This is one of the most aggressive horror films I’ve ever seen. It is a brutal experience. Truly visceral, and unrelenting. This is absolutely not everyone’s cup of tea. It was beyond extreme. It was also really good.

This is the sixth installment in the evil dead franchise which began in a small cabin in Michigan when a group of young people decided to make a gross out horror/comedy. Ever since then the series has swayed back and forth between horror and comedy. Sometimes it’s more horror. Sometimes it’s more comedy. This movie is takes the gross out and the horror parts of the series and cranks those elements up to 11. And then for good measure it tosses in a couple of the weirdest and most macabre jokes possible. Jokes so dark you’re not even sure they’re jokes at all.

The film follows Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, she is married to an abusive bully who is part of an abusive and cruel family. The family just so happens to be the descendants of the professor from the first movie who found the book of the dead and brought the evil Deadites into the land of the living. When one of his family finds a dagger amongst his belongings that can end the Deadites forever, the evil descends in full force upon the family to destroy them and the dagger forever.

I have rarely seen a film that is this aggressive before. The edits are fast and hard. The sound design fills your ears with the squishy, gorpy, sounds of carnage. The effects work makes you feel the blood and guts to the point that you’ll want to wash afterward. And the camera angles are so close that you can almost taste the blood and decay. It embraces a maximalist style that I have seen before in the horror genre, but I’ve never seen it done this effectively or sustained across an entire runtimes the way it is here. The Evil Dead from 2013 is about as close as I’ve seen to this level of gruesome and gleeful gore, but it wasn’t sustained like this. It had downtime. It had lulls in which horrific things weren’t happening. There is no such reprieve here. Even when what we’re seeing isn’t horrifying, such as when Alice revs up a saw blade style weed wacker to defend herself, it is shot in rapid close ups that don’t give us a moment to breathe. We don’t even get the triumph of seeing the hero suit up. It’s all still horror.

This does get relentless and overwhelming. And that’s me talking. I who have seen a million horrors in a million movies found it to be a lot. I knew I was in for it when in the opening minutes a character is boiled alive in a lake and dies on shore only for the Deadite to step on his hand and the cooked flesh of his hand peels away underfoot to reveal the bones beneath. If that sounds like too much to you, then skip this movie, because that’s in the first five minutes.

The character interactions are also ossifying for a different reason. This is family that is full of abuse and refuses to acknowledge the pain and suffering they’ve inflicted. The matriarch is in full denial. The father is emotionally cut off and vile. The brother is a weakling and a coward. The favorite son is a controlling abuser. Every moment is fraught with tension. Even when demons aren’t consuming flesh there is still horror to be had.

All that is to warn everyone that they might not love this movie. I however really respected it. I enjoyed it for its craft and skill. I enjoyed the visceral terror it instilled. I liked the thrill of watching a filmmaker fully unleashed. This is a no holds barred style of horror filmmaking that I have not seen on this scale before. The story telling works really well. The character work is excellent. The horror is great. It worked for me, but it is absolutely not everyone’s cup of tea.

It was my cup of tea. I give it an A, but do avoid this one if you aren’t ready for a brutal experience.