The Deadites are back, baby! Evil Dead Rise is now playing in theaters and ready to scare the pants off you. Arriving a decade after the last movie, the newest installment of the franchise has already gotten off to a great start after snagging $2.5 million in Thursday night preview screenings at the domestic box office.
“A road-weary Beth pays an overdue visit to her older sister Ellie, who is raising three kids on her own in a cramped L.A apartment,” reads the official synopsis. “The sisters’ reunion is cut short by the discovery of a mysterious book deep in the bowels of Ellie’s building, giving rise to flesh-possessing demons, and thrusting Beth into a primal battle for survival as she is faced with the most nightmarish version of motherhood imaginable.” Written and directed by Lee Cronin, Evil Dead Rise stars Lily Sullivan and Alyssa Sutherland as the two estranged sisters, with Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, and Nell Fisher playing Ellie’s young children.
Our own Jessica Dwyer loved Evil Dead Rise, giving it a glowing 9/10 in her review. “Evil Dead Rise manages to introduce and give you the history of the main characters fairly quickly and does it well,” Dwyer wrote. “But it doesn’t waste a lot of time getting to the nitty gritty and once it starts it doesn’t let up. The film is a brisk 97 minutes and it GOES. No one is safe either once mom Ellie is transformed into one of the most disturbing and terrifying female monsters I’ve seen in a while. Actress Alyssa Sutherland is fantastic in this and she worked with Cronin and his team to create not only parts of Ellie’s look but also her movements. It’s extremely effective and I feel like a lot of fans are going to love it.” You can check out the rest of Dwyer’s review right here.
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another ten years for our next Evil Dead movie, as Bruce Campbell has said that they’re hoping to make a new sequel every two or three years. “I think the stories will progress a little more now,” Campbell said. “We’re going to try and do them more like every two or three years rather than every 10 years. It’s also the first time Sam is working with his brother Ivan to create an overall Bible that will give future writers and directors an idea of where this thing should go next to potentially tie in some of these stories. So I think it’s going to get a little more tied in as the years go by. But because it’s all about the books. It could be a book in the past, a book in the future. It’s yet to be determined.” I suppose that all depends on how successful the new movie is.
Evil Dead Rise is currently sitting at 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. Let us know what you thought of the movie in the comments below!