Movies
MTV’s “Scream” Gets New Cast…
Most of the core cast for MTV’s “Scream” series was announced a couple weeks ago. Now they’ve announced four more actors, with one replacing the previously cast Amy Forsyth.
From THR:
Willa Fitzgerald will star as Emma Duvall, a classic beauty whose looks and popularity hide a natural shyness and intellectual nature. Her new life with the “in crowd” leaves her estranged from her childhood best friend, Audrey. Emma is the lead in MTV’s Scream take and bears a resemblance to Neve Campbell’s tortured high school student Sidney Prescott in the 1996 feature film.
Taylor-Klaus, who has been recurring on The CW’s Arrow as DC Comics character Sin and whose credits also include The Killing and House of Lies, will replace Forsyth in role of Audrey, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. She’s described as an artsy loner who aspires to be a filmmaker.
Bobby Campo (The Final Destination) will recur as Seth Branson, a hot English teacher at Lakewood High who has an easy charm and is clearly one of the “cool” teachers, who can go with it if a lesson plan gets a little off-track.
Connor Weil (Sharknado) will be a series regular and portray Will Belmont, an all-American high school basketball player who adores his girlfriend, Emma (Fitzgerald).
Joel Gretsch (Witches of East End, V, The 4400) is set as Sheriff Clark Hudson, a good guy and good sheriff who is father to Kieran (Amadeus Serafini). David Arquette famously portrayed the lovable sheriff in Williamson’s features.
How good is Seth Branson’s character description? “Who can go with it if a lesson plan gets a little off-track.” So awesome.
As a fan of the franchise, I’m looking forward to this. I just really hope it doesn’t have the ugly vibe of Teen Wolf.
The Evil Dead universe expands this weekend with the arrival of Evil Dead Burn in theaters, unleashing a demonic siege upon a grieving family. Director Sébastien Vaniček doles out a gauntlet of pain from beginning to end, and that includes the credits.
While Evil Dead Rise skipped out on credit scenes, Evil Dead Burn follows 2013’s Evil Dead with the inclusion of a mid-credit scene and a post-credit scene, extending the Deadite mayhem to the very end.
Vaniček uses the mid-credit scene for levity, injecting one last punchline of gallows humor regarding the Price family. It also raises questions on where that carnage leads. But it’s the post-credit scene that holds larger franchise implications, sure to get fans talking.
It also doesn’t make much sense.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead!
Evil Dead Burn directly ties to Evil Dead Rise, with a possessed Jessica (portrayed in the new movie by Greta Van Den Brink) brutally dispatches a pair of fishermen before leaving the lake in search of those in possession of the Kandarian dagger: the Price family. Deadite Jessica kicks off a new wave of terror when she targets eldest son Will (George Pullar), using him as a Trojan horse into his family.
The Evil Dead Rise connections come full circle in Burn’s post-credit scene, bringing back a fan-favorite Deadite.
In this scene, the daughter of the cremator hired to handle Will’s remains gets curious about a shelf of unclaimed ashes. Among them are the ashes of Ellie Bixler. The girl, left alone while her mom is tending to a client, hears a voice she mistakes for her mother. It’s not.
The voice guides her to a mirror, where she sees not her reflection but that of Deadite Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie wastes no time dispatching the child, claiming with a grin, “Mommy’s back.“
Sutherland’s Deadite performance remains a standout in this franchise, but Ellie’s appearance here doesn’t make much sense beyond fan service. Evil Dead Rise final girl Beth (Lily Sullivan) reduces Ellie, who’d assimilated into the Marauder, to a bloody pulp via tree shredder in the film’s climax. There’s not a lot of flesh or sinew left to cremate, to start. To really get into semantics, the Marauder was an amalgam of multiple Deadites in one, so separating her remains from, say, Danny’s (Morgan Davies) or the neighbors seems like an impossible task.
The Marauder in Evil Dead Rise
It’s also jarring in that Deadites tend to prefer to make their torment personal. Ellie has zero connection to this random child. To further nitpick, there are likely much closer crematoriums to Ellie’s home, even if the lake and Price household are in the general region.
Most of all, Vaniček plays so fast and loose with the Deadite possession rules that this scene breaks from the established norms in a confusing way. There’s no dagger here or incantation to summon a demon, so it’s not clear how just being in the presence of her ashes summons her here.
Does any of this really matter? Not at all. The haplessness of this scene’s inclusion doesn’t seem to suggest anything other than a fun momentary reprise of a fan favorite character. It does, however, seem to leave the door wide open for Ellie’s full return.
It’ll be a while before we find out if that is indeed the intention behind this scene; the next is Evil Dead Wrath from director Francis Galluppi (The Last Stop in Yuma County) set for theatrical release on April 7, 2028. It’ll predate all Evil Dead films with its 1972 setting.
Evil Dead Rise
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