When last we met our heroes from “Evil,” they were stranded in the middle of a futbol stadium looking for an escape helicopter rumored to be able to take them to a safe haven. Instead they were met with nothing and found themselves in the middle of a field surrounded by wall to wall walking dead. According to this film, they survived this hopeless battle and are now on the move to learn more about this dread zombie apocalypse. Never has there been such a scattered and hopelessly awful sequel than “Evil: In the Time of Heroes.” While the original was no masterpiece, it at least strived to bring us something of an interesting and intense zombie picture that practiced the formula of the modern zombie films with a twist on the supernatural.
“Evil: In the Time of Heroes” offers no such advantage. Instead we’re subjected to a screenplay that is messy, horrifically written, and absolutely nonsensical. I could barely appreciate this as a horror comedy let alone an actual sequel. I could understand defying logic to keep our original heroes alive, but the film takes leaps and bounds of pure stupidity that it becomes much too difficult to swallow. The screenplay jumps back and forth in time for reasons that are never explained; we’re given a glimpse in to the time of the ancient Greeks, then we bounce back and forth between the prologue in to the apocalypse, and then after the apocalypse and for some reason the director brings back dead characters with barely a reasonable explanation.
I was puzzled at most of the directions taken with this sequel as most times I could never be sure if the director was merely kidding around with the material or thought most of this garbage would be good horror entertainment. Why do we need to see a character’s fight with someone over a parking spot in a flash back? Why does the same actor play his own mother and dress in drag? What was the point of seeing Greek gladiators in the prologue? If the director was trying to channel some form of comedy, then he failed absolutely and “Evil” is a poor follow-up to a potentially great series of films. I was fully prepared to enjoy the follow-up to one of the more zany zombie pictures of the last five years, and instead I was treated to complete and utter nonsense that could never be sure if it was playing the material for comedy or just didn’t have a firm grasp on its genre.