Piggybacking off of yesterday’s review of a movie about possession and evil destroying a family, today I decided to look at the not-quite-sequel, not-quite-reboot in the Evil Dead franchise. Not sure what it is with this year’s Horrortoberfest but I have been going heavy on the movies with child murder/endangerment for this first week. It’s not even the theme, just happens to keep showing up in recent films.

There is a wraparound story that more closely resembles the classic Evil Dead with one of the single best opening title cards to a movie I’ve seen in a while but it isn’t our main focus. Instead we are focusing on mother Ellie, her children Danny, Bridget, and Kassie, and her visiting sister Beth. When an earthquake hits, it opens up an entrance to an old vault beneath the ground that Danny can’t resist checking out. Turns out the vault was holding some dusty old records and the Book of the Dead. Danny ignores his sister’s protestations to not mess around with them and decides to play the records setting off a classic deadite free-for-all inside the high rise apartment building.

The movie does a good job of both referencing the original movies while also doing something new with them. While many of the Raimi signature zooming shots can be seen and classic lines like “I’ll swallow your soul” or “dead by dawn” can be heard, the film eschews the campy, comedic tone of the original films in favor of a much more serious horror setting. Instead of horny young adults in a cabin, we have a single mother and her children plus a sister who is about to become a single mother herself. The change in setting and characters makes the possession of Ellie much more tragic and horrifying than it might otherwise have been.

This is also a movie made to please the gore-hounds out there that want nothing more than buckets of blood from their horror films. The director, Lee Cronin, said they used over 6,500 liters of fake blood for this movie (with most of that being for one especially blood-soaked scene). The generally unkillable nature of deadites (a term not actually used in the film since it would be a bit too jokey) means that you can get all sorts of nasty slashes, stabs, burns, and blasts. I also appreciate that every time I would think “But what about X” while watching, the movie would almost immediately address the concern in the most gruesome way possible.

There are things that don’t land especially well like Beth doing Bruce Campbell’s classic “Come get some” line, which feels tonally out of place. That said, I think the movie took the franchise and did something worthwhile with it.

Score: 4.5 out of 5