There’s nothing harder than a death in the family. People are at their lowest and most volatile. The last thing any grieving family would want or deserve is a visit from their local deadite. It’s this setup that turned a lot of audience members off of Evil Dead Burn. “It’s too mean! Evil Dead movies are supposed to be fun!” Well, I’m here to say that Evil Dead can be anything it wants, as long as it has over-the-top violence, soul-sucking demons, and a special book written in blood and bound in flesh. And I ain’t talkin’ about the good book.
Evil Dead Burn doesn’t rise to the heights of its predecessor. I mean, who can compete with THE Lee Cronin? But I love how nasty Burn is to its characters. I mean, if demons were real, isn’t that what they’d do? Torment us before killing and possessing our family members? If anything, that’s what makes the Evil Dead franchise special. The villains in these movies don’t just torture and kill; they have fun doing it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a granny in a wheelchair or the beloved family pet. The deadites spare no one.
French writer/director Sébastien Vaniček, acclaimed for his breakout spider-infestation movie Infested (2023), takes the helm this time. I love this trend of getting young, talented up-and-comers from all around the globe to direct Evil Dead movies. It all started in 2013, when the first Evil Dead remake launched the career of Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez. Then we had Lee Cronin from Ireland, Sébastien Vaniček from France, and up next, American writer/director Francis Galluppi of The Last Stop in Yuma County fame… who I am just discovering was born on the same day as our website’s very own Sean Lemme. Which begs the question: “When is Sean gonna direct an Evil Dead movie?” Come on! You want an Evil Dead movie with giant robots? Hire Sean.
Mild Spoilers Ahead: Burn opens at the same lake where the horrors of Rise uh… rose. Jessica (Greta Van Den Brink), a deadite from the previous film, appears, kills two fishermen, and wanders into the forest in search of more victims.
Meanwhile, two couples, Alice (Souhelia Yacoub) and her husband, William (George Pullar), and William’s brother, Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan), are at a club when Alice and William get into a big fight. William storms off drunk and speeds away in his car. Racing down a dark road, he fails to notice Jessica appearing in front of him. The two collide, Jessica utters a creepy deadite chant, and William burns to death in the car. Cue the title over the flames.
It’s a brutal opening, but what sold me on the tone of Burn is the next sequence, in which Alice, Joseph, and Thya attend William’s funeral alongside his parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), and his senile, wheelchair-bound grandmother, Polly (Maude Davey). If the scene wasn’t dour enough, the entire ceremony is drowned out by construction noise from outside. The situation gets more awkward when Alice is asked to speak and admits she has nothing prepared. It’s misery on top of misery to an almost comedic effect. How macabre. I love it.
From this funeral sequence, we learn that not only does Alice not get along with her deceased husband’s family but that she was planning to leave him after he physically abused her. Meanwhile, Edgar wants to see William’s charred corpse before leaving. He gets his wish, only for the corpse to break free and burn his arm, infecting him and eventually turning him into a deadite. The family returns home, and all hell breaks loose as Edgar turns the rest of the family into deadites one by one. Classic Evil Dead.
All of the violence in Burn is effective and well shot. The trailer highlights a memorable sequence where the camera stays on Alice in one unbroken shot as she crawls across the living room floor in the middle of a full-on person vs. deadite scuffle. Still, I did find myself checking my watch (my phone) in the middle. I couldn’t help but feel the film could have been trimmed by a good ten or fifteen minutes. I wouldn’t say the film is a slow burn (pun intended), but I did feel it was hitting a lot of familiar beats over and over again. They fight, they hide, they fight, etc.
The characters are fleshed out enough, and the performances are good, in particular Souhelia Yacoub as Alice and Tandi Wright as the mean mom who hates Alice so much that she sides with her deadite family. I was hoping for a meatier subplot involving the grandma, considering her deceased husband studied the Necronomicon and has a Kandarian dagger in the house capable of defeating the deadites. She does still get a memorable fight sequence when she gets pinned to one of those electric chairs that help disabled people get up and down stairs.
I had a good time with this one, and although I’m annoyed that the film ends with not one but two mid-credit teases for future installments (gonna guess this was the producers’/studio’s idea and not Vaniček’s), this is a solid installment. I could even see my personal rating going up on a future watch. I think it depends on how good or bad Evil Dead Wrath (due out in 2028) is and how all of these installments hold together as a series.
So yeah, don’t let the Debbie Downers tell you this isn’t worth your time. Horror movies can be fun, like Evil Dead II, and they can also be gut punches, like Hereditary. Burn is a bit of both and a good representation of what this series has to offer. I’m also excited to see what Vaniček does next. Who would have thought a series about pus-filled demons who scream at you would be such a good launchpad for future auteurs? Well, I had a feeling… A burning feeling.
I like giant robots