It's a bummer to watch the lowest point of a favorite horror franchise unfold on the big screen, especially as a huge fan of the original movies (including the underrated 2013 reboot) making the high praise given by the so-called professional reviewers that much more perplexing. When it was announced that Rise would feature two sisters and the three children of the one sister, I expected high tension situations and emotional scenes as the family members hold witness to their loved ones being tormented by demon possession and horrendous body dismemberment; too bad for me I guess because I did not feel as if the characters had any sort of relation to each other outside of being actors who had just literally met one another on set and were told "this is your 8-year-old niece and her mother (your sister) is trying to murder her, okay? Now....ACT!". In addition to the existing disconnect between the characters, there is absolutely nothing about Rise that feels as if it belongs to the franchise and if you were to remove "Evil Dead" from the title, you would have just another basic demon possession movie. There are plenty of websites and "professional" critics who praise the movie as a success, it even holds a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than the 2013 reboot, but this level of absurdity tells me a couple of things: 1) Rotten Tomatoes cannot be trusted, ever; 2) the gender of the characters, the gender fluidity of the younger characters, and girl boss attitudes matters much more to the modern audience than the actual quality of the film; 3) People are as simple as an Army of Darkness skeleton soldier. Referring back to my second point, I have no problem with an all-female cast, it was Mia after-all who was the lone survivor of the 2013 film, but she held a certain distinction and badassery that only a recovering addict who has already been through hell can possess. The characters in Rise on the other hand, feel as if they were cast just for the sake of casting a woman character. They are not empowered for their life experiences or exploits (go ahead, I dare you to tell me that being a woman guitar tech is empowering) they are just women included in a movie because that is the current Hollywood blueprint which also happens to portray males as bumbling buffoons who contribute nothing except getting in the way of all that on-screen girl power. If all that female independence wasn't enough to bore you straight out of the theater, there are plenty of other mistakes that will, for example: the characters failing to question why their loved ones are suddenly being possessed or how they barely react to truly gruesome deaths, scenes that were unintentionally hilarious as evident by the dozen or so laughing movie goers, the pointless lake scene which was obvious time-filling content, and the kills lacking the same visceral impact felt during the 2013 reboot for the simple reason that mutilating kids/women is distasteful, but here is a simple solution for that issue - DON’T cast kids in a movie notorious for body horror. I left the theater disappointed that my favorite horror movie franchise is finally on the down swing of its existence, but it happens to the best of them, does it not? If it can happen to horror legends like Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Pinhead, and countless others, then the Evil Dead franchise is not immune and Rise marks the beginning of that end for this great franchise.