Mladen and Del review ‘Evil Dead Burn’

Warner Bros.

“Evil Dead Burn” starring Souheila Yacoub as I’ve‑Had‑Enough Alice; Hunter Doohan as weakling and coward Joseph; Luciane Buchanan as Up‑Yours Thya; Erroll Shand as bitter, mean, angry, and resentful Edgar; Tandi Wright as Gotta‑Keep‑Everything‑Together Susan; Maude Davey as funny, Alzheimer’s-addled grandma Polly; and others. Directed by Sébastien Vanicek. Score Composer Double Danger (Xavier Caux and Douglas Cavanna). Script Writers Florent Bernard, Sam Raimi, and Sébastien Vanicek. One hour, 50 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: What happens when members of a dysfunctional family get possessed, one by one, by demons trying to keep themselves from getting kicked back to Hell? The family’s dysfunctions get amplified to 11 as they corral, at times, the demons to settle long festering, or newly minted, grudges to even the score.    

Spoilers: Ah, yeah.

Mladen’s take

The Horror is all around me in real life.

The high-end apartment complex going up across from my office that only military personnel will be able to afford because they’re BAH‑ed. I can no longer access my favorite fishing spots on the beach because the Air Force has made them No Trespass land. Northwest Florida has become one giant parking lot, day or night. Oh, poser Florida Gov. De‑Insane‑tis paid tens of millions of dollars to a campaign contributor to buy worthless Norriego Point in Destin. It’ll blow away when the next hurricane hits the area and so will the tax dollars, your tax dollars, that Fahrenheit 451 Ron used to pay off one of his besties for the spit of sand. The Gulf Stream is starting to not stream as much. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting greater by the minute. The Sixth Mass Extinction is well on its way to playing out. The Fabulous Five Fascists – Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Trump – still have tens of millions of supplicants enabling their “Animal Farm” ways. The Horror.

So, I groaned when Del invited me to see pretend horror in the form of “Evil Dead Burn.”

What can I say about that except this, thank you, Del, the on‑screen horror was pretty darned good. And less grotesque than what’s actually going on around us.

“Evil Dead Burn” gets a B+ from me and that’s just because of the dropped dagger thing.

Know that “Evil Dead Burn” is only mildly scary. What drives this mature bit of horror filmmaking is a solid script, good acting, and its sincere commitment to old‑style graphic violence. It’s “The Exorcist” melded with “The Omen” (the original films) with tints of “Hellraiser.” Don’t get me wrong. “Evil Dead Burn” is not as good as those classics but, tell you what, it ain’t bad.

The movie cuts to the chase really fast. First couple of minutes set up the story, so, no, you need not watch the preceding five Evil Deads to understand what’s about to happen.

Also, “Evil Dead Burn” does a good job of weaving a plot – family dynamics gone awry – with a lot, and I mean a lot, of top‑notch, true-blue and red and purple and mushy and stringy and oozing and spraying and pulpy body mutilation. Heck, a couple of scenes meandered into disgusting. Wait ’til you see how Thya infects Polly with demon seed. Yuck. Times 1,000. Can’t decide, though, which was more bonkers gross, the Polly‑Thya moment or the Susan‑Edgar make out scene. Wait, I’ve decided. It’s Thya mercilessly infecting the demented grandmother.

More than anything, though, I give “Evil Dead Burn” a nod for recognizing that events happening in the background are critical to good storytelling on the Big Screen. Pay attention toward the middle of the movie to what’s erupting behind and around our lovely and unpossessed Alice as she tries to escape the demons. Loved it. The Alice moment was a beautiful reminder of the best slaughter ever captured on cellulose. The film is “Let the Right One In” (Swedish, 2008). The set is a pool and the bloodletting distant as Oskar, being held under water, is getting bullied.    

Visually, “Evil Dead Burn” sets the mood with dreary weather, a dreary landscape, and a dilapidating house. Aurally, the soundtrack does the film a solid by propelling the story without overwhelming it as happened, for example, with 2025’s “Tron: Ares.”

“Evil Dead Burn” is worth seeing in a theater. Drop the change to help make it a success. I’d like to see what comes out of the two teasers that come at the end of the movie.

Del’s take

Is an Evil Dead movie really an Evil Dead movie without the presence of Bruce Campbell? Take comfort, Deadheads. Campbell is an executive producer of this sixth installment of Sam Raimi’s low-budget horror series that began at a remote cabin in the woods way back in 1981. All the Evil Dead tropes have been lovingly preserved – the goopy, nausea-inducing gore; the cackling, maniacal demons; and the weird, leaf blower-level POV of approaching evil. What “Evil Dead Burn” offers that the first two films didn’t – “Evil Dead” and 1987’s “Evil Dead 2” – is an actual plot, and an interesting plot at that, though not wholly realistic.

The movie begins innocently enough, with a birthday celebration for Joseph Price (Hunter Doohan) at his brother Will’s club (George Pullar). Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) is present, along with Will’s wife, Alice (Yacoub). Will and Alice argue – it’s suggested a history of domestic violence exists between the two – and Will storms off in a drunken huff. Joseph tries to keep him from driving but Will, the older of the two, asserts himself and leaves, after which he promptly runs over a demon-possessed Jessica (Greta Van Den Brink), who causes Will to crash, and then passes the demon to him as he burns to death in the wreckage of his car.

Later, the family gathers at a crematorium for Will’s service, and in a nice bit of claustrophobic horror Will’s father, Edgar (Erroll Shand) is attacked by a reanimated Will who is pounding on the casket about to be fed to the flames. Edgar now becomes the carrier and proceeds to infect the others as they gather at the old family house, now crumbling into ruin under Joseph’s neglect, for a tense, miserable wake. Will’s mother, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar blame Alice for Will’s death. And they resent that it was Joseph who lived and not Will because Will was making something of himself while Joseph seemed weak and directionless.

As each family member is infected by the demon, all pretenses of civilized behavior go out the window as the possession victims find new and inventive ways to attack, and those defending themselves find new and inventive ways to fend off those attacks. There are knives involved, plus guns, plus shards of glass, plus toilet bowls, plus gasoline-powered edgers, plus chainsaws, plus a collection of pointy-tipped utensils – sharp side up, of course – arranged in a dishwasher basket. The havoc and ruin these instruments produce is displayed as graphically as current camera and computer technology allows. That bucket of popcorn you bought before entering the theater will sit untouched, and if it didn’t, the bucket will serve as a handy barf bag.

For a possible B-level horror movie, the actors in “Evil Dead Burn” do a remarkably good job. Will’s mother Susan is given a brittle grip on sanity by Wright that I found totally relatable, while Shand’s depiction of father Edgar and his seething, demon-exacerbated dementia seemed entirely appropriate to the moment. Van Den Brink is terrifying as Jessica, who kicks off the massacre mayhem by murdering two friends out for an innocent day of fishing and beer-drinking. I wasn’t as impressed with Yacoub’s Alice, who inexplicably stuck around despite having her ass kicked by her husband, and then his parents treating her like a mudroom throw-rug. The one character I actively disliked was Doohan’s Joseph, who was weak, indecisive, and failed spectacular in a moment where he might have redeemed himself.

Another aspect of the movie I found remarkable was the cinematography, which was often spectacular. As Will’s car is rolling down an embankment we’re given a look at the chaos taking place inside the car – debris hovers in midair as if gravity had been suspended. And the fight scene that takes place inside the car was the best I’ve ever seen. At one point a fire extinguisher explodes, filling the car with a cloud of white chemicals that momentarily masks the horror of who is doing what to whom.

What I think most folks won’t appreciate is the jaw-dropping violence and gore, which are on par with that notorious butcher scene from “Bone Tomahawk.” It might be the most gratuitously violent movie I’ve ever seen. “Evil Dead” and “Evil Dead 2” were both violent films, but the violence was leavened by comedy. While “Burn” has its comedic moments, the tone of the violence is deadly serious. I haven’t seen 2013’s “Evil Dead” or the 2023 “Evil Dead Rise” so I can’t compare.

I’m giving “Evil Dead Burn” a B. In ways it’s better than its predecessors, but the blood and guts were too much for me.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.