It's depressing to watch the nadir of a beloved horror franchise play out on the big screen, especially if you loved the original films and the underappreciated 2013 reboot. This makes the glowing reviews from purportedly professional reviewers all the more puzzling.
I was expecting intense situations and moving scenes as the family members watch their loved ones suffer from demon possession and horrifying body dismemberment when it was revealed that Rise would feature two sisters and the three children of the one sister; unfortunately, I did not feel as if the characters had any sort of relationship to one another beyond being actors who had just recently met one another during the filming, we were informed that our 8-year-old niece's mother (your sister) was attempting to murder her. Now....ACT!".
Apart from the existing character disconnect, nothing about Rise feels like it belongs to the Evil Dead franchise, and if you took "Evil Dead" out of the title, you would have just another standard demon possession movie. Even though the film has received glowing reviews from numerous websites and "professional" critics, and it actually has a higher Rotten Tomatoes rating than the 2013 reboot, this level of absurdity tells me a few things: 1) Rotten Tomatoes is never to be believed; 2) the gender of the characters, the younger characters' gender flexibility, and three things stand out about modern audiences: 1) Girl boss attitudes are far more important than the movie's real excellence; 2) People are as simple as an Army of Darkness skeleton soldier.
Regarding my second point, I have no issues with an all-female cast—Mia was the only survivor in the 2013 movie, after all—but she possessed a certain distinction and badassness that only an addict in recovery who has already experienced hell can have. The characters in Rise, on the other hand, seem to have been chosen only for the purpose of casting a female character because that is the current Hollywood paradigm, which likewise portrays men as clueless buffoons who only serve to obstruct all that female strength on TV.
The characters' failure to question why their loved ones are suddenly being possessed or how they hardly react to truly horrifying deaths, scenes that were unintentionally hilarious as evidenced by the dozen or so laughing moviegoers, the pointless lake scene that was obvious time-filling content, and the kills lacking the same visceral impact are just a few examples of the errors that will bore you straight out of the theatre. The latter is because it is simply offensive to mutilate children or women, but there is a simple solution to that problem: DON'T cast children in a body horror film.
