The Collegio Pittsburg's student voice since 1916
Himika Akram reporter
The fifth installment of the Evil Dead film series is here and this time, it is from the director come writer Lee Cronin. My forever favorite song “Que sera sera” gave that bone-chilling vibe when I was watching the trailer. Though from the trailer, the scary scenes looked a bit overdone to me. But after watching the movie, I felt for the real nature of this franchise it was needed.
Unlike the other horror movies, which normally take place in the rural areas or the suburbs, this one took place in the backdrop of a worn-out building of Los Angeles. So, we can call it an urban horror movie. This movie is a story of two estranged sisters Beth and Ellie. Beth comes to Ellie’s apartment with her own pregnancy news and to seek Ellie’s guidance on the matter. The 3 kids of Ellie- Danny, Bridget, and Kassie go out of the apartment to buy pizza.
At that time, an earthquake hit the apartment and left a gigantic hole in the parking lot. After returning, Danny investigates the hole and finds some religious artifacts there and a strange kind of book, which he took to his room. Later we got to know, that the book was the third edition of “Naturom Demonto”, and ancient book which contained rituals that used to be practiced by the priests in secret and they got abandoned by the church for doing so. This book had incantations which can unleash the Deadites of the past and present, which is the main antagonist of this franchise.
When the earthquake took place, Ellie was in the elevator and at that time Deadites possess over Ellie. Once she was out of the elevator, she was behaving very strangely and started attacking her kids and sister; and horrifically murdered her neighbors and their children in the hallway.
In some scenes, I got confused if Cronin tried to scare the audience or tried to be funny? Because some scary scenes were rather funny than scary. For example, the scene where the demon’s eyeball getting ripped out and fell on someone’s mouth, I did not find anything scary here. Even though Ellie got possessed and turned up against her own kids, she is a mom at the end of the day and that side begs the demon to stop, where we feel bad for the mother. There were many disgusting and upsetting elements here; but as I said, that is the theme of this franchise. It’s all about blood, crabwalks, crawling, grimace, bones cracking and grins; with some wicked humor added to it. But the good part is, probably this is the only horror franchise, where the violence and gores add to the scare factor instead of putting it there only to add shock value.
Acting-wise, Alyssa Sutherland definitely did a great job; especially with her freaky lines like “Mommy’s with the maggots now”. This was her groundbreaking performance till date. The use of practical effects was noticeable. One downside of this movie was too many references from the original one which was made by Sam Ramini. Sometimes it felt like overfeeding the audience with references to the visuals and iconic dialogues for that movie. The sound design definitely stood out and was probably the best aspect of this movie. It was a hundred percent successful to create the intensity and terror that was required in the scary scenes.
Overall, it was a great one to watch. 97 minutes would pass very quickly and would not let you sit bored for a moment. My rating of this movie would be 7 out of 10.