EVIL RISING - ***

Directed by: Antti-Jussi Annila. Starring : Ville Virtanen, Tommi Eronen. Horror / Paranormal. Finland. 2008/2011. Runnig Time : 83 Minutes. Certificate : 15.

Do you like your horror films to combine scares with an episode of something from the History Channel. If so then Evil Rising may be just what you are looking for.

Taking us way way back to the year 1595 and the end of the war between Sweden and Russia, 2 brothers Eerik and Knut are set out by the government to draw up their countries boundries. Yet during the war, Eerik commited many killings including leaving a young girl chained up in a cellar and left to die.

Whilst out on their mission they encounter a mysterious village centred around a swamp, its key feature is a sauna which is believed to have the power to cleanse your previous misdeeds. Still with me?? Good....

And that is basically the premise of Evil Rising, the story tells of how it appears the girl returns to visit and haunt the brothers and the weirdness of the village they encounter, where no children are ever born and no one ever dies yet unusual occurances occur such as people gouging out their eyes or eating their own tongue. If i'm being honest, if I was in a shop and looking for a film, if I picked this up and read the preamble of the storty then it would be back on the shelf again.

I can't and won't be too harsh as the story is different and the film looks amazing, the harshness of the environment, the sheer remoteness of it all, the cold and unforgiving nature of the land that the brothers have been sent to divide is given great visual power within this film. But it falls down as for me it just doesn't capture me enough. I don't like my horror to involve me thinking too much and I like it to have an interesting subject matter but this one just felt very drawn out. The run time of 83 minutes felt like an eternity and I will be honest here that I broke it up and watched it over two seperate viewings, overlapping midway so that I hadn't lost on the second viewing what I had seen on the first.

If I had to draw one conclusion it would be that whilst the film looks good, it's content had bored me by the time anything exciting actually happens. It took till around halfway through the film before it picked up any sort of pace and even then it plodded along without any sort of major jumps or scares.

I'm sure there will be people out there that love this film but i'm afraid I am not one of them. It isn't bad per se but it just suffers from a story that just does not grab me and keep me interested for it's duration. Evil Rising has been out and around now for a few years under it's previous name Sauna and now it is seeing a UK release. If I am being honest it isn't really worth the wait and I took very little from it or would I return to it for a second viewing. Not a bad idea, novel even but whilst it looks great it falls down in it's execution.

Extras: Just a scene selection and one solitary trailer. To be fair, even if their was more, the films content would not have been enough to make me even slightly interested.

Kristian Keogh.