‘All you’ve ever done is bring us pain…’
One of the great things about the two Evil Dead movies since Sam Raimi stepped aside (Evil Dead (2013) and Evil Dead Rise (2023)) is that they exist in isolation. There is some connective tissue (there has to be; otherwise, this wouldn’t be a shared universe at all), but for all intents and purposes, those two sequels work as standalone movies. This is so unlike every other horror franchise out there, desperately clinging to legacy characters and iconography (looking at you, Scream, Halloween, Alien, etc), so it is especially disappointing that Evil Dead Burn, the sixth entry in the franchise, reverts to type…
The plot will be familiar to everyone who has seen an Evil Dead movie. Some jackass reads from the book of the dead (in this instance, the jackass in question is Joseph Price as portrayed by Hunter Doohan), and, inevitably, inexorably, the Deadites arrive. As with the previous entry, here it is a family that is tormented: Joseph’s ill-tempered brother, Will (George Pullar), his very French wife, Alice (Souheila Yacoub), family matriarch Susan (Tandi Wright), gruff, psychotic father Edgar (Erroll Shand), and ailing grandmother, Polly (Maude Davey).
One thing I liked about Evil Dead Rise is that the family at the centre of the film felt authentic. I believed that that family could exist somewhere, and I believed the connection between them. With …Burn, this family are inconceivably awful before any Deadites even arrive. None of them seems like real people. This is not a fault of the cast, all of whom try their best with what they’ve been given, but the characters are so thinly drawn, reduced to whatever trauma has defined their lives the most, that I never cared about any of them. Writer-director Sébastien Vaniček never gives us a reason to.
Luckily, there is some good stuff here. Aside from some egregious CGI right at the end, all the effects are genuinely excellent throughout. There is a satisfying mixture of practical and digital that makes everything, even the most gruesome sequences, feel real. And there is some serious gore here. French horror cinema has always been one of the most extreme exponents of violence and gore in Europe, and that really comes through here. It’s inventive, wince-inducing and memorable. It’s just a shame that the movie going on around all the violence never matches the intensity of the film’s set pieces.
Evil Dead Burn is grizzly effective in places, and ties the rest of the films in the franchise together (for better or worse), but it’s also the most forgettable film in the franchise. With Evil Dead Wrath, the next entry in the franchise, already in the bag, and another sequel teased in the post-credit sequence here, it seems we can expect the Deadites to be haunting our screens for a while longer yet. Let’s hope the next entry takes a few more risks.
