The opening minutes of Evil Dead Burn do a swift job of settling franchise fans into familiar territory. The first thing we hear is a fly with a buzz, followed by a man anxiously poring over a reel-to-reel tape recorder and other paraphernalia of research into things that really should not be disturbed. We’re then told of a new and crucial item in the now 40-year-plus-old mythology, and the latest in the saga of Deadites and disfigurement is off to the races.
Just like Sam Raimi’s original, Evil Dead Burn represents an enthusiastic up-and-coming filmmaker throwing everything he has at the screen. In this case, director Sébastien Vaniček (making his second feature after the terrific killer-spiders shocker Infested) has a significantly higher budget with which to stage his energetic brutality; you could call this the John Wick of Evil Dead movies. There are slight echoes of other past films too, from You’re Next to Silent Hill, yet Vaniček makes this very much its own flick, even within the long-running franchise.
One of the advantages of the Evil Dead series is that it has been based on an endlessly malleable premise, not any specific characters or other details; it has ably survived the departure of its original signature protagonist, Bruce Campbell’s Ash. Like that of Rise, the focus of Vaniček and Florent Bernard’s Burn screenplay is a family that is under stress even before the supernatural comes into play. But first, there’s a setpiece that directly ties this story in to Rise’s events, and establishes Vaniček’s aggressive, dynamic visual/editing approach as well as his complete lack of boundaries when it comes to grue and ghastliness.
Then one of the best smash-cut transitions in recent memory takes us to a nightclub where we’re introduced to Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and her toxic relationship with husband Will (George Pullar). We don’t have very long to get attached to him, though, because he’s soon unalived and Burn gets to the meat of its story, as Alice attends Will’s cremation service and it becomes clear she has not been an accepted member of his family. Particularly disdainful is his mother Susan (Tandi Wright), who says of Will, “I would do anything for us to be together again,” which anyone in the audience will know is exactly not the kind of thing you want to say in a movie like this.
That kind of knowing foreshadowing is an example of the dark humor that bubbles up here and there during Evil Dead Burn, which generally adopts an uncompromisingly savage tone in both its violence and its emotions. Alice joins Susan, her husband Edgar (Mārama’s Erroll Shand), their son Joseph (Hunter Doohan), his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), and Susan’s dementia-addled mother Polly (Maude Davey) at the family home—which, of course, is a crumbling manse out in the middle of nowhere. Even before the characters bring it up, we can deduce that that occult scholar seen at the beginning was also part of this brood, and the ancient evil imbuing his artifacts begins infecting this dysfunctional group, turning them against each other in hideous ways.
As in past Evil Deads, Burn’s possessees taunt their victims while terrorizing them, and there are plenty of old conflicts and resentments for them to disinter here. Given the emotional chaos swirling around her, it’s easy to identify with Alice, given a strong and sympathetic reading by Yacoub. While it’s understandable that French filmmaker Vaniček would cast a fellow countrywoman as his lead, Alice being a literal foreigner also accentuates her outsider status amidst Will’s family. The rest of the cast fully commit to their roles, before and after a number of them transform into demonic monsters.
Vaniček, Bernard, and makeup/effects designer Jane O’Kane (Ash vs. Evil Dead) come up with a seemingly endless variety of atrocities for them to visit upon each other, using all manner of found objects. O’Kane’s grotesquely standout work is complemented by visual effects supervised by Thierry Onillon, which are largely so good and so visceral that they mesh seamlessly with the prosthetics, and deliver both genuine jolts and serious gross-outs. (Vaniček has said one particular gory bit had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17, but I can’t imagine anything more extreme than what they got away with in the R-rated release version.) There’s a variety to the staging, shooting and cutting of the mayhem that keeps things lively as well. Vaniček’s approach ranges from rapid-fire edits to an impressive, long single-take shot, and from a punchy close-quarters struggle inside a car to a lengthy fight viewed from overhead. Among other things, it makes you think it would be totally awesome to see Vaniček tackle a hardcore martial-arts action film.
As the title suggests, there’s a bit of fire involved as well, and it informs the overall look of Evil Dead Burn. As production-designed by Nick Connor (art director on Rise and Ash vs. Evil Dead) and shot by Philip Lozano, the settings often have an evocatively burned-out veneer, with what appears to be ash drifting down through some of the exteriors. Making it all the more ominous and scary is the doomy score by Double Danger, a.k.a. Parisian composers Xavier Caux and Douglas Cavanna. Everyone involved here was clearly devoted to pushing things to the max, and in the final 15 minutes or so things get pushed maybe a little too far, in a couple of different ways that won’t be revealed here. Nonetheless, Evil Dead Burn continues the very successful track record of producers/Evil Dead creators Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell finding promising rising filmmakers and turning them loose in their gruelingly horrific world.
