Well, that was mindless carnage.

A family in grieving finds itself torn further apart with demonic intervention.

The tritely titled Evil Dead Burn is directed by Sébastien Vanicek (Infested, which curiously has the same poster design) and is a sequel to 2023’s Evil Dead Rise. The movie stars Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, and George Pullar.

While Sam Raimi’s original 1980s movies started the franchise, the movies have been getting progressively darker lately. Gone are the campy antics, now we have grisly movies with depressing “reality” mixed in.
What does this sequel represent for the series going forward?

The movie follows a friend group of two brothers Joseph and Will, (Doohan and Pullar) and their partners Alice and Thya, (Yacoub and Buchanan). Will has a serious falling out with his wife, Alice, and drives off into the night. This causes him to die in an accident on the road, and his family place the blame squarely on Alice’s influence.
But when Will isn’t actually dead… the family’s time of grief turns into a time of horror, and the family are at risk of losing their souls.

But that’s not how the film starts.

There’s something to be said about how you start a film. About the setup you are giving your principal characters; so they have the best foundation to make the audience care about them. Even a little. Evil Dead Burn does a phenomenally bad job at this. We are instead given a needless scene with throwaway characters, designed to connect to Rise. Oddly, the deadite featured isn’t played by the same actor… which confuses matters further.

The bulk of the movie is the interplay of an unhappy family torn by the death of their “perfect” son. Perfect, despite his abuse of his wife Alice, who then has to take their posthumous praise in any way she can. Sadly this doesn’t mean simply leaving. The action largely takes place in the house they got married in, which now absurdly looks like hell on Earth.

But while the Evil Dead series has a theme in single location scope (besides outlier Army of Darkness) Evil Dead Burn takes a long time to get there. We are tossed around from location to location. A club. A motorway. A crematorium. Another roadway. The house. A building site. The film has a very scattered pacing, and this isn’t helped by the scattered writing in the screenplay.

The crux of the story is that the dead have risen. But in defence of humanity, a weapon was created that will remove the evil spirits from their human hosts. My problem with this premise is twofold: 1, no one would want to return to their bodies after a deadite has abused it, and 2, we see deadites killed with dishwasher doors. No dagger required. We also get some of the clumsiest heroes we’ve seen in a while. Oh cool, they have a weapon to chop up demons with! Oh, they dropped it somehow.

This might sound like nitpicking and ranting, but this is a systemic issue in this screenplay. There’s nothing rewarding here. It is just miserable. Characters are shouting at each other. The chemistry starts and ends with: I hate/distrust you. Then they will be attacking each other for (to them) no reason. All in a vacuum of emotion; it is all so uninteresting and cliché. There’s no sense that these people actually loved each other, unless you are content with the occasional photograph or video of scenes we didn’t see. So any sense of loss (or surprise) is absent. Making for a very predictable experience.

The film does have moments, though they may be brief. It feels as though the writers had ideas, but no means or skill to lace them together. A deadite drinking a wax candle is a cool image. Someone falling onto a dishwasher’s cutlery rack is new. However, I am less familiar with the rules of deadites, I thought people had to be dead to become one of them? Apparently not.
The family’s senile grandmother was fun, played by Maude Davey. She possibly stole the show by giving at least some levity to the proceedings.

I find myself comparing it to Lee Cronin’s recent horror movies: The Mummy, and Evil Dead Rise. Both for better or worse, are Evil Dead movies, in name or otherwise. Sébastien Vanicek’s movie sits in-between them. It isn’t as good as Rise, but it is better than The Mummy. This one just makes you ask questions you shouldn’t be asking. Or simply willing it to do something cool or have a character do something logical. Not a good look for a horror, in my opinion.