Movies are meant to engage two of your senses. You can see them, and you can hear them. Beyond that, certain gimmicks can tickle the others, but for the most part, two senses are the max. We think, however, that the new film Evil Dead Burn could very well be considered an exception. Evil Dead Burn is so brutal, painful, disgusting, and intense that you can practically (but, thankfully, not literally) feel it buzzing in your bones. Every stab, scrape, rip, pound, push, you name it. The story itself doesn’t quite deliver on the same level, but you’ll be so delightfully grossed out along the way, you probably won’t notice until later.
Evil Dead Burn is the sixth installment in the iconic horror franchise created by Sam Raimi way back in 1981. Most directly, it follows the fifth film in the franchise, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, with a few links here and there, which are additive overall, but not hugely consequential to the story at hand. This story follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a woman who married into a family with a very secretive history. When Alice’s husband is killed, her in-laws Susan and Edgar (Tandi Wright and Erroll Shand), Susan’s mother Polly (Maude Davey), her brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) all circle back to their house after the funeral—a house that is of great interest to the killer demons of the series called Deadites. When Evil Dead Burn kicks in, it really kicks in, but it takes longer than you’d expect to get there. The script by Florent Bernard and Sébastien Vaniček, who also directs, works best once the characters and relationships are well-established. However, none of those characters, whether they’re coded as heroes or villains, are particularly interesting or likeable. As a result, while there are a lot of relatable, maybe even cliché, family horrors on display well before the actual horror takes over, for a while it feels like the only thing the film will be killing is time. Erroll Shand as Edgar in Evil Dead Burn (Image: Warner Bros.) And yet there are a few solid moments sprinkled in. There’s a nice cold open to set it all up, and there is also an undeniable joy and delightful rising tension in knowing things are about to go very, very wrong for these characters. Then, once it does, Evil Dead Burn steps on the gas and doesn’t let up. People die, people fight, people do horribly disgusting things to each other, both very quickly and sometimes very slowly. Nowhere, no one, and nothing is safe. The visual and practical effects in the movie are excellent, and they’re made even better by the sound design, which is how you get that added sense of almost feeling the brutality.
