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Back in the days before the internet - almost prehistoric times, for some younger folk - aspiring horror moviemakers couldn't just upload content on YouTube and get discovered. Writer-director Sam Raimi and his actor friend Bruce Campbell made a short concept film and begged and borrowed and scraped together enough money to make The Evil Dead (1981), a bloody, darkly funny tale of demonic possession and Deadites (as the monsters are known) that did well enough to spawn higher-budgeted sequels and a TV series and move Raimi into the bigtime.
He would direct other kinds of movies, including the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy, but never forsook his horror roots.
Evil Dead Burn, the latest in the franchise, has Raimi and Campbell with producing credits. The new movie is directed and co-written by French filmmaker Sébastien Vanicek, whose debut feature, Vermin, impressed Raimi. Even if you're not an Evil Dead devotee, it's vividly watchable on its own, with a decent backstory, plenty of gore and a dark, creepy atmosphere, but there's less of the black comedy that gave the earlier instalments a distinctive touch. And at almost two hours, it feels drawn out - the final act in particular could have been a bit tighter.
There are a couple of violent scenes at the start to keep the gore hounds happy while the scenario is being established.
Alice (Souheila Yacoub) is a young French woman whose abusive husband Will (George Pullar) was killed in a car accident that we know was caused by a Deadite. Afterwards she and Will's family go to the latter's big old house in the country to work out what happens from there. As an aside - the movie was shot in New Zealand and the house is an impressive piece of production design, big and spooky and rather the worse for wear.
Alice had been helping run Will's restaurant and her mother- and father-in-law, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Errol Shand), want her to keep it going, though she's thinking of returning to Paris and her father. This makes things even more strained than they already were and when you add in the others in this not terribly happy group - Joseph (Hunter Doohan), the less-favoured son, his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) and senile grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) - and put them all together in an isolated location, it was never going to be easy. Grief can make a tricky family situation worse; exacerbating problems rather than bringing people together, and that's what happens here.
But as we the audience have already seen, when Edgar went to say a final goodbye to Will before the cremation, things are going to get far worse than anyone could possibly have imagined.
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Then we get to the main part of the action, where emotional trauma becomes physical trauma. Some people become Deadites and those who remain try desperately to survive by disposing of the people who not so long ago were near and dear(ish) to them.
There are callbacks to the established mythology of the series - even a long, fast tracking shot or two that's one of the trademarks - but the film has its own identity too.
The movie earns its R classification. There's plenty of body trauma here, impressively and ickily created with a mix of practical and CGI effects and make-up. Various body parts are stabbed and gouged and severed and burned (like it says in the title) and in one memorable moment, a character is pushed onto a dishwasher load of forks and knives.
Stay put for two scenes in the end credits, one midway through that adds a nasty little jolt and one at the very end that brings back a major character from the previous instalment, Evil Dead Rise, suggesting that this won't be the end of the franchise.
