bank that evidently shuttered before certain mystical merchandise could be retrieved from its vault.
Specifically, we’re talking about yet another Book of the Dead: an ancient tome with a binding of human skin that can serve as an entryway for savage supernatural creatures eager to infect and forage in our world.
This particular edition was locked away along with some 1923-era vinyl recordings of a clergyman’s warnings about the dangers of even glancing between the covers.
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