Evil Dead Rise: A horror movie. That's it, mostly.

Never too far from cliche in a good year, the horror genre has more or less lapsed into a state of pure conventionality. You kind of know what you’re going to get every time you see a horror movie these days. There will be a lot of “jump scares,” and some weird clicky, jangly sound effects, and at some point a girl or a woman will contort herself while making strange groaning or growling sounds, and that’ll be about it, 90% of the time. There’s just not a lot going on these days. There are still some real winners out there—“Smile” was very enjoyable, and 2018’s “Hereditary” was among the scariest and most well-done horror movies of the last 25 years—but in the main there’s a staleness and tiredness to it all, with most horror movies too serious to be enjoyably campy yet too low-effort to be actually good. Everything sort of feels frozen in place circa 2003 or so.

Evil Dead Rise is also stale and tired. The fifth film in the Evil Dead series—yet another example of decades-old intellectual property being strip-mined right down to the clinkers—sees yet another group of people beset by yet another gleefully obscene and violent demon, lots of violence, tons of gore, lots of visceral closeups of weird body stuff, a double-barreled shotgun. Most of the prior Evil Dead movies have taken place in rural areas; this one takes place in decaying urban Los Angeles. That’s new, I guess. It ultimately doesn’t really matter. It’s not like they take the action to Sunset Strip or to Muscle Beach. As with most movies these days, both in and out of the horror genre, this one makes liberal use of an extremely limited color palette; everything is washed-out, dull, gray, monotonous (aside from the blood). The lighting is also maddeningly darkened. It’s impossible to see a considerable portion of the on-screen action unless you’re in a fully darkened room, like nail-the-blankets-to-the-windows dark. (We did not see this movie in the theaters because none of us was willing to pay theater money for what was, need I remind you, the fifth film in a nearly-50-year-old franchise.) The lineup of actors is, you know, they’re there. There’s a mom, Ellie, and she gets possessed and goes nuts. The actress does a reasonably okay job of depicting that. The mom’s sister, Beth, becomes the heroine, and she does some stuff that moves the plot along, stabbing demons and whatnot. I get that we’re supposed to celebrate the kickass female leads of horror movies these days, they expect us to really lean into that, and this one, she does okay, sort of. I can’t easily recall anything that made her distinctive. Nobody really stands out in this movie in any way that matters or is memorable.

That’s not uncommon. One of the chief crippling defects of modern filmmaking is that filmmakers have forgotten en masse how to make characters likable, or notable, or unique, or indelible in any effective way. I don’t know what’s going on in the writer’s workshops, but your average movie these days is generally populated by characters that aren’t just forgettable after the movie is over but who are barely noteworthy when the movie itself is running.

Evil Dead Rise is like that. Nobody is interesting; nobody has any really distinguishing characteristics that make you interested in them or what happens to them. Honestly the most memorable aspect of the characters in this movie is that they are all grumpy. Pretty much everyone is just a grump. Nearly all of them spend their onscreen time with sour faces and cranky demeanors. Why? Eh, it doesn’t really matter. There’s an absentee father in there somewhere, and the mom and the kids are kind of bent out of shape over that—sort of. It’s never really sold all that well. Aside from the youngest girl, who mostly serves as a means to hand the protagonist a weapon every now and then, nobody in this film displays much emotional range beyond irritability.

The movie is uninterested in exploring its human subjects much beyond those shallow depths. Many if not most films made today—horror or otherwise—suffer from that critical sort of character defect, where the writers couldn’t be bothered to craft a likable cast of personas and the actors couldn’t be bothered to bring any to life. Think of the great movies you love. Think of The Godfather, say. You can rattle off the great character traits of everyone in that movie in no time: Vito is cool and collected, Sonny is a hothead, Michael is cold and ruthless, Fredo is weak and stupid, Kay is a self-deluding sellout. Go see Evil Dead Rise, meanwhile, and see if you can similarly nail down any personality traits of anyone you saw in this movie. Big spoiler: You can’t.

Interestingly, perhaps the sole redeeming narrative device of Evil Dead Rise is found in Beth’s pregnancy: She discovers she is expecting a child within the first few minutes of the movie, and the film sort of lazily depicts her as fighting the daemons in part on behalf of her unborn baby. Her maternal instinct is rendered almost as an afterthought, barely there, blink and you’ll miss it, but anyway it’s there, offering a vaguely pro-life sentiment in an inadvertent sort of way. Strikingly, at one point the demon claims that Beth is carrying “two souls,” her own and that of her unborn baby’s, which is pro-life enough to be almost orthodox Catholic. That kind of subtle if unintentional anti-abortion message was probably too much for most critics; mega-feminist website Jezebel claimed that “part of [Beth’s] will to survive comes from bringing [her] fetus to life,” a masterful if craven elocution right in line with NARAL. I guess you shouldn’t put too much stock in a by-rote pregnancy plot device in a second-rate horror movie. But, I mean, it was something. You take what you can get in these situations.

There’s not much else there, though—the movie is rote enough that by the time the great climactic woodchipper sequence comes about, you’re pretty much done with it. There are no surprises here, just another entry in another long movie series, another missed opportunity to create something new in favor of creating something stale and warmed-over. That’s just the way it is these days. At the falling action, bested by the Final Girl with the chainsaw, Ellie’s demon-possessed head tells Beth: “You know, you really do look like Mom. And you're gonna fail miserably just like her.” A predictable corner-kick into the woodchipper and it’s all done. Evil Dead Rise fails, too—maybe not miserably, but a failure nonetheless, a demonstration that the present age of filmmaking is, if not evil exactly, most assuredly dead.