Despite possessing people for nearly 45 years now, the Evil Dead somehow seem to be going from strength to strength. Maybe it’s the result of a spoken incantation from within that famously grotty Book Of The Dead, or just maybe franchise creators Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Bruce Campbell have a damn good eye for talent as the franchise seems to have suddenly picked up speed like a growling POV shot hurtling through the woods. The ball started rolling with Fede Alverez’s 2013 remake that gave Raimi’s original a bit of spit and polish while still being impossibly grim, and from there we eventually got Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise in 2023 that finally pushed the franchise barriers away from teens in cabins (mostly) and dropped it into the middle of a family crisis.
However, thanks to French killer spider flick, Infested, director Sébastien Vaniček has now gotten the opportunity to turn up the heat on the franchise with Evil Dead Burn. Can this latest entry in the famously vicious series keep up the trauma while finding ghastly new ways to violently repurpose everyday objects?
After a bit of between-movie shenanigans that sees the prologue of Evil Dead Rise spill out over into this film, we witness the brutal and fiery death of Will, a hot tempered husband who has a tempestuous relationship with his French wife, Alice. Despite his many shortcomings, his death impacts his family hard who, despite their various, flinty relationships with one another, all believe that family is everything. Standing at the head of the family is the intense patriarch, Edgar, but the real glue of the family would have to be the controlling influence of his wife, Susan, who wields her many sacrifices as a lever to get what she wants. While youngest son Joseph is trying to weather the weight of their expectation with the aid of his friendly girlfriend, Thya, he’s just too timid and too beaten down to push back.
Despite feeling grave misgivings about showing up a the funeral thanks to Will’s abusive nature and the barely disguised disapproval of her in-laws, Alice begins to endure the agonising ceremony with an equally sociably excruciating wake to follow, but unbeknownst to the family, something nasty has gotten into Edgar at the funeral home that’s festering inside him and will soon try to tear this already rotten family unit apart.
Trapped within their crumbling family house with a demonically possessed father lurking on the grounds, the group – not to mention Susan’s dementia-riddled mother – have to try and fight off their Deadite attacker as the latest gathering of souls targeted by the horrors of the Dook Of The Dead. But as the evil force starts claiming the members of the family one by one to turn them into violent ghouls, it seems that this time the Deadites actually have some sort of mission, or purpose. Just what is it they could be looking for and how long can the various, family resentments lurking under the surface stay hidden with demons eagerly willing to spill the tea?
While I’ve been a gargantuan fan of the Evil Dead for ages, one thing I’ve become particularly enamoured of with the newer films is how an infestation of Deadites usually comes along when the main characters are at their lowest ebb. Back in 2013, Evil Dead saw it’s leads tormented during an intervention of a drug addicted member of their group, while Evil Dead Rise picked on estranged sisters as they struggled to reconcile and make ends meet. Well, that burgeoning urge to kick someone when they’re down once again proves to be the driving force in the latest Evil Dead offering, and Vanicěk’s choice to focus on a family in free fall proves to be an especially inspired choice. Needless to say, the injection of family angst and rampant dysfunction proves to be an incredibly fertile ground for the director to literally poke, prod and impale his cast on a whole new range of spiky objects.
However, what’s most inspired is Vanicěk bringing in a sense of the New French Extremity to the world of Evil Dead which proves to unsurprisingly be something of a cracking fit. While the film finds ghastly new ways to misuse dish washers, discarded cutlery, fountain pens and even a car head rest as weapons of mess destruction, it’s made all the more painful by the incredibly personal family drama that heaves in a bunch of allegory that wallops harder than a piece of toilet to the skull.
The actors all weather the storm well, with Climax’s Souheila Yacoub shining while she unsurprisingly bears most of the brunt of the multiple forms of abuse; but the rest of the cast, including Hunter Doohan’s beaten down son and Luciane Buchanan’s dentures sucking Deadite, prove to be impressively up for the emotional and physical challenges that come with an Evil Dead movie.
There may be a few grumbles with some Kandarian gatekeepers about the fiddling of some of the established lore, such as a retconning of the anti-Deadite dagger which undergoes something of an Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade style redesign (think the simplistic holy grail) and other, less open-minded fans may question the presence of a Deadite possessed dog; but if we aren’t expanding and evolving a franchise, then why do it at all? However, what’s most important is that all involved know that a Evil Dead film is supposed to be a rollercoaster ride and Vanicěk ensures this is achieved by making Evil Dead Burn arguably the funniest entry of the newer breed by far. OK yes, so most of the laughs come from the utter incomprehension of Maude Davey’s mentally muddled Polly to everything that’s going on around her, but it’s incredibly refreshing that the filmmakers have chosen to give us little laugh breaks before nailing us with yet another hideous image that forever halts us from seeing a particular household object in the same way ever again.
One of the most consistently strongest franchises in horror keeps it’s bloody streak going with a heat-based entry that, in many ways, surpasses it’s immediate predecessors with it’s toe curling drama, wince inducing violence and some genuinely innovative set pieces (the unbroken shot where Alice crawls like a solder under fire while chaos erupts all around her is sublime). However, some of the flow of the film is slightly disrupted by a need to connect some dots from previous movies and while it results in a crowd pleasing cameo (stay till after those credits, kids), it’ll also having franchise stalwarts scratching their head about how it’s all supposed to synch up. But these are minor niggles in the face of such a satisfying, horror blowout that bends over backwards (literally, after a particularly nasty stair fall) to ensure that this franchise still burns hot.
With the upcoming Evil Dead Wrath due in 2028, we find the franchise still in rude health as it uses a dysfunctional family as a canvass for the usual acts of crowd pleasing atrocities. In fact, Burn could be a genuine contender for the best of the new bunch if it wasn’t for the distracting need to bow to a couple of franchise connections. Still, the series continues to be as groovy as ever thanks to the use of hot new talent to stoke those beloved, sadistic flames.
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