Leaning as heavily on comedy as horror, the original Evil Dead trilogy was fueled by star Bruce Campbell’s peerless blend of stoutness and silliness, which gave its demonic malevolence a Looney Tunes cartoonishness that was as zany as director Sam Raimi’s stewardship.
The franchise’s rebooted big-screen phase, on the other hand, has not only done away with Campbell but, with him, any genuine wackiness, instead defining itself via over-the-top gore. Consequently, it’s a genuine shock to discover that, to a far greater extent than its two predecessors, Evil Dead Burn finds the funny in the fantastically nasty—and, in doing so, proves a stomach-churningly amusing nightmare.
As with 2013’s Evil Dead and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, Evil Dead Burn (July 10, in theaters) is a calling-card effort for an up-and-coming genre talent—in this case, French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, who follows up 2023’s Infested with a deliriously gnarly tale of spousal abuse and familial dysfunction.
Vaniček has a flair for the grotesque, as he demonstrates during a prologue in which two young men are attacked at a lake by a demonic “Deadite” who’s been summoned from its slumber by aspiring author Joseph (Hunter Doohan) listening to his grandfather’s old recordings about the Book of the Dead and a mystical dagger that can kill the creatures. It’s a short-and-sinister setup punctuated by a hilarious cut from a body being struck by a car to a twerking rear end—the first of many sight gags that suggest the series has rediscovered its sense of humor.
At a nightclub, Joseph’s birthday celebration is spoiled by the hostile bickering of his brother, William (George Pullar), and his French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub). This is an uncomfortable scene for Joseph and his spouse, Thya (Luciane Buchanan), and it concludes with William driving off in a drunken huff, at which point he strikes a soggy female Deadite, setting his flipped vehicle ablaze, and is told that it’s coming for his clan.
Before that can happen, though, Joseph, Thya, Alice, and William’s parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), along with dementia-addled and wheelchair-bound grandma Polly (Maude Davey), gather at a funeral home where the ceremony is spoiled by ongoing construction cacophony. The looks Alice receives from Susan and Edgar suggest they blame her for William’s demise, and the atmosphere grows tenser still when Alice admits that she didn’t prepare a eulogy for her deceased husband.
That winds up being the least of the family’s problems, as Edgar’s desire to have one last glimpse of his son before he’s cremated leads to a macabre encounter that kickstarts Evil Dead Rise’s madness. Like in Raimi’s films, the Deadites possess their victims through exchanges of bodily fluids, spreading like a Satanic pestilence. Back at the remote vacation house that Joseph has allowed to fall into disrepair—an additional source of friction between these individuals—Edgar begins acting more than a tad strange.
The sight of him with a weed whacker is a Chekhov’s gun-style bit of foreshadowing, and shortly thereafter, he goes from unwell to unholy, much to the bewilderment of his relatives, who are unprepared for this harrowing turn of events and the hideousness that ensues.
Evil Dead Burn is a well-constructed merry-go-round of mayhem, with Vaniček and Florent Bernard’s script concisely establishing the various internecine feuds that underscore its drama, be it Polly’s delusional belief that Thya is stealing from her, Edgar’s view of Joseph as a disappointment, or Susan’s unconvincingly expression of love and support for Alice.
The Brady Bunch they are not, and the film benefits from the anger and resentment bubbling beneath their grieving surface. All of that becomes fuel for the fire once Edgar succumbs to his devilish ailment and goes hog wild. In the immediate aftermath of that transformation, Vaniček stages a sequence inside a car that’s a model of directorial dexterity and bracing violence, culminating with a novel and squirm-inducing murder that’s punctuated by another character’s inaction at the moment of truth.
The majority of Evil Dead Burn takes place in the family’s derelict residence, and that forest-enshrouded locale, as well as repeated high-speed shots from the Deadites’ point of view, serve as fitting nods to the franchise’s origins. Rather than merely duplicating that which has come before, however, Vaniček’s stand-alone sequel charts its own ghastly course by rooting itself in intertwined familial enmity, with Susan and Edgar’s thinly veiled bitterness at their daughter-in-law existing side-by-side with Joseph’s insecurity over his shortcomings (and parents’ dissatisfaction) and Alice’s fury at her in-laws—the last of which has to do with their seemingly willful blindness to their late son’s abusive tendencies.
Such concerns give Evil Dead Burn some meat on its bones, even as it strips away flesh and muscle at a startling rate. Vaniček does his best to up the ante whenever possible and, more often than not, succeeds, his rotating camerawork and inventive compositions energizing set pieces marked by impressively excessive gruesomeness.
Faces, torsos, and limbs are slashed, bludgeoned, severed, and impaled with a consistency that should be numbing. Yet the proceedings are never wearisome, both because Vaniček concocts innovative means of ending characters’ lives, and because he routinely interjects brief instances of levity into the action, at least one of which involves Polly and the stair lift she needs to reach the house’s second floor—and which, predictably, factors crazily into the finale.
For the first time since Raimi was at its helm, the Deadites’ demented butchery feels fresh in Evil Dead Burn, and credit for that rejuvenation goes squarely to Vaniček, who recognizes the material’s inherent rollercoaster-from-Hell appeal. Escalating his carnage to staggering heights without losing sight of the relatable real-world stresses and strains that make his protagonists such vulnerable targets for the Deadites, the director goes old-school with his latest, devising a series of episodes so deeply discomfiting that they invariably elicit chuckles.
That mixture of revulsion and hilarity is the lifeblood of the Evil Dead movies, and it’s captured so well by this new installment that, following its two underwhelming modern ancestors, it resurrects faith in the series’ future—which, one hopes, continues to embrace the goofiness at the heart of its grisliness.
