Reviews

Sam Raimi kick-started The Evil Dead franchise back in the 1980s and now it’s making a resurgence, with Evil Dead Burn coming out only three years after Evil Dead Rise.

This latest horror instalment, directed by French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, is a completely different story from Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, although the longstanding Evil Dead lore connects them.

This film follows French widow Alice (Souheila Yacoub) as she reunites with her late American husband’s family at a remote lakeside house after the funeral.

Her brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan) has been reading his late grandfather Dr. Benjamin Price’s research and has learned about the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (Book of the Dead) – an Evil Dead staple – as well as the existence of a dagger that can kill deadites – zombie-like entities possessed by a demonic spirit.

Joseph discovers the dagger inside the house and unleashes hell on his family. The Kandarian Demon, the franchise’s unseen malevolent force, commands deadites to attack them and retrieve the weapon and possesses certain family members, turning them into deadites too.

Not wasting any time before getting to the deadite horror, Vaniček mentions the dagger in the first five minutes in a rushed exposition sequence that introduces this new nugget of information quickly.

In fact, most of the film has this frenetic, propulsive energy, with quick cuts and jumps, as well as handheld camerawork and disorientating movements. Vaniček’s skill as a filmmaker is best exemplified by an impressive one-take sequence filled with chaos, destruction and many moving parts.

Starting with the 2013 soft reboot, Evil Dead, the franchise has ditched the comedy aspect of the original horror-comedy trilogy and gone full super-violent horror. Evil Dead Burn continues this trend, giving us a wild, brutal and shocking film filled with wince-inducing body horror, gory deaths, dangerous improvised weapons and lots of blood and body parts.

Vaniček provides little breaks from the mayhem in the first two-thirds to build character and explain the lore, but the final act is relentless, with Alice being constantly attacked by deadites. She really gets put through the wringer and actually goes through too much – the film didn’t need the final opponent and should have been 10 minutes shorter.

This outing isn’t quite as exciting as Evil Dead Rise, and the character-driven moments about abuse and trauma feel undercooked, but if you came to the film looking for non-stop gore and carnage, you won’t be disappointed.

In cinemas from Friday 10th July

By Hannah Wales

© Cover Media