Well, there was literally nowhere to go but up from the original “Evil Dead”, one of the very lamest horror movies ever made, the movie that invented the “Ooops, we accidentally made a terrible horror movie—I know, we’ll call it ‘horror comedy’, as if we meant to make it bad on purpose! It’s ‘camp‘! Yeah, that’s the ticket!” excuse.
And this does go up from there. This basically tries to remedy all the flaws of the original by giving it a decent budget, nice-enough cinematography and direction, and even tacks on a new third act seemingly to try to fix the most irredeemable feature of the original, the terrible storyline. And in that third act, this movie actually rises all the way to the level of unremarkable hollywood pop-horror product. That’s about the peak of it.
Still a thousand times better than the original. Like $10 is a thousand times better than a penny, but still doesn’t even come close to making you rich.