No one would ever accuse Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead of being a particularly deep movie, or a picture concerned with matters of taste. It was quite literally marketed as “the ultimate experience in grueling horror” nearly a half century ago and sought to deliver on that hype train. It was violent, grotesque, and so happily gonzo in its depravity that it became the case to study in UK censorship battles during the Video Nasties debacle of the 1980s.
It was also, we should add, full of youthful ingenuity and an almost mirthful sense of play. Whether you knew the backstory or not, the sensation of former school-day chums innovating new camera techniques in the woods of Tennessee was palpable and giddy. There was slaughter, sure, chainsaws, of course, and gore galore. But even that OG film—which played the scares with a straighter face than Raimi’s outright camp sequels—still did it nearly all with a smile on its face and a twinkle in its eye.
Since its inception, this series has been as much about amusement, if in an often bleak, gallows fashion, as chills. Recent 21st century attempts have sought to steer the series back to its more gruesome roots, but be it Fede Alvarez’ beyond-credulity buckets of blood and demonic banter with a sing-songy Jane Levy in neon contacts, or Lee Cronin’s wicked portrait of a family in dissolution, they had thus far sought to retain that dark sense of mischief that makes it go down smooth.
In which case, Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn is here to break the mold. Out later this week, this one is also about a family in collapse, and it’s got demons and buckets of blood aplenty. Yet the mischief is gone, the twinkle faded, and the only thing grueling is the slapdash aesthetics applied to a series once renowned for turning bloodletting into a visual art form of swooshing cameras and bemusing gags. There remain a few neat tricks at play in Vaniček’s variations, but by and large Evil Dead Burn is simply crude and cruel, a movie full of misanthropy and as unpleasant to sit through as the scatological splatter of mid-2000s torture porn.
There are still a handful of aesthetic flourishes, including a solid third act one-er where hell literally breaks loose in a family’s lakeside home, but they are exceptions to the rule of what is a deeply ugly film, inside and out. It’s a movie that begins in earnest during a beleaguered funeral and only sees its vibe plummet from there.
The funeral in question is for one William (George Pullar), a barely-drawn crap husband and presumably crap brother, who inside of 90 seconds berates his French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and his milquetoast sibling Joseph (Hunter Doohan) during the latter’s birthday party. Shortly afterward, Will is blessedly burned alive by the Deadite forces of the Nine Circles, who taunt their proverbial pig on the spit that they have been searching for him so he can lead them “to your family.”
Hence the discount shelf sendoff the character gets in a depressing service attended only by his estranged and guilt-ridden spouse, brother and prospective sister-in-law (Luciane Buchanan), as well as parents Susan and Edgar (Sandi Wright and Erroll Shand), plus a dementia-addled grandmother (Maude Davey). All parties are part of a family condemned to a grim legacy by Grandpa (squint at the family photos for a cameo), who apparently enjoyed summoning the Devil in their dilapidated vacation home’s attic during his leisure time. And now those distant, spiritual in-laws have come to pay their respects.
There is ostensibly a metaphor about toxic families and the generational scars they spread in the screenplay, which Vaniček co-wrote with Florent Bernard. Via exhausted and despondent Alice as our requisite final girl, hers is a perspective both within and without three generations of bad choices festering a family from within, damning them long before the demons show up. We slowly discover that a violent and abusive marriage has corroded the soul of poor Susan, who in turn had learned long ago from her own parents how to turn a blind eye to acts of deviltry, great and small. How that’s influenced the men William and Joseph grew up to be, and the women who put up with them, becomes its own dark prophecy. The metaphor in all this is technically meatier than anything approaching a plot in the first couple of Evil Dead cult classics, but it’s also rote and delivered without conviction.
When a movie is this filled with piss and venom for the characters, of whom it basks in the suffering and misery of, any tacked-on concessions to an elevated subtext amounts to the only hint of farce present. Evil Dead Burn is an inferno of nihilism too consumed with contempt for its characters, its setting, and possibly the audience, to have any emotional or cathartic heat. It exists as a gross-out, shock machine wherein human bodies are destroyed, dismantled, and defiled in as putrid a manner as possible.
Of course the desecration of characters has always been Evil Dead’s meat and potatoes, but this one is not college kids at play or fanboys emulating a cult classic in wry good humor; it’s a sadist picking at the wings of flies in extreme, endless closeup, be it of what Papa Edgar is so obviously about to do to the family dog during a tense family dinner, or how grandma’s mental decline from Alzheimer’s is glibly mocked and exploited as the only source at attempted—and wildly misjudged—humor in an otherwise quite funereal endurance test.
There is little to nothing to redeem this empty exercise in franchise extension, not its performances, not its production design, definitely not its cinematography, and not necessarily even its gore, lest seeing people disemboweled in dreary closeup is the lone threshold for your idea of entertainment.
Forty years after being so wrongfully accused, Evil Dead has finally attached something irredeemably nasty to its name. Unnecessarily too.
Evil Dead Burn opens on Friday, July 10.
