Joel on Film

In a few too many ways, Evil Dead Burn seems to be a bit more beholden to its immediate predecessor than to the film that, in 1981, eventually spawned a couple of direct sequels, a remake, a reboot and now a sequel to the reboot. That film was 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, which sought more and more ways to gross out its audience but did so with a shock of blackened humor. With his sequel, co-writer/director Sébastien Vaniček doesn’t exactly start things off by making much of a good impression.

In some way, the effect of the film’s prologue is intentional, as a couple of buddies find themselves on the dock of a bay and wind up, respectively, hook-line-and-sinkered and boiled to death by a member of the undead lurking in the lake. The violence here is about as sudden and graphic and unforgiving as we expect, given the series we’re talking about here, and we find ourselves admiring—even as we are sickened by—the way the filmmaker pulls off those bits of body horror to make them feel truly, repulsively real. It’s also, though, pretty much the same scene that opened the previous movie, just with the specific details slightly altered.

We’re supposed to recognize, are we not, that stories revolving around the book of the dead, which curses whoever repeats a few ancient phrases from it, essentially rhyme with each other to some extent. That’s a nice thought, although it portends the rest of this movie, which does almost nothing of note with its heavily loaded story of hidden abuse, family secrets and the trauma that results from both of those things. Well, there is about to be a whole lot more trauma where all that came from, though Vaniček and co-screenwriter Florent Bernard are far more concerned with trauma of the bodily variety, the members of a small family (and their dog) are subjected to the cruel whims of a death curse.

It simply becomes a little bit harder to care about the domestic drama this time around, in a movie that still wants us to laugh, to some degree, at the absurd level of carnage on display here, which really does make the previous movie look tame by comparison. Indeed, it even makes the literal shower of rain from 2013’s Evil Dead (which was such a dull freak show of horror otherwise that the downpour came as an undeserved blast of brief ingenuity) look like a gentle sprinkling. Heads are pummeled and punctured and pulverized when limbs are not being ravaged or ripped off, and eventually our admiration of the craft gives way to exhaustion at the tedium and repetition of it all.

Before that, there are flashes of a sincerely felt drama about a woman, named Alice (Souheila Yacoub), trying to survive the towering temper of her jackass husband Will (George Pullar), before being subjected to the suspicion of his parents (Tandi Wright and Erroll Shand) at the funeral for their son. You see, after a particularly heated argument, which ended in some very bad vibes and negative wishes between husband and wife, Will was an unassuming victim of the curse, burning alive in a car accident but, of course, walking out of the morgue and killing the mortician’s assistant—shredding him alive, in fact, because Vaniček means business—in front of dear old dad. When his father comes back home, distressed and traumatized and maybe worse off than both of those, well, you can imagine how this’ll all go.

The other figures in this story are Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), and the family’s grandmother Polly (Maude Davey), whose senility is used as a trick a few too many times by the screenwriters for us not to register the blatant exploitation of a very real disorder. The book of the undead comes in as sort of a plot point in the distant background, as if this screenplay started as something else entirely from Vaniček and Bernard but, perhaps with the benefit of a major studio deal, morphed into a franchise installment.

One by one, the curse passes between them, with the script playing fast and loose with the logic of the spread—the better to get to the flesh-tearing carnage, of course. The movie looks great and moves with a real sense of purpose, keeping the action inside the family house or on its grounds once everyone has gone back home from the funeral for a family dinner. Since everything here is at the whim of the filmmakers’ spectacle-mindedness, whatever genuine feeling in the story is lost pretty quickly.

It only occasionally rears its head, too, in the form of the capably convincing portrayal of rising terror by Yacoub, which eventually twists toward pity and, finally, a kind of exasperated resolve. She binds together everything about Evil Dead Burn, which tries to be about something deeper than its gore and, in the process, dilutes the effect and the power of both.

Rating: ** (out of ****)