‘Evil Dead Burn’ Review: The Evilest ‘Evil Dead’ Movie Yet

In the 1953 animated Looney Tunes short “Duck Amuck,” Daffy Duck faces his most despicable arch-nemesis. Specifically, he’s at war with his own animator, to whom Daffy is nothing more than a pathetic plaything. Watching Daffy Duck fight to keep his dignity intact, and his body unexploded, as an all-powerful deity with a sick sense of humor repeatedly destroys his life is a powerful metaphor for the chaos of everyday existence. It’s also funny as hell.

I think “Duck Amuck” is the key that unlocks Sam Raimi’s original “Evil Dead” trilogy, which was superficially about hapless boob Ashley Williams, played by Bruce Campbell, fighting undead monsters. But those films were actually about Campbell himself, trying to prevent Raimi from killing him on camera, and possibly with a camera. The first three “Evil Dead” movies get progressively sillier until they finally assume their ultimate form, a broad comedy in which Campbell graduates from Daffy Duck to Bugs Bunny, embracing the cartoonish nature of his reality and crowning himself the king. Hail to the king, baby. Hail to the king indeed.

So it’s fascinating to watch the new 21st century “Evil Dead” movies veer off in a completely new direction. The original team may have produced “Evil Dead” (2013), “Evil Dead Rise” and “Evil Dead Burn,” but a younger generation of gorehounds has claimed these ultraviolent supernatural splatterfests for themselves. And for whatever reason — maybe the runaway train of disillusionment that is the 21st century, or maybe just old-fashioned cynicism — these new directors have all but abandoned Raimi’s self-aware comedy. In its place is a protracted sensation of hopeless misery, spiked with whirligig camera movements and cheese graters, used in a way I suspect the cheese grater industry isn’t happy about.

The latest, “Evil Dead Burn,” stars Souheila Yacoub (“Dune: Part Two”) as Alice, a woman whose abusive husband, Will (George Pullar), dies in a sudden, brutal car accident. It isn’t just any car accident. He plows right through a Deadite — a demonic entity that possesses human beings and mangles their own flesh before, during and after they mangle everyone else’s. And her life only gets worse from there.

After Will’s funeral, his whole family assembles in the moldy, rotting house where their grandfather used to live. The old man left behind a collection of arcane books, evil trinkets and old timey audio recordings full of creepy exposition. There’s no Necronomicon this time but there is an artifact in the house the Deadites will stop at nothing to find, so they start infecting the family one by one, ripping their bodies asunder in morbidly inventive ways and revealing that Alice’s in-laws were probably going to hell long before hell knocked at their door.

“Evil Dead Rise” comes courtesy of director and co-writer Sébastien Vaniček, whose 2023 horror film “Infested” had “Evil Dead” vibes aplenty. “Infested” is about an apartment complex overrun by thousands of giant, venomous spiders, where the working class residents are abandoned by a callous government authority that doesn’t value them. It was scary, it was inventive and it felt like everyone was out to get you, with or without the monsters. The original French title translated to “Vermin,” which refers to the spiders and also how society views the spiders’ hapless prey.

“Evil Dead Burn” doesn’t have killer spiders but it does have a similar, oppressive moral decay. Vaniček’s latest is about splatterhouse monsters, and it’s chockablock with wild, exaggerated gore and fantastic camerawork. But it’s really about families who let a history of abuse turn everyone, even victims, into monsters. Erroll Shand plays Will’s father, Edgar, whose violent outbursts are so familiar it takes a long time for his wife and kids to realize he’s possessed by an evil entity. More evil than they’re used to, anyway.

Then there’s Will’s mother, Susan, played by Tandi Wright as a woman who gave up her dreams to take care of her family. But she didn’t make sacrifices for the greater good, she made sacrifices to feel repeatedly, but temporarily, safe, casting a blind eye to the wickedness that also infected her eldest son and, we learn in disquieting ways, was well on its way to corrupting her youngest, Joseph (Hunter Doohan).

Vaniček’s film has all the earmarks of an “Evil Dead” movie. He piles on the brutality and madness until the house and everyone in it is obliterated. By the time someone falls into a chimney, while someone stuck inside the chimney points a power tool upwards, we’ve achieved peak “Evil” and peak “Dead.” Cinematographer Philip Lozano is a brazen genius, pulling off camera gags and wild movements that can make watching “Evil Dead Burn” in a theater frustrating. Sometimes you want to rush the projection booth in the middle of a scene, just to demand they run it back a few minutes so you can see how they pulled off a particularly fiendish mirror trick.

You can’t fault “Evil Dead Burn” for showmanship. But Vaniček’s commitment to making his film a karmic reaction to real-life horrors — as opposed to acts of supernatural happenstance, affecting mostly innocent randos — gives “Evil Dead Burn” the most gruesome, grueling tone of any film in this long-running series. For some horror fans that will be all they’ve ever wanted, and this film will no doubt satisfy, but the ugliness at the heart of Vaniček’s story makes demands of the audience.

The anxious editing in the film’s first act only makes it that much harder to get our bearings, refusing as it does to introduce these characters as though their circumstances were normal and then got stranger. It may take time to find “Evil Dead Burn’s” wavelength and match its embittered, aggravated tempo. But our unease mirrors Alice’s own sense of displacement, the unmistakable anxiety that comes with prolonged, close proximity to people you can’t trust. Souheila Yacoub gives an impressive performance as the character who seems destined to make it all the way through to the end, albeit significantly worse for the wear, and probably not entirely intact.

“Evil Dead Burn” is not a “Duck Amuck” movie. Its characters aren’t at war with the director. The director is brutally punishing most of them for their sins, and whether you think his characters deserve to get their eardrums punctured with a fountain pen or not, you can see where he’s coming from. It’s not the smartest “Evil Dead.” It’s not the funniest “Evil Dead.” It’s not the best “Evil Dead.” But it is the evilest “Evil Dead,” and that feels right. Dead right.