Time to dig up those library cards and check out that dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis again. Not that the infamous Book of the Dead has much of a role to play in Evil Dead Burn, the sixth feature in Sam Raimi’s long-running supernatural horror series, which started way back in 1981. The one useful nugget revealed in its sinister pages this time is the existence of an ancient dagger that is the sole means of killing a deadite for good. Naturally, the clan of freshly turned deadites will stop at nothing to get their hands on it before the miraculously uninfected final girl does.
Director Sébastien Vanicek may have come along well after the New French Extremity wave of the late ’90s and early 2000s — his first feature, the effective 2023 rampaging spider shocker, Infested, is on Shudder — but his taste for grisly carnage, vicious cruelty, spilled viscera and bone-crunching hyper-graphic violence is firmly rooted in that school. This is a movie that revels in its meanness.
Evil Dead Burn
The Bottom Line
An orgy of unmodulated mayhem.
