Evil Dead Burn

God help me, I liked Evil Dead Burn. I wasn’t expecting to. Don’t get me wrong: I loved the original Evil Dead trilogy, and after a while I even came around to the 2013 remake. The remake was a very different kettle of innards, steering far away from the Looney Tunes joy of possessed Bruce Campbell breaking plates over his head, but it had its own kind of visceral integrity. 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, however, left me cold and just felt like a special effect guy’s demo reel for gore effects. I was assuming Evil Dead Burn might just be more of the same, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. While it is very violent indeed, and the humor involved is quite dark, the direction is full of energy, the camera moves are audacious and what could easily have been a studio money grab is actually a work of crazed cinematic art.

Joseph (Hunter Doohan) is exploring his deceased grandfather’s papers about the Book of the Dead and how to defeat evil spirits via a special dagger. He brings the weapon back to his family home. This alerts a “Deadite” (Jessica from Evil Dead Rise) who has been lurking in a lake, so she makes her way toward Joseph, hoping to destroy the dagger. She causes a car accident in which she transfers her evil essence to Joseph’s brother, Will, before burning him to death. (Note that there will be a lot of burning in this story).

Will’s French wife, Alice (Souheila Yacoub), attends his cremation service. His parents, Edgar (Erroll Shand) and Susan (Tandi Wright), make it clear that they blame her for their son’s death, while his grandmother, Polly (Maude Davey), is convinced Alice has stolen some money from her. After the ceremony, dead Will passes his possession onto Edgar, who manages to conceal this fact until everyone is home for a big family dinner, at which all literal Hell breaks loose.

Doohan does a good job as Joseph, one of the least horrible people in the family, and adds an amusing grace note to a gruesome scene involving his character, in which he’s in so much insane discomfort that he has to laugh at the magnitude of it. Yacoub gives a fierce performance as Alice, annoyed that the American family she’s married into is even worse than she thought. Wright effectively depicts a mother-in-law as a demon, and Davey has fun with helpless old lady Polly causing all sorts of horrific mayhem. Finally, Shand is especially strong and scary as the possessed Edgar, looking like a feral Bill Burr on a rampage.

French director Sébastien Vanicek seems to have taken inspiration from original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi in terms of the inventiveness of the camerawork, and it’s a sight to behold. Of course, he does an homage to the flying camera through the woods representing the Deadite spirits, but he also does a move in which fighting characters move from the floor to the ceiling in a shot that flips over three times in a row. Most impressive of all is a bravura one-shot sequence in which a character crawls toward the camera as all manner of chaos explodes around and behind her. The desaturated dark color of most of the film provides a striking contrast to the bright reds and oranges of blood and fire that dominate the final third of the movie.

Vanicek is credited as co-writing the script with Florent Bernard, and unfortunately the writing is the least successful part of the picture. The characters are thinly drawn, and the audience isn’t encouraged to care for them. That being said, there are some good aspects of the writing, such as the way preexisting family tensions are used by the demonic spirits to turn them against each other. There is also plenty of grim amusement to be had, as in the funeral scene in which nearby construction noise makes the eulogies mostly inaudible, the clever framing of a shot involving a fight in a chimney, and the droll use of a stair lift for both dread and laughs.

Evil Dead Burn is a malefic blast that shows a filmmaker having great fun with the tools of cinema. It’s not going to be for everyone due to its intensity and plentiful gore, but for those who like their cup of horror to be on the strong side, it’s a tasty concoction.