HALLOWEEN HORROR: Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)

Socially-awkward Lennon (Krypton and Barbarian's Georgina Campbell) lands a position as a backcountry ranger in the (fictional) Arvores National Park.

The massive park is known for the large number of people who go missing there, including Lennon's sister when they were youngsters.

Lennon is determined to find out what is really going on in the dark and creepy liminal spaces of the heavily forested park, but encounters a conspiracy of silence among her work colleagues.

Head-strong and determined to march to the beat of her own drum, Lennon disobeys a direct order during a hunt for a missing person (who she actually ends up rescuing, thus attracting the ire of whatever is lurking in the darkness) and finds herself on five days notice.

It is during these final days of her first season in the park that things start to get really strange.

I had high hopes that Lovely, Dark, and Deep would be a solid blend of two of my favourite horror sub-genres: rural horror and cosmic horror, but ultimately it falls into a well-trodden formula seen in so many similar movies.

While it's thankfully not as grating as a pretentious Ben Wheatley rural horror outing, early Blair Witch and Picnic at Hanging Rock vibes soon give way to obtuse, clichéd and random imagery. 

There's an overly-long nightmare sequence that has Lynchian aspirations, and is clearly meant to be the closest we'll get to an explanation of events, but much of it ultimately comes off as being weird for weird's sake.

The film, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland (who wrote the far-superior The Wind) clearly has good intentions; there's an interesting idea buried in there but as a story it's poorly told.

The cycle of sacrifice to the hungry and unknowable spirits that inhabit the woods is a really novel concept, but is hidden among a lot of unnecessary distraction padding out the 87-minute run time. 

Clearly there isn't enough of the main plot, as written, to satisfactorily fill the movie's duration and so atmospheric artistry is called upon to inflate what is there.

On one hand there actually was much to admire in Lovely, Dark, and Deep but on the other was the inescapable fact that it was thin fare, reminiscent of so many other movies - both better and worse.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Rachel took one look at the Blu-Ray sleeve for Evil Dead Rise and proclaimed: "Oh my God! Doesn't that give you nightmares?"

From that reaction, I suspected I was on to a winner with the latest entry in the evergreen Evil Dead franchise.

But writer/director Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise did more than simply earn its place among the other flawless horror flicks to bear the Evil Dead moniker, it far exceeded my expectations.

After a grisly cold open that serves as a slight misdirect, focus shifts back 24 hours to a condemned tower block in Los Angeles where pregnant guitar technician Beth (Lily Sullivan, from the Picnic at Hanging Rock miniseries) is reuniting with her estranged sister, tattoo artist and single mum Ellie (Viking's Princess Aslaug, Alyssa Sutherland).

Ellie sends her kids - teenagers Danny (Morgan Davies) and Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and youngest child Kassie (Nell Fisher) - out for pizza, when an earthquake strikes.

The kids are in the parking garage under the apartment complex. Danny sees that a hole has opened up, seemingly leading into a dusty old bank vault of some kind.

He drops down to investigate - unperturbed by all the crucifixes  hanging from the ceiling - and comes away with a collection of old records and a strange book, which he thinks might be valuable.

Unwrapping the book in his bedroom, the fun begins... it is, of course, the Naturom Demonto aka The Book of The Dead aka the Necronomicon.

When he plays the records, he discovers they are recordings from the 1920's of a priest who'd found the book and sought church permission to translate it. When he was refused, he and a couple of other rebellious priests did it anyway... recording passages of the book onto the Shellac 78.

Naturally, if you've seen any of the other Evil Dead movies you can guess what happens next.

Ellie becomes possessed by the summoned Deadite and goes on a rampage, seeking to swallow souls and rain down chaos in her wake.

Transformed Ellie is a terrifying creature, both from her physical brutality and the psychological torture she is able to inflict on her children and her sister. 

Cronin's script cleverly transposes the "innocents trapped in an isolated cabin in the woods" setting from the original films to "innocents trapped in an isolated apartment in a rundown tower block", and it works wonderfully.

The constant action mixes canny foreshadowing of carnage to come with an abundance of Evil Dead standards (from a flying eyeball and a chainsaw to key lines of dialogue).

With pitch perfect pacing, this gradually escalates - as more people fall prey to the Deadites - to an amazing, over the top, grandest of Grand Guignol finales with so much blood... oh, so much blood.

Trapped inside their small home, the protagonists - and, ultimately, the antagonists - have access to a vast array of sharp kitchen implements, and other household objects that can easily be converted into weaponry, which leads to an abundance of creative violence (NB. the already infamous cheese grater moment is thankfully quick and not quite as graphic as it could have been).

Outside of the Evil Dead franchise,  Evil Dead Rise takes visual cues from numerous other horror films, as diverse as [REC 3] and Aliens (Kassie might as well be called Newt).

If it lacks anything, it's the broad slapstick humour of the Ash (Bruce Campbell) era movies, although the final confrontation definitely has its moments. Instead the 96-minute movie veers, in that respect, more towards the gritty verisimilitude of the parallel universe iteration/remake from 2013.

This is not a criticism, but an observation, because I didn't feel that Evil Dead Rise needed non-stop knockabout humour.

Without a doubt this is one of the best films I've seen this year. I love pretty much all flavours of horror, but my favourite is this kind of action-adventure horror, pitting man against monster.

Evil Dead Rises satisfies that craving, while leaving me hungry for more sequels from  Lee Cronin, who has proved himself a worthy successor to Sam Raimi et al who gifted us with the original Evil Dead.

• Evil Dead Rise is now available on Blu-Ray and DVD in the UK.