Hunter Doohan in Evil Dead Burn. Photograph: StudioCanal. All Rights Reserved./PA View image in fullscreen Hunter Doohan in Evil Dead Burn. Photograph: StudioCanal. All Rights Reserved./PA Horror films Review Evil Dead Burn review – wildly gory horror tears a grieving family to pieces The latest new chapter in Sam Raimi’s classic franchise goes harder than ever before but there’s something missing
Prefer the Guardian on Google W ith the release of Evil Dead Burn, there are now just as many Evil Dead movies not directed by Sam Raimi or starring Bruce Campbell as there are entries with that original team in place. The next film, Evil Dead Wrath, is already set for a 2028 release, when it will officially tip the balance toward non-Raimi film-makers. And unlike the non-James Cameron Terminators or the Spielberg-free Jaws sequels, these post-Raimi Evil Dead movies (which retain the director’s services as a seemingly enthusiastic producer) have so far enjoyed box office success, decent critical notices and appreciation from their horror fanbase.
Read more Yet all three of the post-Raimi Evil Deads still feel as if they take place in the shadows of what came before – specifically, the original 1983 indie horror classic about a bunch of young people who stumble upon the Book of the Dead in a cabin and accidentally unleash demonic hell upon themselves. The reasoning must be that with so many dopey horror comedies failing to competently imitate the splattery slapstick of Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness, and with Ash’s story continued in a three-season TV series, a new version’s only hope is to recapture the nasty (and, yes, sometimes darkly comic) transgressions of the first film. Evil Dead Burn comes closer than the others so far – though maybe not close enough to obliterate the comparisons entirely.
Evil Dead Burn isn’t a direct sequel to 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, but it begins with the same lakeside setting as that film’s introduction, linking this similarly family-centric story to the earlier entry. (A post-credits scene draws a closer, albeit somewhat pointless, connection.) After a gruesome crash, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) loses her husband, William (George Pullar). Though it comes as a shock, she may not be as devastated as his family expects, for reasons strongly hinted early on and developed further throughout the film. Yacoub makes a fine, moody anchor, even if she never gets her shot at Bruce Campbell-style square-jawed clowning. The major change the non-Raimi Evil Dead movies have in common is their attempt to flesh out the characters – before stripping that flesh away in various undead skirmishes.
Alice’s brother-in-law, Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan), are more sympathetic to Alice’s situation than William and Joseph’s forbidding parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand). But everyone tries to stay barely polite for an ill-advised post-funeral gathering at a dilapidated family home that has been passed down to the unsuccessful Joseph. It almost comes as a relief – to the audience, anyway, who isn’t seated for a dreary family drama – when the seething tension is brought past a boiling point by the conversation of key characters to Deadites, the series’ voracious cross between zombies and the demonically possessed.
As producers, Raimi and his longtime collaborator Rob Tapert seem eager to give relatively unknown film-makers a shot at Evil Dead; Burn’s French director and co-writer Sébas…