‘Evil Dead Burn’… What Are We Doing Anymore?

Before stepping into the theatre for Evil Dead Burn, I was racking my brain as to why the new suite of Evil Dead films haven’t come anywhere close to Sam Raimi’s original trilogy of films for me. Recent installments, like Fede Álvarez’s 2013 reboot and Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, have left me feeling cold and I’ve never been quite able to say why.

If there’s one bit of credit I’ll give to Burn – a truly woeful attempt at creating a new entry in this franchise – it’s that it gave me the answer: modern horror filmmakers seem to think that the silly heights of Raimi’s work are beneath them, leading to a clumsy combination of serious themes and half-hearted homage that’s nothing short of dreadful in this film particularly.

Loosely following on from the end of Evil Dead Rise, this film picks up with a new set of characters, anchored by Alice (Souhelia Yacub). A French immigrant running a business with her abusive husband Will (George Pullar), the two have a vicious fight that leads him to speed off and hit a Deadite; as you may guess, his death swiftly follows. As Alice joins Will’s weird family for the funeral and returns to their old home, people begin to act strangely and the scourge of the Deadites spreads.

Let me say this: I am not inherently opposed to an Evil Dead movie having themes or subtext, even if the originals didn’t. What I do take issue with is how Burn clumsily splices together genuinely upsetting themes – in this case, domestic abuse and familial trauma – with shoddy attempts at the entertaining genre fare that we expect from Evil Dead.

Evil Dead Burn feels oddly ashamed of its own legacy

French director Sébastien Vaniček has obviously been inspired by French extremity films that deal in relentless cruelty towards their characters, and this approach just does not suit Evil Dead at all. The fact that the first two major Deadite sequences in this film feature the killing of a dog and a genuinely upsetting “fight” in a car that honestly feels starkly like real domestic abuse feels totally off, made worse by the fact that it’s near impossible to get invested in the film’s astonishingly dumb and unlikeable cast of characters.

The bleakness of these scenes makes Burn’s attempts to feel “fun” later in the runtime ring that much more hollow. Tried and true series techniques feel like cheap parlour tricks when interspersed so scarcely throughout this movie, because in truth Burn so rarely attempts to even feel remotely like an Evil Dead film.

Instead, it feels as though Vaniček wanted to make a French extremity film, and the only way to do that was by attaching his idea to a recognisable IP while throwing in some half-hearted franchise references and hallmarks. Is that actually true? I obviously can’t say, but what I do know is that Evil Dead Burn is officially the new low point of the franchise and an absolutely shocking misfire.

For much of the film I found myself baffled and intensely disappointed by its surface level shocks and catastrophic misunderstanding of this series; I was only too happy for it to be over. My final verdict: decidedly not groovy!

★

Evil Dead Burn is in cinemas now.