You can never get lost. You stop looking at your family for a second and suddenly an ancient curse hits you where you become possessed thirsty for blood. Or just a streaming platform decides to upload one of the highlights of the yearespecially in the field of the fantastic, without prior notice and out of the blue.
It is a bit what happens now, giving us a good joy before the weekend to the fans of the most festive horror and with a tendency to gore. If we do the measurement there will likely be few movies this year with more gore per square foot. Although it is not the only remarkable thing that a film like ‘Infernal Possession: The Awakening’ has to offer.
waking up the monsters
The latest attempt to continue the Evil Dead saga is now available to stream through HBO Max, the Warner Bros. platform that was in charge of producing and releasing the film. Lee Cronin receives the baton from Fede Álvarez, the last director to reboot the Sam Raimi trilogy, although he also keep up the gore trend that marked the film of the Uruguayan filmmaker.
After a formidable prologue where we are once again introduced to that tireless and frenetic evil force that turns people into deadites, the film introduces us to a guitar technician in the middle of a tour with a group. After news that leaves her in shock, she goes to visit her sister’s house and her three children in Los Angeles. There a powerful earthquake hits the city, leaving the building without light and revealing a series of mysterious recordings and a book that will cause release from evil.
The tensions between the sisters due to their different ways of life mark the story in a similar way to what Cronin’s previous film, ‘Cursed Forest’ did, which explored family tragedies through terror. But here the Irish filmmaker changes the calmer tone, almost the misnamed elevated terror, for a wild and beastly touch, since It has more resources but also a franchise image to maintain.
‘Infernal Possession: The Awakening’: macabre and funny
It is not a problem in this case, since the film recovers the best parts of Ávarez’s ‘Infernal Possession’, almost acting as a sequel even though it is not really the case. The sum of festive terror and relentless gore It works like a charm in his case, avoiding falling into too much affectation for the dramatic part of the story and delivering quite effective sequences everywhere.
Its black humor is radically different from that of Raimi’s films, which had more elements of self-parody and physical comedy, but it is nonetheless rabidly entertaining. The use of deadites is brutal, with the actress Alyssa Sutherland shining in this most twisted and macabre facet of the film, and in just an hour and a half he manages to put you on a roller coaster of violence and viscera of the most fun.
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