French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček vowed when he took charge of the sixth installment in the “Evil Dead” film series that it would be the most brutal. Mission accomplished, mon ami. Not the most artful or clever or scariest. Brutal.
Vaniček has certainly delivered — a relentlessly violent, overlong, one-note, meandering grindhouse that lacks its predecessors’ Looney Tunes approach to horror and humor. “Evil Dead Burn” shows signs that the franchise may have found itself a savage, nihilistic dead end in torture-porn, even as a seventh is on its way.
Chunks of flesh fly after a weirdly convoluted introduction to a family possessed. Dogs are stabbed, scissors carve into heads, hot candle wax is swallowed, a head is caved in with a metal dishwasher door, a fountain pen is jabbed through an ear, a corkscrew finds itself in someone’s throat, grilling skewers are used in non-FDA approved methods, a face is melted on a radiator and an electric knife is used, but not to carve a holiday roast. Someone shoots themselves — not once, but three times in the face — and then this same sturdy character somehow has a long make-out session with a loved one. And they say romance is dead.
There’s tons of gore but to what point? The 2013 reboot was about drug addiction, while 2023’s femme-centered “Evil Dead Rise” was about maternal anxieties — and alternate uses for cheese graters. This one seems to try to explore domestic violence, but it’s a poor vehicle since someone gets their head cartoonishly bashed in with a prosthetic limb.
And, alas, there isn’t the customary chain saw whipped out at the end. No, this time we get a weed wacker as an appetizer and then a jackhammer in the face. It all ends with a weird “Terminator”-esque finale. What “Evil Dead Burn” needs is an editor and a visit from Amnesty International.
To be fair, there are some great set pieces: A multi-minute fight between three characters in a car is a triumph — fingers get amputated in a door, the sunroof is crushed, seat belts are used to strangle and headrests impale. And one long, continuous shot of one of our shallow-breathing heroes crawling to safety across an extended fight scene indicates where this film could have gone.
The script by Vaniček and Florent Bernard tries to connect all this mayhem to the “Evil Dead” canon, starting with a nifty opening sequence that involves two buddies whose fishing trip is brutally interrupted by a demon-possessed young woman, who we are left to surmise is a leftover from the last scene of “Evil Dead Rise.” There are the necessary references to “The Book of the Dead” and a connection to Professor Raymond Knowby, who sits at the heart of the original mythology. For all you “Evil Dead”-heads, there’s the reappearance of the Kandarian Dagger (Guess how many slashes it will deliver).
It sets up a plot — loose, very loose — about a new widow (a fearsome Souheila Yacoub) whose relationship with the family of her late husband is strained. There’s a nutso dad who shouldn’t be left around sharp objects and rips at his son’s coffin (Erroll Shand), a chilly mom (Tandi Wright) who is every inch the Matriarch — “Without family, you’re nothing,” she says firmly — a wimpy son (Hunter Doohan) and his pretty cool girlfriend (Luciane Buchanan), a little more psychotic than you’d like in a life partner.
Vaniček seems incapable of dread and his humor is odd. He apparently thinks it’s hysterical to have an 85-year-old grandmother with dementia and a missing leg keep accusing people of stealing from her and then turn her into a demon (Maude Davey, working hard). The script bafflingly notes early on that our widow’s shoes make one of her heels pinched so she needs a Band-Aid — maybe funny because of the buckets of gore to come? And you can tell two Frenchmen wrote the script because smoking is, checks notes, encouraged.
We’ve come a long way since Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, and not in a good way. With so much elevated horror at the movie theaters these days, “Evil Dead Burn” seems like a step back — off a cliff.
“Evil Dead Burn,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release that hits theaters July 10, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong bloody horror violence and gore, and language.” Running time: 110 minutes. One star out of four.
