We are fans of the Evil Dead movies. We’ve always loved director Sam Raimi’s go-for-broke brio, his proof-of-concept examples of how Three Stooges-style slapstick could pair nicely with Grand Guignol levels of gore, the way the films took modest budgets and simple ingredients — kids, demons, a cabin in the woods — and somehow used them to create gonzo horror soufflés. Despite the in-house mythology becoming more complicated once things moved to the small screen, the sheer pleasures of the series remained. It was the rare modern-horror franchise to revolve around a hero (shout-out to Ash Williams) rather than an iconic killer. Its resident big bad was a book. A tome bound in the flesh of the damned and inked in blood, but still. Even when the films got a “soft” reboot in 2013, courtesy of Uruguayan writer-director Fede Álvarez, the switch from ha-ha to holy-shit intensity still managed to capture the twisted, tainted spirit of the original trilogy.
So we do not say this next part lightly. Please, please, please stop making Evil Dead movies. Pretty please. With a Deadite-possessed cherry on top. Enough already.
Suffering through a few minutes of Evil Dead Burn — the second film in an attempt at semi-anthologising the franchise following 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, with a title that sounds like what you’d get if you read the Book of the Dead aloud without the proper amount of sunblock — is enough to convince you this is the only sane path forward. We know that Raimi, who’s still a producer on the films, and the folks at New Line/Warners are currently planning a prequel right now. We know this plea will fall on deaf ears, and far be it from us to keep anyone from keeping their bank accounts full. It’s not too late to pull the plug and go gently into the night, however. Because movies like both Rise and this new one are what make discerning horror fanatics cynical and ruin a franchise’s good name. If this is where you want to start taking things, it’s time to give the Evil Dead brand the boomstick.
From the moment Burn‘s first big scare drops, you can sense that French director Sébastien Vaniček is trying to mix things up a bit, at least in terms of the look and feel. The setup and location are roughly the same as Rise‘s opening: Some folks are hanging out on that one pier near that one lake by that one cursed cabin. A female Dead-ite from the previous film pokes her head out the water, and after some nasty business involving fish hooks, she proceeds to boil someone alive by upping the lake’s temperature. (Fire will be a recurring motif, yet this idea seems like a strange way to justify the movie’s title.)
Vaniček was responsible for that arachnophobia-nightmare fodder Infested from 2023, and the idea of injecting some late New French Extremity into the Evil Dead bloodstream is tantalising. Franchises live on familiarity, whether you’re a horror-film series or McDonald’s. Longtime viewers can attest that fresh transfusions, both ideological and aesthetic, are what keep things creatively vital even while you maintain the core elements and, in this case, free-floating camera movements. But there’s immediately the sense that something is off. There’s a doubling down on the pain infliction that’s meant to seem edgy, but just feels overly self-conscious, like a kid sniggering over the fact he just told a joke with dirty words. It’s an early sign of trouble, tone-wise and quality-wise. Things are about to get even worse on both counts.
Because Evil Dead Burn does not want to be just an Evil Dead movie — it wants to be something close to a Eugene O’Neill play with genre benefits, a Fangoria-approved family melodrama. Sounds intriguing on paper, right? First, you meet your final girl du jour, Alice (Climax‘s Souheila Yacoub). She’s a French woman who’s married into a very bad family, via a very abusive husband (George Pullar). Her dickhead of a spouse has an encounter with the female Dead-ite from earlier, which leaves him a) deceased and b) possessed.
His brother (Hunter Doohan) and the brother’s girlfriend (Lucianne Buchanan) are dear friends of Alice, and support her in her moment of grief. Alice’s mother-in-law (Tandi Wright), father-in-law (Erroll Land), and her husband’s dementia-suffering grandmother (Maude Davey) don’t care for her at all. After the world’s most awkward funeral, everyone convenes back at the family’s nearby vacation house. Long story short: The Book of the Dead gets read, the hunt for a mystical dagger takes on massive stakes, a number of people turn into Dead-ites, family members turn into growling ghouls intent on punishing the living, things get nasty.
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Once the story gathers everyone into the house and lets the mayhem start in earnest, an overall feeling of Gothic grimness and rotting-corpse griminess takes hold. The movie then leans so heavily into the decay-heavy visuals that you realize that’s the only card in its deck; imagine someone watched old Marilyn Manson music videos and the opening credits of Seven, then thought, “Why worry about narrative dynamics when I can just make the whole movie look like that for almost two hours?” One long shot involving Alice crawling through nonstop carnage happening above her, behind her, and in front of her makes you believe Vaniček can choreograph chaos if need be. But so much of this is just generically extreme splatter dialed up to 11. The phrase “torture porn” used to get thrown around a lot, yet the various scares and gorehound money shots here simply feel like hardcore torture, rinsed then repeated.
For some folks, a few “ew, disgusting” moments is enough. They want to see something that’s the cinematic equivalent of a roller-coaster drop, a fright-night outing on a Friday night. Yet Evil Dead Burn barely gives you that adrenaline-rush dump. It just wants to gross you out without trying very hard, and then throw a few tidbits of fan-service chum into the water for good measure. The fact that it ladles all of this onto a story about family trauma and dysfunction doesn’t make it profound. It simply makes it a genuinely pretentious slog instead of a regular bad-horror-movie slog. You can picture Ash Williams rolling his eyes at the faux gravitas of it all. Save this shit for the Saw movies.
On its own, Evil Dead Burn might just feel like a misstep. Coming after the equally questionable previous entry, however, this feels like a last gasp. It’s nothing but dead on arrival. To those in charge of the brand: Stop now, and maybe you can retain some of the series’ good name. Keep going along these lines, and you risk losing your audience. We can only be burned so many times before we simply give up.
From Rolling Stone US
