The Deadites are back – kind of – in director Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn, the sixth feature film entry in the long running horror franchise. A direct follow-up to 2013’s Evil Dead and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, Evil Dead Burn follows a grieving family to their doomed home in the woods following the untimely death of restauranteur, Will. But family tension will soon take a back seat to gritty survival horror when undead demons crash this family reunion in typically gory Evil Dead Fashion.
Will (George Pullar) and Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) marriage is on the rocks. At first glance it looks like typical passive-aggressive jabs have just built to an unsustainable volume, but when a drunk Will escapes from his brother Joseph’s (Hunter Doohan) birthday party after a nasty spat with his bride, a Deadite in the road sends his car flying off the road, ending the fight for good, or so everyone thought.
After a bit of a disastrous memorial service in which Alice, seemingly relieved that her nightmare marriage is over, shows up less than enthusiastic about publicly grieving, the family returns to their home in the woods to debrief and decompress. Will’s parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), clash with Alice, who seems to be shutting down emotionally at a time when the family needs to band together. Joseph and his partner Thya (Luciane Buchanan) try to keep the peace, all while Grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) weaves in and out of the situation, largely unaware of the increasingly tense atmosphere.
It doesn’t take long before the demonic presence that took Will rears its ugly head in the house, and one by one claims the family members, turning this reunion into a fight for survival.
While the Evil Dead franchise may not have been the most popular series of the ‘80s boom, it has most definitely been one of the most consistently entertaining. Each film is distinctly different from the last and they’ve somehow all managed to carve out their own individual niches while maintaining a standard that binds them together thematically even as they vary wildly in execution.
The most recent entries, the 2013 remake and its 2023 sequel, are considerably more dour in tone than any of the earlier films but still managed to exude a gleeful spirit that plants them firmly in the world of The Evil Dead. Evil Dead Burn does not, instead, it mistakes sloppily integrated trauma porn and the occasional moderately disturbing gore gag for substance, making this film the first entry without much to recommend, even as it tries desperately to recreate the magic that the series is famous for.
A large part of Evil Dead Burn’s success depends upon the audience relating to Alice, who is supposed to have experienced life-altering trauma at the hands of Will, and whose survival depends upon defeating this trauma to escape this house of horrors. The biggest problem with that is that her past is barely a blip in the film’s narrative, we get glimpses of the combative relationship between the two, and Will is certainly presented as a villain with a violent temper, but the pieces don’t add up to the character we get in Alice. She is the family pariah, and it seems as though the rest of the house’s guests won’t be sad to see her go now that she’s no longer related by marriage, and frankly, I can’t blame them.
With a compelling protagonist out the window, the film can only hope to recoup its losses through the Evil Dead’s signature giddy, over-the-top violence, where it again falls flat. Vaniček comes to the series after having directed the very fun Infested, a festival favorite about an apartment block that is overrun by deadly spiders. He proved with that film that he knows how to stage and execute exciting action, but here it all feels rote. There are very few effective scares to be found, and even the film doesn’t seem to be having much fun with its set pieces, with a few exceptions.
The script by Vaniček and Florent Bernard does very little with the well established Evil Dead mythos, treating it almost as an afterthought or as something they were forced to integrate. The film actively mocks Evil Dead canon by refusing to adhere to the tenets and truths of the world, breaking the inner logic of the series and turning its back on the reason the films have managed to be so successful in spite of all of the wildly varying approaches taken by different filmmakers.
Evil Dead Burn wants to be as violent as the 2013 remake, but it fails to deliver the genuine shock of that film because, frankly, it’s all been done before. Instead, it presents the audience with half-assed attempts at gore gags that have been more successfully executed with more emotional and visceral impact numerous times in just the last few years.
If experience has taught us anything, it’s that there is more than one correct way to make an Evil Dead movie. It’s not a franchise like the slashers of old where plots and tones were rehashed and reused in the name of turning a quick buck. Sadly, what Evil Dead Burn has taught us is that there is a wrong way to make an Evil Dead movie, and sadly this is it.