The free movie we have for this week’s Friday Fright Nights feature is the witchcraft horror movie The Evil Rises
A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Horror Movies YouTube channel every other day during the week – but on Fridays things get even freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
The Friday Fright Night feature we have for you this week may seem a bit familiar to some of you, because we have shared it as a free movie on JoBlo / Arrow in the Head previously… But its title is The Evil Rises, and how could we resist sharing a movie called The Evil Rises on the same Friday as the release of Evil Dead Rise? We couldn’t.
Writer/director Daniel Florenzano’s 2018 feature debut, The Evil Rises is a movie that gets right to the point. As soon as it begins a couple attending a party on the beach are already digging up an ancient, mysterious statue. And thanks to the fact that one of their pals just happened to attend a seminar on this sort of thing a couple months earlier, we have all the information we need to know about the statue just a few minutes into the movie. That means we’re free to just watch as the partiers decide to handle their discovery in the worst way possible… a decision that results in most of them being wiped out by the time the opening credits have finished. Now that’s a way to get a movie started!
The surviving partiers are then tasked with killing sixty-six people in six days so their new evil master can wreak some havoc. It’s a nice, simple story for a first-time writer/director to bring to the screen – and Florenzano definitely brought a unique touch to the way he tells the story. I don’t think any other filmmaker would have written this story, its characters, or its dialogue in a way that would come close to how Florenzano did.
The Evil Rises has the following official synopsis: A group of young friends discover an ancient statue that unleashes an evil spirit who enslaves them to collect human blood so that the evil spirit can come back to life and rule the world. It’s up to a detective, a priest, and a pizza boy to infiltrate the group’s sinister compound to ward the evil spirit from the Earth before it’s too late.
The film stars Bailey La Flam, Michael Glauser, and Julian De La Mora as the blood-collecting servants of the evil spirit, who is played by Erik Cram. As the detective we have Joe Paulson, with Ed Hollingsworth as the priest and Alec Lobato as Chazz the pizza boy. Viewers might spot adult actress Angel Cassidy along the way as well.
Sadly, Hollingsworth passed away in 2020 at the age of 72, after racking up nine screen acting credits over the last few years of his life. If you want to seek out Hollingsworth’s other screen performances, you can find him playing Dr. James O’Hara in an episode of The Golden Age: Heroes of Men, a butler in Daydream Hotel, Travis Bentley in the crime thriller Carbon, an older father in the short film A Son Never Forgets, Albert in the TV show Promiseland, a Lieutenant in the short film The Day I Woke Up, and Vagabond #3 in a TV movie called Kid Fix.
So check out The Evil Rises – after all, it’s free! Check out the late Ed Hollingsworth’s performance in this goofy fright flick – which remains Florenzano’s only feature film at this point, but IMDb promises us another Florenzano horror movie called Sellout is on the way. Then share your thoughts on the film by leaving a comment below or over on YouTube.
Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/the-evil-rises-friday-fright-nights/
