Movies are meant to engage two of your senses. You can see them, and you can hear them. Beyond that, certain gimmicks can tickle the others, but for the most part, two senses are the max. We think, however, that the new film Evil Dead Burn could very well be considered an exception. Evil Dead Burn is so brutal, painful, disgusting, and intense that you can practically (but, thankfully, not literally) feel it buzzing in your bones. Every stab, scrape, rip, pound, push, you name it. The story itself doesn’t quite deliver on the same level, but you’ll be so delightfully grossed out along the way, you probably won’t notice until later.
Evil Dead Burn is the sixth installment in the iconic horror franchise created by Sam Raimi way back in 1981. Most directly, it follows the fifth film in the franchise, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, with a few links here and there, which are additive overall, but not hugely consequential to the story at hand. This story follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a woman who married into a family with a very secretive history. When Alice’s husband is killed, her in-laws Susan and Edgar (Tandi Wright and Erroll Shand), Susan’s mother Polly (Maude Davey), her brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) all circle back to their house after the funeral—a house that is of great interest to the killer demons of the series called Deadites.
When Evil Dead Burn kicks in, it really kicks in, but it takes longer than you’d expect to get there. The script by Florent Bernard and Sébastien Vaniček, who also directs, works best once the characters and relationships are well-established. However, none of those characters, whether they’re coded as heroes or villains, are particularly interesting or likeable. As a result, while there are a lot of relatable, maybe even cliché, family horrors on display well before the actual horror takes over, for a while it feels like the only thing the film will be killing is time.
And yet there are a few solid moments sprinkled in. There’s a nice cold open to set it all up, and there is also an undeniable joy and delightful rising tension in knowing things are about to go very, very wrong for these characters. Then, once it does, Evil Dead Burn steps on the gas and doesn’t let up. People die, people fight, people do horribly disgusting things to each other, both very quickly and sometimes very slowly. Nowhere, no one, and nothing is safe. The visual and practical effects in the movie are excellent, and they’re made even better by the sound design, which is how you get that added sense of almost feeling the brutality.
As the Deadite threat continues to spread through the family and the house, its integration with those relationships eventually becomes a positive. Maybe we didn’t care about mom coddling her boys earlier, but we sure do when a Deadite turns it against them. And of course, there are kills and moments in Evil Dead Burn that you’d never in a million years even dream of. The trailers show a character drinking hot candle wax and another being stabbed through the head with a car headrest, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Those scenes are then directed with a dynamic camera that captures the action in long, moving shots that seemingly place the audience in the room. Characters in the foreground do one thing as something less important, but still wild, happens in the background. It’s sensory overload used to maximum effect. The house itself almost becomes another star of the movie because Vaniček explores every nook and cranny of it, from upstairs to downstairs, in front of the walls and behind them.
The performances in the film are solid, with Shand’s Edgar and Yacoub’s Alice as the obvious standouts. Unfortunately, in a franchise well known for awesome, breakout performances like Bruce Campbell’s Ash or Alyssa Sutherland’s Ellie, no one comes close to that. In fact, the action and gore drive the film forward much more than the performances and characters. There are also a few plot quirks that don’t quite land, at least on a first viewing.
Nevertheless, a few flaws aside, Evil Dead Burn will delight fans of horror, gore, and this franchise. It’s got just enough lore to make it feel like a crucial installment in the series, and more than enough blood and guts to keep you queasy. We’d remind you to stay for one scene during the credits and another at the very end, but you’ll be so beaten into submission by the film that you’ll need the rest anyway.
Evil Dead Burn is in theaters on July 10.
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