Just a few years ago, Lee Cronin brought new life into the Evil Dead franchise with his smaller film, Evil Dead Rise, scoring a Rotten Tomatoes score the same as the very first franchise entry from Sam Raimi 42 years earlier. Despite the praise, I liked Evil Dead Rise without loving it but was certainly glad to see more in this treasured universe for so many horror fans. So the pressure was on French director, Sebastien Vanicek who had only directed one feature length film before, and not one in English. But we all know the horror genre can be a fantastic place to make a name for yourself.
Evil Dead Burn is the story of Alice, after her her husband is killed in a car fire. She attends his funeral, and spends time with his creepy family, who think she’s to blame. The family one by one gets possessed by a spirit, desperate to look for a weapon that could stop them from returning.
It’s been such a strong year already for horror with the likes of Obsession breaking many records, critically acclaimed, and becoming one of the most profitable films of all time, Backrooms performing very well at the box office as well, as well as the likes of Send Help and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The genre is producing some of the most interesting, creative films in cinema at the moment, and is proving to be successful at it, long gone are the times where we would see countless horror films that would come and go, being very generic and making no impact. Evil Dead Rise isn’t that, it might not have broken box office records but on a small $20 million budget (around the same as the 2013 Evil Dead) it ended up with a box office run of just under $150 million worldwide, the highest in the franchise so far, proving to have had an impact, and no surprise that the studio wanted more in the universe.
The cast in these types of films are never big names, and the sort of faces you’re like ‘I think I’ve seen you before but couldn’t tell you where or what it was’. Honestly the only one I was able to pin down was Hunter Doohan, who plays Tyler in Wednesday. French actress, Souheila Yacoub is the lead character in this one, being this film’s final girl, I have previously seen her in her role in Dune: Part Two (didn’t know she was in it) and her first feature film, Gaspar Noe’s Climax. She does a decent enough job in this film, being a final girl comes with a lot of pressure due to the iconic performances through the years of many leading women. When I compare her to other people in this franchise, I think she will go down as more memorable than the last couple in my eyes, but still a long way from everyone’s favourite, and the icon of this series, Ash. If anyone does particularly standout it would have to be Errol Shand and Tandi Wright who play the parents-in-law who have lost their son. Both are effective and creepy performances, even before they become possessed.
There’s a clear theme to the film of families refusing to believe their son could do anything bad, choosing not to believe their partners. I think this works really well for the film. It has clear impact, but does drag the film into feeling less like an Evil Dead, and more like a horror film that had the script read by a producer who went ‘We could make this an Evil Dead right’ and then forced the Book of the Dead into the film so it felt connected. It felt like the writers came up with the idea of what they wanted to do, and everything thing else was worked out around that idea. Writers Florent Bernard and Sebastien Vanicek haven’t done a great deal of work before, and I think particularly the final fight ends up feeling quite flat, and lacking what the rest of the film had.
A big reason why fans of this franchise love it so much, is in the earlier entries to the franchise the deadites had a real level of fun. This was never truer than Army of Darkness, which saw Ash transported back to medieval England to take on the deadites. Since that entry in 1992, the franchise seems to have lost it’s sense of fun a bit, I think it has flashes of moments of fun in every moment since, but nothing compared to Army of Darkness and Evil Dead 2. I really want to see the franchise return to that. It absolutely is a harder skill to balance both the brutal horror that fans expect and enjoy, with that sense of fun, but that’s why someone only like Sam Raimi was able to do with his films. I don’t think we will see that again in the next entry either, and the concern is that this becomes just another horror franchise.
Overall, Evil Dead Burn is a decent horror film with fun moments and a punchy theme that lands thanks to decent performances from the cast. If this wasn’t an Evil Dead film, I’d still enjoy it as much, but think it could do more to tie back into the franchise that fans love so much, rather than distancing itself from the fun routes that Sam Raimi initially brought to his series.
What did you think of Evil Dead Burn?
Let me know in the comments below or via social media @floodersfilms.
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