There was never any question of whether Evil Dead Burn was going to be a gory movie. With the exception of Army of Darkness, every film in Sam Raimi’s gonzo franchise has done its best to one-up the bloodshed seen in previous installments — a difficult task, considering that the original was banned in the U.K. for seven years thanks to its intense horror brutality. But French director Sébastien Vaniček’s desensitized late-period entry into what used to be a consistently solid series misses one important point: Evil Dead movies are also supposed to be fun.
Without a sense of mischief to keep the story exciting and unpredictable, intensely violent movies can have a numbing effect. Evil Dead Burn hits this point quickly — which is unfortunate under any circumstances, but especially for a movie that’s 110 minutes long. A lot happens, and all of it is outrageous: As in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, the emphasis here is on creative weaponry, so that every time the camera rests on a wine-bottle opener or a dishwasher full of knives, we know that someone is about to do something horrifying with it. One of the best of these comes when a woman, recently impaled in the neck by a car seat headrest, pulls it slowly out of her neck and drops it on the floor, cackling the whole time. But this, too, gets dull after a while through sheer repetition.
