Evil Dead Burn

Sam Raimi’s 1981 demon-possession schlocker The Evil Dead was both praised and reviled as one of the original ‘video nasties’. Over the following 45 years, the series it spawned has mutated and evolved, with Raimi’s own sequels injecting dark slapstick comedy (with the help of a game Bruce Campbell), before Fede Alvarez’s 2013 remake stripped things back to brutal basics and Lee Cronin’s 2023 Evil Dead Rise deftly transposed the cabin-in-the-woods carnage to a tower block. Now, in this nominal sequel to Cronin’s film by French writer-director Sébastien Vanicek (Infested), the one-time ‘video nasty’ has simply become, well, nasty. 

Evil Dead Burn manages to be grim in almost every way imaginable, even before it unleashes its onslaught of torturous gore. It takes place beneath an overcast sky that perpetually spits drizzle and sleet, and its primary location is a dilapidated, depressing family home soiled by damp and black mould. The backdrop, meanwhile, blends domestic violence, familial misery and bitter grief. The story kicks off with the supernaturally nudged death of an abusive husband, whose scarred wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) must further suffer the hateful glares and icy comments of her in-laws at the wake, then their ultra-violent antics as, one-by-one, they succumb (some more willingly than others) to the Deadite curse/infection. 

The theme of domestic abuse has been previously tackled in horror by Men and, very recently, Obsession. But Evil Dead Burn lacks either of those films’ wit or finesse. Vanicek and co-writer Florent Bernard simply use it as another weapon in a blunt, rusty arsenal seemingly intended to inflict maximum cruelty on their characters, and maximum distress to their audience, all supposedly in the name of catharsis. We are very much in old-school exploitation territory here. 

Among the movie’s many domestic atrocities, a dog is stabbed to death with a fork, a woman’s face is caved in with a dishwasher door and a fountain pen is slowly pushed into someone’s ear. To be fair, Vanicek keeps his camera nimble and his choreography tight, delivering some technically impressive oners amid all the limb-hacking pandemonium. But when a film’s only attempts at levity involve a dementia-afflicted granny (Maude Davey) saying inappropriate things, you have to question how exactly it qualifies as ‘entertainment’. 

After a couple of hours of pummelling and dour sadism, you’ll be pining for the days of Bruce Campbell throwing himself around with a chainsaw.  

In cinemas worldwide Fri Jul 8.