Evil Dead Burn Forgets to Have Fun in it's Hyper-Violence

The Evil Dead franchise has a lot of goodwill behind it. The Sam Raimi-helmed original three movies are beloved DIY 1980s practical horror masterpieces. Fede Alvarez’s 2013 sort-of- remake reinvigorated the franchise with a darker and more-wicked energy. Lee Cronin gave us 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, which took the franchise out of the woods and into a decrepit apartment for a fun, sinister, family-focused and even bloodier entry into the series. All this to say, there is no such thing as a bad Evil Dead movie. This trend continues with Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn, albeit to diminishing returns. Vaniček continues the trend of the “new” Evil Dead movies’ fixation on hyper-violence, shocking kills, and mean spiritedness, but he loses some of the chaotic fun of the previous, better entries in the series. 

Ever since Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell passed off their franchise to new, up and coming horror directors, the Evil Dead movies have thrived by catering to audiences that crave extreme violence and grisly kills. Evil Dead Burn understands this almost to a fault. The movie opens, once again, in the woods. The grandson, Joseph Price (Hunter Doohan), of a deadite scholar is searching through his late grandfather’s cabin where he finds his Necronomicon research and the Kandarian dagger. Fortunately for him, the dagger is the only thing that can kill the evil dead or “deadites”. Unfortunately, his discovery of the weapon summons a deadite to his location in the hopes of seizing the dagger for herself to protect deadite immortality. The scene is set and now the bloodfest can begin. Two innocent fishermen in a nearby lake are sadistically killed in the deadite’s pursuit of Joseph and the dagger, but he ultimately evades her and makes it back home. He’s safe, for now. 

In a very French-flourish, the film smash-cuts from the untimely death of the fishermen to a raucous club with booties bouncing and beats blaring. The club is also where Joseph is now celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), his toxic and abusive brother Will (George Pullar), and Will’s French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub). Will and Alice get into a physical fight (because Will is a bad man who hurts women), and Will drunkenly drives his car off and into the woods (not the woods!). Will crashes into the lurking deadite, dies, and is now dormantly possessed by her spirit. Things are about to get much worse for our core four characters when they attend this asshole’s funeral. 

Even though the film begins with Joseph looking for research about the deadites, Burn’s protagonist is actually Alice, a French immigrant who has long suffered physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her late husband, Will. Even though everyone else in the movie clearly knows she was being abused, no one in Will’s family ever seemed to do anything about it. If anything they all put Will on a pedestal and have long overlooked his terrible behavior. This all becomes even more clear when everyone reunites at Will’s ill-fated funeral. After some awkward hellos between Alice and her in-laws, the parents demonstrate how profoundly sad they are about the loss of their terrible son while barely acknowledging Alice at all. They clearly blame her for his death. Alice’s unacknowledged trauma looms large over the rest of the movie and soon becomes a morose playground for deadites to gather.

Since this is an Evil Dead movie, we know there’s nothing good in store for this fragmented, unhappy family. The father-in-law Edgar (Erroll Shand) is the first at the funeral to get got by the deadite after he tries to break Will out of his coffin and is quickly killed and possessed by the deadite. Things really blow up when the family heads to a remote, dilapidated estate where they are all trapped together with their grief, baggage, and now a deadite impersonating the family patriarch. Thus begins the series of increasingly over-the-top and sanguinary kills that force Alice to confront her past traumas. 

Like I said, there is no such thing as a bad Evil Dead movie. Burn makes its best effort to do all the things a fan of this series could ever want. Fingers getting chopped off in car doors, lake-based electrocution, falls onto open dishwashers full of upward facing steak knives; this is why we come to the movies. Vaniček understands this and attempts to rise to the occasion by trying to give fans of the series what they want. While the movie has plenty of shocking violence, it lacks the mischievous, chaotic spirit that propelled that gore in earlier entries in the series. The previous entry in the series, Evil Dead Rise, is a great movie because it gives audiences gasp-inducing kills while also keeping the zany, impishness of the Raimi-directed movies of the 80s. Evil Dead movies are so beloved because they’re fun. Burn seems to forget that. 

Instead Vaniček’s fixation on crafting the meanest, grisliest deaths possible has the opposite effect of what the kills in the earlier movies do. Instead of engaging the audience in the fun, twisted kills, he numbs us into a stupor where an event like a fountain pen shoved into an eardrum is just another thing we and Alice have to endure before we can get out of this hell house. 

That’s not to say there aren’t things to like about this movie. Souheila Yacoub makes a very compelling and effortlessly cool final girl who you root for the entire time. The rest of the cast is more than game as they take their turns entering their deadite personas and unleashing literal hell on our protagonist. The setting of the decrepit, gross estate is as unsettling as it is a breeding ground for the pure evil that awaits it. This is a well crafted film. One just wishes that maybe Vaniček could’ve had a little more fun with it. That is the Evil Dead spirit after all.

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