For decades in the horror community, there was Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, and there was everything else. While franchises spat out installment after installment, Raimi’s gruesome, punishing, blackly comedic splatter fests remained (more or less) perfect. When it became clear Raimi wasn’t going to make a fourth one himself, it opened the door for new directors. 2013 saw Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake and 2023 brought us Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the first in what is to be a new trilogy. The second installment, Evil Dead Burn, from French director Sébastien Vanicek, is here now. While it tries to be Evil Dead, it’s really just everything else.
Nobody besides Sam Raimi is Sam Raimi, and I like that Vanicek—like Alvarez and Cronin before him—attempts something different within the framework of the series. Are there deadites? Do they inflict grievous bodily harm on themselves and others? Will we see power tools? Great! But you still need the basic elements of good drama. Alvarez used the premise to touch on addiction and detox; Cronin made it all about stunted adulthood and taking responsibility. Evil Dead Burn gestures toward something deeper, but never spends near the amount of time it needs to resonate. And the characters? Maybe the thinnest and least likeable you’ll ever meet.
The movie follows Alice (Souhelia Yacoub), whose husband Will (George Pullar), with whom she has a bit of a fractious relationship, dies early in the movie. We then cut to the funeral attended only by Will’s family. That includes: Mother Susan (Tandi Wright), father Edgar (Erroll Shand), brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), grandma Polly (Maude Davey) who suffers from dementia, and Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan). It’s a tense event (to put it mildly) and even more tense is the lunch afterward at the family’s now-dilapidated summer home.
Joseph has uncovered some of Susan’s father’s papers in the attic. He was some kind of occultist in a secret society, and he found a sacred relic. The reel-to-reel tapes Joseph plays (because of course he does) in Evil Dead Burn awaken the demonic entities that descend on the family and make things generally unpleasant. Or, I guess, more unpleasant.
My biggest issue with the movie is that we don’t know anything about these people. The amount of time between when we meet the family and when deadite shit starts happening is so brief in Evil Dead Burn, we barely get our footing. The movie keeps throwing these jump-cut-laden flashbacks to Will and Alice’s unhappy marriage while Will’s family berates her for wanting to move on with her life. (Sidebar: I couldn’t tell you if the funeral is happening a week after Will’s death or six months.) Joseph is a writer, I guess, and his girlfriend Thya is…a woman…? And Will’s parents, holy crap. Their whole reason for existing seems to be “we hate our son’s aloof French widow because she’s aloof and French.”
The closest we get to a character with any sort of past is, ironically, Grandma Polly. She’ll occasionally say things in her dementia confusion that allude to what life was like before. But if you think an Evil Dead movie is going to treat a grandma with dignity, you need to go back to thinking school. No one is safe in this movie, not even the dog we barely see. It almost feels like all of these people are in completely separate movies, and it’s just nobody told them.
I’m definitely not going to argue that Ash Williams and his friends in the first Evil Dead were supremely deep characters. However, we got to spend a decent amount of time with them just hanging out. We also had Bruce Campbell’s increasingly unhinged performances, not to mention Raimi’s demented Warner Bros. cartoon direction to get us by. Here, we have some decent gore sequences, and one or two single-take action scenes that feel somewhat different. And Evil Dead Burn is certainly a brutally violent movie, but it is not in a fun way. For all the stomach-churning elements of the earlier movies, they all had fun, gave us some gallows laughter.
Evil Dead Burn wants to give the story gravitas with themes of familial trauma and spousal abuse. That is way, way too heavy a subject to tackle if the filmmakers had no desire to actually contend with it. The moments that veer toward comedic feel so strange amid all of that. The movie is just at odds with itself. It may have been a bad Mummy movie, but Lee Cronin’s movie from earlier this year feels more tonally consistent with an Evil Dead movie than this does.
And not to pile on, but if you feel like sticking around past the credits, you’ll see the most confusing and forced tease for another movie I’ve perhaps ever seen. It truly baffles me.
The Evil Dead series has a very high bar for quality in my opinion, and Evil Dead Burn is comfortably the worst. I’ve seen all the movies three or more times apiece; I can’t see myself ever watching this one again.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.