Daily Times

Just a skosh more than a decade after Fede Alvarez’s carnage-crammed “Evil Dead” reboot jump-started the horror franchise spawned by Sam Raimi’s low-budget 1981 cult favourite, writer-director Lee Cronin has delivered his own imaginatively scary take on the “Book of the Dead” mythos with “Evil Dead Rise.”

A kinda-sorta sequel, it offers incontrovertible evidence that predatory and possessive bogeymen are just as frightful when their hunting ground shifts from a cabin in a dark corner of the woods to a gone-to-seed apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.

Said building – aptly described by one holdout resident as a “condemned dump” – just happens to have been built on the site of a long-closed bank that evidently shuttered before certain mystical merchandise could be retrieved from its vault. Specifically, we’re talking about yet another Book of the Dead: an ancient tome with a binding of human skin that can serve as an entryway for savage supernatural creatures eager to infect and forage in our world. This particular edition was locked away along with some 1923-era vinyl recordings of a clergyman’s warnings about the dangers of even glancing between the covers. Trouble is, all it takes is an earthquake, and a curious adolescent living with his family several stories above the buried material, for all hell to break loose. Cronin bookends “Evil Dead Rise” with evil doings set in territory more familiar to franchise devotees. For most of its tightly wound running time, however, the new film remains within the dingy yet spacious apartment shared by Ellie, a woman still trying to cope with being abandoned by her husband and her young children Bridget, Danny and Kassie. Beth, Ellie’s estranged guitar-technician sister, takes time out from her out-of-town work schedule to discuss with her sibling an urgent matter – her pregnancy – just before the earthquake strikes. And before a gaping hole appears in the parking garage floor, leading to the long-sealed bank vault. And before Danny drags back to the apartment – well, you know what.involved.