‘Evil Dead Burn’ Review: The Deadites Are More Vicious Than Ever

Time to dig up those library cards and check out that dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis again. Not that the infamous Book of the Dead has much of a role to play in Evil Dead Burn, the sixth feature in Sam Raimi’s long-running supernatural horror series, which started way back in 1981. The one useful nugget revealed in its sinister pages this time is the existence of an ancient dagger that is the sole means of killing a deadite for good. Naturally, the clan of freshly turned deadites will stop at nothing to get their hands on it before the miraculously uninfected final girl does.

Director Sébastien Vanicek may have come along well after the New French Extremity wave of the late ’90s and early 2000s — his first feature, the effective 2023 rampaging spider shocker, Infested, is on Shudder — but his taste for grisly carnage, vicious cruelty, spilled viscera and bone-crunching hyper-graphic violence is firmly rooted in that school. This is a movie that revels in its meanness.

Excess clearly is the director’s watchword, which seemed to dovetail nicely with the appetites of the hardcore horror preview crowd with whom I saw the film. Every new bit of skull-crushing, goopy bloodletting and creative weaponry improvisation was greeted with fist pumps, roars of approval and more than a few grossed-out cries of “Ewwww!” 

The fact that the script by Vanicek and fellow Frenchman Florent Bernard offers almost nothing unfamiliar in narrative terms is probably immaterial, though the new standalone entry could have used a more firmly established chief agent of malice, like Alyssa Sutherland’s monster mother in the last installment, Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. This time it’s dad who starts spreading hellfire through a different family, though the mounting deadite pileup means it’s not long before he’s just part of the demonic gang, not the main threat.

Like its 2023 predecessor, Evil Dead Burn starts with the brisk dispatch of secondary characters at a pretty lakeside spot — the film was shot in New Zealand — where buddies Jared (Keanu Karim) and Leo (Tapiwa Soropa) are fishing. When Leo goes off to take a cellphone call from his girlfriend, Jared gets a bite that makes his fishing rod buckle, reeling in what he assumes will be a big catch. Nuh-uh. Right off the bat, Vanicek shows he’s not fooling around, with a maximum-brutality kill. By the time Leo returns it’s too late for them both.

The deliverer of death (Greta van den Brink), once she’s done levitating over the lake and wandered up onto the road, provides the link to the principal characters when she’s splattered by a speeding car. The driver is Will (George Pullar), a hothead who storms off from a club mid-argument with his spiky French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub), abandoning a birthday celebration for his brother Joe (Hunter Doohan), there with his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan). Will’s deadite collision results in some fiery retribution, making it three deaths even before the main title appears.

Early hints that Will was an abusive husband appear to have a precedent in the snarling disposition of his father Edgar (Erroll Shand), whose kindness mostly is reserved for his dog. Until even that bond turns nasty. At Will’s funeral we also meet his sharp-edged grieving mother Susan (Tandi Wright), whose words during her eulogy — “I would give anything for us to be together again” — prove portentous. Careful what you wish for.

Edgar insists on a moment alone with his dead son before the coffin rolls into the crematorium furnace. He’s startled by a knock that seems to come from inside the closed casket, but the chaos that ensues remains unseen, only heard in Samy Bardet’s malevolent soundscape. 

Back at the dilapidated family home, Edgar grows even surlier, lashing into gentle-natured Joe for being an under-achiever compared to his brother and causing Thya to become apprehensive about Ed’s proximity to sharp objects. Only Grandma (Maude Davey), nattering away with advanced dementia, seems oblivious to the tension. 

Spoiler alert, not that you won’t see it coming, but if you think absence of lucidity, a wheelchair and a prosthetic leg will stop a crabby octogenarian from becoming a raging hellcat with the strength of a heavyweight wrestler, you have probably never seen an Evil Dead movie. And if you have, you should pretty much be able to predict the sequence of gruesome events that follows. 

Vanicek and Bernard draw the requisite connections to Evil Dead lore by making the main setting the rambling house where Will and Joe’s historian grandfather conducted extensive Necronomicon research before abandoning the family to travel the world seeking information about a mysterious cult known as The Circle of Wise Men — a negligible addition to the mythology. While Susan has insisted repeatedly that Joe dispose of grandpa’s collection of notes, drawings, artifacts and a detailed scrapbook, he only half complies.

Naturally, someone, in this case Alice, hauls the dreaded book out of a trash bag, reads that demonic forces are summoned by the utterance of an incantation and proceeds to speak those gibberish words out loud. Big mistake, though arguably only slightly more stupid than Susan, who stacks the dishwasher cutlery rack with the knives blade up. Were you raised by savages, lady?

Along with the half-baked theme of women who have toughened up to survive abusive men, xenophobic distrust of strangers plays a part in the chilly vibe of Will’s parents toward Alice from the start. Granny doesn’t discriminate, hissing invective at both Alice and Thya with equal venom. But Susan’s hostility is more focused, side-eyeing her daughter-in-law even at the funeral. 

Wright’s performance is amusing in that she seems only a tad less spiteful in benign mode than when she gets with the demon program and starts shrieking at Joe: “Bring me the Kandarian dagger!” For a minute I thought she said “Kardashian,” which would have been a marketing opportunity.

As the assembled party one by one turn ferocious and the butchery intensifies, it’s obvious who’s going to be the last one standing. The fun, as always, is in spotting which objects will be repurposed as weapons. 

Those include a detached car seat headrest, a fancy fountain pen gifted to Joe by Will, an ugly-ass candelabra, a corkscrew and a chunk of porcelain from a smashed toilet bowl. Uh, hello, unhygienic! Ribbons of free-flying fishing line with hooks trussing up one character like a roast is not something you see every day. Of course, there are also nods to the beloved Raimi-era chainsaw with power tools like a brush trimmer and a heavy-duty hammer drill.

Vanicek and DP Philip Lozano pump up the visual energy to match the unrelenting action — lots of frenetic handheld camerawork; swooping tracking shots; a virtuoso oner; a series-trademark, low-to-the-ground high-speed zoom through woodlands; and the usual disorienting framing, notably when characters start spider-walking up walls and across ceilings or skittering over the roof.

The score by French experimental duo Double Danger (also the composers on Infested) amplifies the action, building from ominous electronica to Black Mass-level hysteria with satanic choral elements. And the tendency toward practical effects over CG is satisfying, highlighting makeup designer Jane O’Kane’s gnarly work.

There are moments of dark humor, but only one gag involving Grandma’s motorized stairlift that could be called laugh-out-loud funny. Vanicek seems more interested in slathering on the gore, to the point where the movie starts to seem less like a full-bodied story than a string of hyper-violent set pieces. (Minor cuts reportedly were made to bring the MPA rating down from NC-17 to R.)

That also leaves the actors with little scope for character definition, limiting them to playing types, though Swiss actress Yacoub is compelling as Alice proves her resilience while never downplaying the nightmarish mental and physical torture she endures.

I missed the antic spirit, the wicked sense of mischief and the straight-up goofy comedy that defined Raimi’s originals, not to mention the unhinged madness of Bruce Campbell’s beloved leading character, Ash. (Raimi and Campbell serve as a producer and executive producer, respectively.) The series’ new iterations, starting with Fede Álvarez’s 2013 soft reboot Evil Dead, have largely abandoned its roots as horror-comedy in favor of orgiastic slaughter. There’s no doubt an audience for that, but it’s a whole other style that honors the early chapters in name alone.