I agree with 90% of all reviewers here. Evil Dead Rise is a mediocre Horror film and a terrible ED film! In my opinion this comes down to three things mainly:
1. For some reason the audience feels no connection to the characters. Why they chose to write about an artsy Yuppie family of 4 with no dad in sight and a sister/aunt that brings nothing to the table except being pregnant and a "guitar technician" ...and expect us to give a rats ass is anybodys guess. I am not like them, I don't know anyone like them, I didn't even like them, so why should I care what happens to them?
2. The look and feeling of the SFX. The whole thing just looks way too overproduced, there is no heft and no punch to the violence, it kinda resembles a Netflix production that way. There were a couple of good FX shoots (the Chainsaw bit), but also a couple of very bad ones (bfs severed head in the beginning).
3. Tone: they neither went for the grim mood of ED1 or the 2013 version, nor the comedy horror of ED 2 and 3. It kinda was just there doing its own thing, but not in a very convincing manner.
I think the ED movies live on a very basic premise - Demons take over people, other people have to fight them (it gets richer with the lore, the Necronomicum etc., but the basic premise is just that). I really believe one could tell hundreds of interesting stories about that, but EDR wasn't it!
