Since Sam Raimi’s gruesome franchise was brought screaming back to life with the 90-minute bloody ascension that is Evil Dead Rise, a trilogy of Deadite movies was promised. Second up to command those demonic sickos is director Sébastien Vaniček, but can he sustain this hellish crescendo? Enter the dysfunctional family, newly widowed Alice (Souheila Yacoub), and the grieving family, brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), parents Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), and grandma Polly (Maude Davey), gathered to mourn Will’s (George Pullar) unexpected death. Little do they know the Deadites are on their way to turning this grim affair into a nightmare.
The Evil Dead universe has never been one concerned with realism, but even before their reanimation the grieving Price family felt more like caricatures. Polly, the grandmother with severe dementia is played solely for cheap laughs, while the stuck up mother-in-law Susan’s decision to feed the family instant mash potato on paper plates after her favourite son’s funeral, seems inconceivable. Shoddy character building would have gone unnoticed had it been effectively drowned out by the prerequisite bloodshed, but instead the most dire wake imaginable has been paired with an exhausting abuse narrative with clumsy pacing. Alice is visibly conflicted about Will’s death, given her husband’s violent ways, a fact which is fed to the audience repeatedly, with an unnecessarily heavy hand.
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Since Raimi passed the Kandarian baton, each Evil Dead film has insisted on a central trauma that harms the family almost as much as the demons possessing them, slowing the bloody flow of a franchise that should be relentless. In this case, Evil Dead Burn insists on not one but two beaten women (Alice and Susan) and using Deadites to explain generational cycles of abuse, which feels insincere in a film where walking-talking corpses mutilate themselves for kicks. Pair this with a script that assumes audiences share grandma Polly’s memory loss and Evil Dead Burn becomes a bloated corpse which struggles to stay alight.
All Deadites are to some extent hags once the corpse reanimates to cackle and spew to their black heart’s content, but Evil Dead Burn has delivered the first actual Deadite hag with Polly. A feat not nearly as impressive as Final Destination Bloodlines breaking the record for the oldest stunt woman, Yvette Ferguson, to be set on fire. Instead it’s another hag movie to add to the ever mounting pile from up and coming male horror directors.
However, the biggest disappointment of Evil Dead Burn was how hard it is to see Vaniček’s unique vision, evident in Infested, anywhere in this film. Instead I saw a studio’s dedication to creating a dull cohesion – complete with the same camera angles and lore-based easter eggs – between films, instead of allowing each director to forge their own gruesome path. If Evil Dead Burn had committed to its gore (of which there is plenty), without explicit metaphors about domestic violence, it may have lived up to its potential. But instead all of Alice’s suffering culminates in a face-off with a final Deadite that resembles a charred silver surfer coughed up by a burnt out franchise, leaving audiences with more embers than brimstone.