Evil Dead Burn review: Brace yourself for relentless carnage
For the current Evil Dead revivals, series creator Sam Raimi has tapped different filmmakers for three separate movies. Three years after Lee Cronin‘s Evil Dead Rise, we have Evil Dead Burn from French director Sébastien Vaniček.
The film drops us straight into the new lore, with Joseph (Hunter Doohan) listening to tapes from his late grandfather, Dr. Benjamin Price, about the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (Book of the Dead). On the tape, Price reveals the existence of a dagger that can kill deadites (zombie-like entities possessed by a demonic spirit) and notes that if the dagger is uncovered, deadites will come to steal it.
It just so happens that Joseph finds the dagger in a remote lakeside house a short time before he gathers with his parents Edgar and Susan (Erroll Shand and Tandi Wright), grandmother Polly (Maude Davey), wife Thya (Luciane Buchanan) and sister-in-law Alice (Souheila Yacoub) to mourn the sudden death of his brother. As Price promised, the Kandarian Demon (the franchise’s unseen malevolent force) sends deadites to retrieve the weapon and possesses family members, turning them into deadites too.
Vaniček wastes no time introducing the pivotal dagger and the new lore and getting straight to deadite time. I must admit the pre-title drop sequences felt a little rushed, with lots of quick cuts and jarring jumps, but there’s a propulsive energy and we get to the horror quicker, so I can’t complain too much.
I was really impressed by the filmmaking talent on display, such as a single-take sequence where so much happens around one character, frenetic handheld work and unexpected and disorientating camera moves. The action makes full use of the space, with the house getting truly destroyed, and the fight/attack choreography is gnarly and visceral.
Vaniček, who caught Raimi’s attention with his 2023 horror Infested, knows exactly what people want from an Evil Dead movie – a wild, unhinged, brutal, super violent ride – and delivers exactly that. The body horror is truly wince-inducing, there is an insane amount of blood, a wide range of inventive weapons and really gory deaths with close-up injury detail. For the first two-thirds of the movie, we get a reprieve from the craziness here and there, but the final act is non-stop horror action at a breakneck pace.
Poor Alice gets put through the wringer and I actually thought too much happened to her. Let her catch a break between deadite attacks! There’s one too many and it overstays its welcome; the film should have been 10 minutes shorter. This is a physically and emotionally demanding role and Swiss actress Yacoub nails it. Her character’s trauma isn’t written particularly well (the character work is generally quite undercooked), but she does her best with what she’s given. Also, there are a few gags, but more lighthearted moments would have been welcome, considering Raimi’s original trilogy blended horror and comedy.
If you’re looking for a relentless horror filled with carnage, chaos, gore, blood and body parts galore, Evil Dead Burn is for you.
In cinemas from Friday 10th July