Evil Dead Burn
No one can truly know the experiences of another or the truth of their lives; Joseph Price and his girlfriend Thya aware that things are not perfect behind the apparent success Joseph’s brother William has built from his marriage to Alice, the restaurant they run together, she refusing to give up smoking while he wants a baby and his own drinking, what they see is only a fragment, their latest argument seeing him storm off on Joseph’s birthday night out.
A moment of inattention and a distraction seeing Will flip his car which bursts into flames, new widow Alice is unsure how she is supposed to feel, the services at the crematorium awkward and dinner afterwards with Will’s parents Susan and Edgar and senile grandmother Polly lacking any comfort or grace, Alice already having been sworn to secrecy after finding Edgar attempting to slash his wrists and surreptitiously moving any bladed objects from his reach, not realising the angry determination which possesses him.
Sixth film in the Evil Dead sequence though the 2013 remake of the original is justifiably ignored in the timeline, Evil Dead Burn takes its cues from Sam Raimi’s 1981 original and its sequel, the Price family holding their own secrets which damaged them all, Polly (Maude Davey) the unpredictable bad-tempered widow of the late Doctor Benjamin Price who researched the Book of the Dead, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, and the cult who, unlike his resentful family whom he abandoned in his search for mystical objects, believed in its terrible power.
Directed by Infested‘s Sébastien Vaniček from a script co-written with Florent Bernard and shot in New Zealand and springing from 2023’s Evil Dead Rise though no foreknowledge is needed, a more appropriate name for the film might be Evil Dead Burn, Boil and Dismember, with chaos and carnage in equal measures as Hell’s bells and buckets of blood are unleashed, relentless and remorseless and variously employing kitchen appliances, garden implements and of course power tools as well as drooling Polly’s false leg.
Will (George Pullar) the golden child, his body may be blackened but with her feelings all over the place Alice (Souheila Yacoub) still does her best not to sully his name even as Susan (Tandi Wright) needles her for displaying what she sees as insufficient grief, Joseph (Hunter Doohan) trying to keep peace even as it provokes Edgar (Erroll Shand), always disappointed in his aspiring writer second son and his perceived failings.
The characters and their relationships given more attention than is customary for an Evil Dead film, when it comes the burn – and the amputations and stabbings – are all the deeper for that familiarity, unwanted though it may be, particularly in the case of Edgar, seemingly all too eager to give himself to possession, freed by the Kandarian demon which has displaced his soul and allowed him to be the vicious man he always wanted to be.
With nods to Salem’s Lot, Alien 3 and Event Horizon, as might be expected while unceasingly brutal the film is also occasionally and uncomfortably hilarious from the crematorium next to a construction site to Polly’s final descent, her stairlift running under the grinning portrait of her late husband, the shift from a cabin in the woods to a grander but dilapidated house in the misty forest allowing a larger battleground but one still haunted by swooping demonic camerawork.
Evil Dead Burn a bloody brilliant time for all except perhaps for the doomed unfortunates at ground zero, alongside The Bone Temple, The Bride!, They Will Kill You, Hokum, Obsession and Backrooms, this continues to be a vintage year for horror, each different but excellent in their own strange and disturbing ways with more on the way, though prequel film Evil Dead Wrath is not scheduled to arrive until 2028, the intervening time perhaps intended to allow some chance of recovery.
Evil Dead Burn is on general release now
