A bit too mean spirited for my tastes. Something that Sam Raimi's originals had was a perfectly seamless blend of slapstick comedy and practical effects driven horror ingenuity. There was never any doubt about the tone being light despite the absurdly dark subject matter, especially in Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness which both deliberately eschew the very notion of tension in favor of a gags-per-minute approach that rivals a ZAZ comedy. Evil Dead Rise tries a little bit too hard to have its cake and eat it too, a complaint I feel I use frequently especially for these later franchise entries. The amount of genuine attempts at tension, scares, or otherwise disturbing the audience can do almost nothing but fall flat because my investment is elsewhere. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I don't go to an Evil Dead movie to be scared, I go to laugh my ass off. This could work if the movie also treated its more serious subjects as comedy beats, y'know almost as a parody of current "elevated horror" trends (there's an elevator pun in there somewhere), but the characters' collective stupidity and the movie's unwavering straightforwardness convince me otherwise. It just wasn't funny enough to work in that way, and it wasn't scary enough to work the other way.

In Evil Dead 2, Ash's hand is bitten and becomes possessed/infected/whatever. This causes it to inexplicably gain a maniacal pitched up laugh. Bruce Campbell breaks plates over his head and does other Three Stooges-esque pratfalls, the hand itself carries Ash's unconscious body across the floor to get to a meat cleaver, and then the only way to rid himself of this terrible affliction is to cut his hand off. Afterwards the hand crawls around and flips him off as he shoots at it with a shotgun. The comedy comes both from the absurdity of the situation as well as a little slice of relatability, like chasing a fly around with a swatter and getting the distinct feeling its mocking you. It also comes quite clearly from the way the scene is presented, with the footage sped up and Bruce Campbell ADRing various grunts despite his mouth clearly not moving in the shot. It's graphically violent once the blood starts spraying during the hand severing, but it isn't exactly shocking—it isn't trying to be. It's silly more than anything. You don't get any close ups of the hand being cut because all that would serve is to make the audience squirm, something the scene isn't trying to do. Similarly, Ash cutting off his own hand could be framed as loss or sacrifice, but instead he turns around to mock the hand, saying "who's laughing now?!" His stark raving madness at the situation he finds himself in isn't harrowing, I mean the movie is simply too brightly lit to ever come across that way, rather the whole thing is a big joke. Despite the characters taking things seriously, the audience isn't ever supposed to.

Evil Dead Rise has its moments, certainly. The apple biting foley did not go unnoticed and it did make me laugh out loud. The convenience of having a shotgun and a chainsaw become available in an apartment building was also one of those handwaves that felt appropriately shlocky. Sticking something up someone's nose does have a comedic edge to it, although the follow up blood spill gave me Budd Dwyer flashbacks which is frankly not something I ever want to be thinking about when I'm trying to have fun. This is where I mention again how much I dislike the mean spirited tone. It almost feels as if the fun is at the audience's expense, like a "haha, got you, made you flinch" kind of comedy that leaves the recipient in just slightly too much distress to laugh. And comedy isn't even really the right word for it. There are some gags that are obviously comedic, but many of them are just gross out gags or shocking imagery meant for discomfort. Along the same lines, you have a plot about a mother getting possessed and trying to kill her family which is certainly disturbing and a good plot for a movie, but it just feels a bit at odds with those sprinkles of comedy found elsewhere. The movie too frequently asks me to be scared for these poor people, to which I ask the movie "why?" It's a bit cynical on my part, but it took until the final act until I actually started to get interested in seeing how things played out because by that point the movie had stopped caring and just started going for it. Scenes of people arguing about who's at fault or being sad about their dead mom are just too serious to also be in a movie with a blood elevator. The contrast is never focused on enough to make me think it's the point, either. To say it again, having its cake and eating it too. These things are treated as being at odds and played with balance in mind instead of incorporated into each other, an outcome I would've much preferred to have seen.

This is not strictly a bad movie just because I saw some faults with its presentation. If what you want is some pretty extreme gore and violence, you'll have it. If you want Evil Dead references, you got it (this is yet another decades later sequel that devolves to unabashedly dumb self reference for the sake of lowest common denominator audience cheers, "the way your parents remember it" yadda yadda, you know the routine). If you want to laugh your ass off at a slapstick comedy, unfortunately this ain't it. I recognize my complaints about it lacking slapstick are my own expectations brought in from the franchise and not from what I was promised from the trailer or the movie itself, but Evil Dead Rise also never impressed me or subverted my expectations either. It didn't even lean in, rather things play out pretty stock. The characters are brain dead. The plot is barebones and often screeches to a halt. The themes are wallpaper. But if these are things you don't mind so you can get to the parts where people are getting slashed up, stabbed, flung across the room, or dismembered, then you'll probably enjoy yourself more often than you get frustrated.