Evil Dead Burn opens in theaters July 10.
For as straightforward a conceit as the Evil Dead franchise has traded on for over 40 years – read from the cursed book, awaken the vengeful Deadites – it’s always been something of a magic trick to watch how far each movie can push that conceit while still remaining true to the creative spirit of Sam Raimi’s 1981 original. Raimi’s sequels set some very loose boundaries in that regard, but Fede Alvarez and Lee Cronin’s later takes each found varying degrees of success adapting the story into a more modern cinematic context. By comparison, Evil Dead Burn, helmed by French director Sébastien Vaniček, doesn’t meaningfully add much to the conversation.
An extended prologue sets Evil Dead Burn squarely in the aftermath of the events of Rise, as a couple of unlucky fishermen find out what happens to those who indulge in outdoor recreation while Deadites are on the prowl. Burn quickly catches up with a new set of characters, led by Alice (Souhelia Racoub), a French ex-pat grappling with the recent death of her abusive husband Will Price (George Pullar) and a set of in-laws who are struggling to find a way forward through all that with Alice. Once the Prices hunker down at the family farm, their connection to the fated Necronomicon comes into focus and, if you can believe it, they come under assault by Deadites who are out to recover an artifact in the family’s possession. Once the action moves to the farm, Evil Dead Burn closely adheres to the familiar “dead by dawn” structure favored by its forerunners.
Organizing the Deadite action that’s to follow around Alice’s inner turmoil is a good instinct, but it’s one which Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead reboot – the movie Burn most closely aligns with tonally – found much more success in mining. Externalizing how Mia’s drug addiction was destroying herself and her loved ones in the form of the Deadites – a level of thematic specificity that Raimi never had much interest mining with the creatures – led to a strong connection between the horrific violence in that movie and its main character, each benefitting in turn. Evil Dead Rise’s Beth learns she’s pregnant, and immediately has the associated anxiety attacking her in the most closely analogous way possible: through her single-mom sister and her kids. Here, Alice is contending with similarly weighty issues in the aftermath of a terrible marriage, but Evil Dead Burn’s attempts to structure itself around how that complicates Alice’s grief tend to ring hollow. Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard’s script routinely shortchanges and obscures the character’s personality, giving Souhelia Racoub very little room to build Alice into more than just a cipher for those in abusive situations.
Overwrought stylistic choices further hamper the cohesion between Evil Dead Burn’s action and thematic efforts. Not only do cutaways to a fight between Alice and Will really stretch to explain why burning and fire become such common motifs in the story as it goes, but brief though they are, these jumps out of the confines of the Price farm hurt the momentum of the Deadites’ onslaught. It’s a minor thing, but it’s emblematic of how Vaniček bumps against other more important pillars of the franchise. The Price family falls neatly into horror archetypes: Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), a struggling author, serves as Burn’s primary vehicle for delivering Necronomicon-sourced information; there’s also uptight mom Susan, emotionally repressed and explosively angry dad Edgar, and cognitively declining, yet at times spookily lucid grandma Polly. Archetypes can be useful for keeping a story moving, but in an Evil Dead movie, the Deadites are usually more unsettling when they’re playing against their victim’s personality, so Evil Dead Burn’s supernaturally fueled heightening of the Prices’ character flaws feels a little rote as a result.
But amid all the disgusting Deadite mayhem, an Evil Dead film usually leaves room for a laugh. The franchise has always had a particularly complicated relationship to comedy, since Evil Dead 2 eschewed the original’s intensity with its more mischievous pitch and redefined horror-comedies forever in 1987. Evil Dead Burn does make occasional overtures towards dark humor – particularly through Grandma Polly, who functions here a little like Henrietta in Evil Dead 2 – but Vaniček doesn’t have a great handle on when or how to break the tension by leaning into laughs, especially given the dark subject matter Alice is contending with. One moment where a Deadite is trying to convince Polly that there’s a thief in the house with what amounts to a very conversational “oh, oh yeah, totally” pushes the Deadites a little too far into broad comedy. But Vaniček shows an unmistakable preference for shocking grotesquery throughout Evil Dead Burn, and on that count, he doesn’t disappoint.
Vaniček is particularly good at staging moments of Deadite action in close quarters, especially during one early sequence set in a car attempting to leave the property (never a good idea in Evil Dead). Once all hell breaks loose, every moment is a fight for survival that turns a different part of the car into a weapon. Vaniček can scarcely contain his excitement to get from one gory gag to the next, littering early scenes at the Price farm with loudly telegraphed setups establishing all the pokey, stabby stuff bound to be used to pokey, stabby ends later. Once it comes time for those dominoes to fall, Vaniček seldom resists pushing the metaphorical (and often literal) knife in one or two extra times, even in moments where some could argue he goes too far. Burn’s chaotic carnage does get a little exhausting in the home stretch, especially by the end of a climax that feels too close to that of Alvarez’s Evil Dead to create any room for an original final confrontation. The special effects serving those efforts come out of this somewhat scattershot experience completely blameless, something that seemed a safe bet from the moment a character’s flesh melts off their bones like well-braised short rib after being stepped on in the opening minutes. If there’s a part of the human anatomy you’re sensitive to seeing injured onscreen, Evil Dead Burn’s got one hell of an effed up bingo card for you to fill out.
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