Credit where it’s due: Evil Dead Burn, the sixth movie in the franchise and third with a director other than Sam Raimi, offers a clever twist on the original film’s setup. What if, instead of demons laying siege to your cabin vacation with your friend group, you were trapped with your incredibly hostile in-laws when the spirits of the dead rose? After her asshole husband, Will (George Pullar), dies in what she believes is a simple drunk-driving accident — in reality, he’s murdered by a Deadite — Alice (Souheila Yacoub) spends time with his family at their secluded and dilapidated home. By the time they get to the house, Will’s father (Erroll Shand) is already possessed, and soon an Evil Dead movie ensues as family members are murdered and possessed one-by-one, leaving Alice to fight her way out amidst a bloodbath. This is a fine précis for a franchise entry, but unfortunately the final product is lifeless, overly concerned with lore — Will’s family hold the Kandarian dagger that can vanquish the Deadites — and a profoundly unimaginative entry in a series once prized for boundless ingenuity.
Despite the steady presence of Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, each of the three original Evil Dead films took a totally different approach to the material, shifting the balance from horror toward comedy more with each entry, until Army of Darkness arrived resembling a swashbuckling Harryhausen tribute more than the first film in its own franchise. Somehow the three films made this century, each with different casts and directors, are functionally the same movie in which a young woman struggling with a serious real world issue — drug addiction and insecurities around pregnancy in the last two, the end of an abusive relationship here — is put through the Deadite wringer that prioritizes gore effects over all else. The presence of the Book of the Dead and other worldbuilding ephemera tie the films back to their forebears, but Fede Alvarez, Lee Cronin, and now Sébastien Vaniček have primarily borrowed two ideas from Raimi: buckets of gross-out viscera and the taunting Deadites.
What’s missing from Evil Dead Burn then is the gleeful mania that made Raimi’s films — even that more straight-laced inaugural film that these new ones take inspiration from — exuberant and fun even as they were relentless catalogs of spilled guts. In this latest chapter, as the Deadites try to kill Alice they also needle her with comments about her marriage and the abuse her husband inflicted on her. They employ the familiar language of gaslighting and victim-blaming, antagonizing her by insisting that she is nothing without him, without his family, and asking why she stayed with him if he was so terrible. That all of this is screeched at the screen without so much as a single cackle is indicative of the larger project to update Evil Dead by taking its basic premise as seriously as possible. So, where the Deadites once playfully teased Ash Williams, now they incessantly bully this poor woman. It makes for unpleasant viewing, especially as the rest of the film’s cheap thrills undercut any larger point it wants to make.
As for the gory stuff that is the new series’ raison d’être, sure, it is fittingly nasty, even if Vaniček films his shock sequences haphazardly, obfuscating some of the grossest stuff in the process. The film’s mean streak extends, of course, to all the bloodshed, and even those most inoculated to movie violence might blanch at the same dog being murdered three times over. If this movie has a mission, it’s to upset the audience by any means necessary, but there’s ultimately nothing here that hasn’t been present in one of these movies before, even when the specific implements of doom have changed.
Which is to say, Evil Dead Burn fails not because it doesn’t emulate the past — a recreation of earlier movies would be just as useless — but because it can’t carve its own path convincingly. The spirit of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films is that of invention, each movie in the trilogy is its own new thing entirely. To be tasked with making one of these movies is to be given license to do anything. Vaniček has only managed to hide a lack of creativity amidst gallons of splattered blood.
DIRECTOR: Sébastien Vanicek; CAST: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
Comments are closed.