EVIL DEAD RISE (2023)
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Label: WBHE
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: R
Duration: 97 Minutes
Audio: English Dolby Atmos (TrueHD 7.1) with Optional Parisian French, English, Latin Spanish Subtitles
Video: HDR10 2160P Ultra HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Lee Cronin
Cast: Lily Sulliva, Alyssa Sutherland, Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher
Evil Dead Rise (2023) directed by Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) continues the story of evil demonic forces (aka the Deadites) incursion into the land of the living as previous seen in Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness, the Evil Dead remake from a decade ago, and the three season Ash vs The Evil Dead TV series. It starts of with a brief cabin-in-the-woods prologue that seems disconnected from the main story, but we get a decapitation and scalping from it, and eventually it comes back around and makes sense. The story proper takes place in Los Angeles where an estranged guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan, the 2018 TV version of Picnic at Hanging Rock) arrives unannounced at the apartment her estranged sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland, Blood Vessel), a tattoo artist and newly-single mother to teenagers Danny (Morgan Davies, Storm Boy) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and adolescent kiddo Kassie (Nell Fisher). The apartment building Ellie is living in has been recently condemned and they're still looking for a place to move. The building is rattled by earthquakes, and it's during one of these quakes that a large hole opens up in the floor of belowground parking garage, revealing a chamber below. Adventurous Danny climbs down in and recovers a old book and a set of vinyl records dating from 1923 from what looks to be an old bank spookily adorned with a lot of crucifixes. The kid takes the book and the records up to his room, it turns out to be one of the three known volumes of the Naturom Demonto (aka Necronomicon Ex-Mortis), an ancient book bound in human flesh that serves as an enchiridion of demonology and spirit possession, this edition has some gnarly teeth along the open-edge of the book, keeping it locked, but when Danny cuts himself attempting to open it the book itself absorbs the droplets and opens on it's own, uh-oh. While leafing through the blood-inked pages he listens to the records he found with it, which reveals that a priest researching the book in secret back in the 20's had previously recited the incantation and summoned demonic entities known as Deadites. The act of listening to the record as the priest recites the incantations again unleashes The Dark Ones, and while Ellie is alone in an elevator she is attacked, tortured and overtaken by the invisible evil-forces when the power goes out. Now trapped in the run-down building Ellie's sister and children must fend off an all-out flesh-possessing demon attack, made worse by the fact that their beloved mother and sister is now a rotting-fleshed Deadite who uses their grief and familiar bond to gnaw at their souls before getting her claws into them.
The dilapidated building is a great location, the demonic attack set in an apparent complex has elements of Lamberto Bava's Demons 2 by way of the scuzzy aesthetic of David Fincher's Se7en. The look of it is dark and dank, everything is low-lit and feels dirty, it adds to the creepiness of it. The family unit make for sympathetic protagonists, the young kids are surprisingly likeable and they bicker like real sibling, as do the sisters, while also having that unbreakable bond, which proves both a strength and something to be exploited by the demonic forces. The design of Deadite Ellie is pretty great, played by Australian model/actress Alyssa Sutherland she makes for a loving but hip mom struggling with single parenthood at the beginning, and when she's been infected and possessed and goes after her family it's kind of a gut-punch, especially when she begins to rot and spew her venom, that delivery of "Mommie's with the maggots now" seen in all the trailers is so creepy, and it gets way worse.
The gore on display is exquisite, this is a bloodbath, at first we get some milky vomit, black orifice-ooze, discolored eyes, and subtle flesh rotting, which gets more extreme real fast, and once the killing come into play the grue factor triples. There are decapitations, scissors to the face, gun blasts to the head, glass eating, a spear through the mouth, an eye is sucked out, an eye is spat out, and a chainsaw and a woodchipper comes into play with all the expected geysers of blood that would imply. The Deadites at one point form into a grotesque amalgam of bodies like something out of The Thing and there's a nice nod to The Shining with an elevator scene with hundred of gallons of blood!
I was not disappointed by this entry in anyway, it's creepy, well-made, the plot is pleasingly simplistic, the cast is game, and I loved the bloody gore and all the callbacks to the original films, including a visual gag which I only caught during this most recent watch, pizza boxes from Henrietta's Pizzeria "Come Get Some!", with an image of an sweet old granny on it, loved it. If I was gonna gripe I would say I miss the splatstick humor of Evil Dead 2 and the Ash vs The Evil Dead TV series, this is pretty grim stuff, but that didn't really detract from my enjoyment of this latest entry in the franchise, this delivered the bloody demonic goods for me, it comes highly recommended, it's just too bad the WB did not care enough about this property to give it some damn extras!
Audio/Video: Evil Dead Rise (2023) arrives on 4K Ultra HD from WBHE in 2160p UHD framed in 2.35:1 widescreen with HDR10 color-grading, sourced from a 4K Digital Intermediate. This flick is drenched in darkness, the film takes place almost entirely in the dark with the exception of a brief cabin-in-the-woods prologue, set in an around a dank apartment building that is about to be demolished. The HDR10 on the 4K disc offers superior black levels and excellent shadow detail, the low-lit interiors are bathed in shadow, but the WGC color-grading really pulls out the color in these darker scenes, offering finely resolved digitally-shot detail with superior contrast. The accompanying Blu-ray is solid but even the well-authored Blu-ray struggles to resolve the deep blacks that are ever-present, occasionally slipping into murkiness as where the UHD excels. The color palette is pretty dingy with earthy colors, but occasionally some moody amber lighting or the copious amounts of blood will pop thanks to the HDR10.
Audio comes by way of a robust English Dolby Atmos remix (TrueHD 7.1 compatible) with Optional Parisian French, English, Latin Spanish Subtitles. It's a creepy sound design with plenty of discreet use of height and surrounds, when the cursed vinyl LP is played and the priests voice is reciting the incantations it gets real spooky in the room. There's plenty of low-end in the mix as well, which gives The Stephen Mckeon (The Cellar) score some heft.
Extras, well to quite Willy Wonka "You Get Nothing! You Lose! Good Day, Sir!" - WB give us absolute nothing for the films home video debut, zilch, zip, zero! I fail to understand how we get zero, not even a trailer for the film. i know this was originally earmarked for a HBOMax direct-to-streaming debut but tested so well it went to the cinema, maybe that had something to do with it, but that this made it disc bereft of any sort of extras is mind-boggling. The 2-disc release arrives in a dual-hubbed keepcase with a sleeve of artwork featuring the original movie poster key art with a metallic finish and the WB 100 Years logo at the top of the box. Inside there's a slip of paper with a code for 4K digital copy of the film, no extras on the digital either other than a Trailer.
Special Features:
- None
Screenshots from the WBHE Blu-ray:
SPOILERS AHEAD!
