The makers of horror movie sagas want no rest for their wicked creations — and from Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street to Child’s Play and Scream their numbers are legion. The owners of the Evil Dead franchise are no different. But where the aforementioned scary story cycles usually revolve around recurring characters — sometimes heroes, mostly baddies that refuse to die — the common denominator for Evil Dead movies isn’t so much a specific being but a prop, that cursed Book of the Dead. With its creepy descriptions of bodily mutations, sombre incantations and ability to manifest in the oddest of places throughout history, it resembles a satanic version of the Adrian Mole diaries.
The latest instalment, directed by Lee Cronin (his debut feature The Hole in the Ground was a cracker), at least breaks with tradition by unfolding mostly in a Los Angeles apartment building instead of a cabin in the woods, the book’s usual favourite place to corner and kill people. In a building about to be condemned, tattoo artist and cool mom Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and her three children welcomes a visit from Ellie’s sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), a rock-band guitar tech. The two teenage kids, Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), find the evil-incarnate tome in a bank vault below the building, uncovered after a medium-intensity earthquake, along with a 78rpm record that Danny, an aspiring DJ, foolishly slips on to his turntable.
Soon, Ellie is taken over by the book’s evil spirit and goes on a murderous rampage, attempting to kill not just everyone in her family but also the hapless neighbours and, most heinously, a fluffy cat. There will be not just blood by the bucketload but lots of eyeball gore, severed limbs and lashings of the slapstick theatre of cruelty that is the franchise’s signature, including a cheese grater applied to human flesh and a climactic deployment of a wood chipper.
Fans will devour it all regardless, but for viewers less invested in the series this gets repetitive. Worse is the absence of good one-liners, a far cry from the first three films, written and directed by Sam Raimi (still acting as a producer here), which had wit and invention as well as puréed brains.
★★☆☆☆
In cinemas from April 21
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