Evil Dead Burn Movie Review:

With the growing interest in mental health and family trauma discussions in common discourse and movies, horror derived from them has effectively blunted the scare tactics by supernatural entities. But this trend did not kill possession horrors. The genre, much like the entities it relies on, rolled with the punches and charted a new course with films like Hereditary and The First Omen. Sebastien Vanicek's Evil Dead Burn had the trappings of these movies, whose horrors leaned on family tragedies and personal trauma. The film takes the easy way out by getting way too indulgent in gore, leaving the promising personal stories underdeveloped.

Following the death of her husband, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) reluctantly returns to his isolated family home for the funeral, where she finds a household held together less by love than by fear, denial, and years of unresolved trauma. As old wounds resurface and long-buried tensions boil over, the discovery of the Necronomicon unleashes a Deadite outbreak, transforming the family's emotional fractures into a nightmarish struggle for survival. Trapped inside the house, Alice has two battles to fight: One, the Deadites that possess her in-laws; two, their unkind nature and relentless determination to preserve the family.

The second aspect could have given any other horror trope a run for its money, had it been the primary focus. Subtlety would be the last word to describe Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films. Slapstick humour is his distinct touch to the franchise. Evil Dead Burn sticks to the Raimi-like treatment to a fault. Raimi's kinetic and over-the-top style acts as a foil to the simple storylines and characters. Whereas Evil Dead Burn touches on a great many ideas (will discuss in detail), but it merely touches, helplessly surrendering the narrative to Raimi's style. It is pretty much like how most characters in the film take a disconcerting comfort in family, no matter how abusive and toxic it is. The Evil Dead films since 2013 are a departure from Raimi's filmmaking style, with more serious storytelling. Evil Dead Burn (produced by Raimi) flirts with both sensibilities but commits to none.

Director: Sebastien Vanicek

Cast: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand, Maude Davey

You really need a long sheet of paper to note all the fascinating ideas the film introduces and the momentary flourishes that, with more work, could have taken the film to a whole other league. The dead wife asking her husband why wasn't he half as ready to shoot his father as he was while killing her; All hell breaking loose in the house when Will's wedding video tape is playing on TV; Calling the empathetic of the two brothers as weak and a blot on the family; Old woman pulling down a young woman in the name of preserving the family; The spirits bringing out the family's inner detestation for a woman who doesn't want to have a child, the list keeps growing. If only the writers chose to stick with just one of these ideas or moments. And what stopped the exploration of these spaces? Either the dull pursuit of a mystical dagger that could vanquish the evil, or the funny portion involving the demonic entity and the grandma. If not both, then an inventive way of decapitation, bone snapping, skin/flesh peeling, and grotesque and gooey blood letting. 

The gore scenes are very well done. It succeeds with shock value and makes you look the other way on many occasions throughout its under two-hour runtime. But then again, gore to what end? None of the Deadites seems interested in anything other than carnage and shouting contests. Not only do the writers fail to spin a lore around these Deadites, but they also take a poor effort to make them menacing as they are, which is underdeveloped and underwhelming.  What makes the Deadites seem even less bothersome are the earlier-mentioned scarier and highly competent story ideas. The gore and possession also come in the way of exploring grief and the cracks in the family.

The anxious need to belong is written all over both Evil Dead Burn and the family it features. The film's gore, pushed to new extremes, seems determined to secure its place in the Evil Dead franchise. It is much like the insane lengths to which the family members go to safeguard a toxic household masquerading as a family. More than any of its jump scares, the film's biggest horror lies in throwing away the potential for an in-depth study of the horrors of a "perfect family" in favour of writing - 101 Ways to Turn Kitchen Utensils into Lethal Weapons.