Out this week in Irish cinemas is Evil Dead Burn, the latest entry in the much-beloved horror franchise Evil Dead. Starring a relatively unknown and intimate cast, Evil Dead Burn follows a family as they mourn a tragic passing. What starts out as a tense, awkward event quickly turns into a disturbing hellscape when the Book of the Dead returns to enact its usual messed-up shenanigans.
What has made each subsequent Evil Dead film outside of the original trilogy so engaging is that the premise allows each story to be standalone. An ancient evil is awoken by a book and wreaks havoc on those who summoned it. It’s simple, straightforward and allows the director/writer to deliver a fun film without any baggage from previous entries. Evil Dead Burn achieves this for the most part. For the first time in a long time, there is new lore in the Evil Dead franchise, and it isn’t well developed. It essentially involves a weapon that is basically kryptonite to Deadites. If you’ve seen other Evil Dead films, you know this to be fairly unnecessary.
The film opens with that iconic monologue about the Book of the Dead and with someone unintentionally finding it and opening it. We are off to the races. Like all other Evil Dead films, the chaos is centred in one location that the humans are trapped in. And I found these particular victims really interesting.
We all burn down here
There is Alice (Souheila Yacoub), whose husband Will has passed during a drunken car crash and her in-laws. There is Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan). They are kind and warm, and are helping through this difficult time. Then there are Edgar (Erroll Shand) and Susan (Tandi Wright), Will and Joseph’s parents, who are the in-laws from hell. Will was their firstborn, their golden child, and they don’t quite care for Alice for various reasons, one major one being that Alice didn’t pop out a grandchild for them before this tragic accident.
With all this hate bubbling under the surface, the Book of the Dead has a field day with this new batch of playthings. As a new chapter, Evil Dead Burn is a lot of fun. It’s gross, it has some absolutely incredible death scenes and the cinematography when the Deadites are battling the humans is brilliant. There is a particular one-shot scene late in the film that looks harrowingly intense and sounds absolutely disturbing. Another camera trick I quite enjoyed involves a Deadite lifting someone by a shower curtain, and the camera follows them as they climb up the wall, strangling them. It’s something taken right out of Inception with its use of practical camera work instead of CGI.
We found you
The acting is also pretty great. Alice is a compelling character. She was a part of this destructive relationship; she may finally be free of it, but even death does not part them. The dynamic between the family is convincingly grim and realistic, and then gets ratcheted up to 11 when the Deadites arrive. Each of the cast gets to evolve (or devolve as the case may be) as the story progresses.
Sadly, Evil Dead Burn does have the issue that many films have these days, especially if they’re legacy sequels: further lore is added. With Evil Dead, this is especially unnecessary. On top of that, the budget of the film is stretched to within an inch of its life, to the point of breaking when the film reaches its climax. There is a perfect point at which the film should have ended, culminating in a visual that is genuinely disturbing. However, the film continues for another 15 minutes and said visual loses almost all its lustre. Which is a real shame, because up until that point Evil Dead Burn was doing really well in my books.
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