Evil Dead Burn Review: What a Complete Waste

The Evil Dead franchise has survived more than forty years, multiple directors, wildly different tones, Ash fighting skeletons in medieval England, a remake that replaced comedy with pure nightmare fuel, and an apartment building filled with possessed family members. Somehow, Evil Dead Burn is the movie that finally made the whole thing feel dead. I hated this movie. Not in the fun way. Not in the “this is disgusting, and I can’t believe they actually showed that” way. I mean I sat there watching Evil Dead Burn slowly become the worst movie in the entire franchise and wondered how something containing this much blood could have so little life in it.

Evil Dead Burn follows Alice, played by Souheila Yacoub, after the death of her asshole husband. She meets with his family for the awkward funeral and travels with them to their secluded home, where Hell has apparently signed a lease. People become Deadites. Household objects become weapons. Everyone starts screaming. Blood goes absolutely everywhere. Normally, that’s all I need from an Evil Dead movie. Unfortunately, Burn seems to believe the only ingredient that ever mattered was the blood.

This movie is violent. Extremely violent. Director Sébastien Vaniček reportedly set out to make the most brutal movie in the franchise, and congratulations, I guess. He did it. In doing so, he also made the worst one. The problem isn’t that Evil Dead Burn goes too far. This franchise is supposed to go too far. Evil Dead has always been the series that finds the line, laughs at the line, and then cuts the line in half with a chainsaw. The problem is that there’s really zero underneath the violence.

The movie has no personality. It has no fun. It has very little suspense because once the carnage starts, it just keeps beating you over the head with the same note for what feels like three goddamn days. Someone gets mutilated. Someone screams. A Deadite says something creepy. Another household item gets shoved somewhere a household item should never go. Repeat until the credits finally release you from captivity.

There are technically some creative kills here, I guess, but the movie throws so much violence at the screen that eventually none of it matters. Gore only works when there’s some kind of buildup, surprise, tension, humor, or emotion behind it. Burn just piles more meat onto the grill like you haven’t had enough already.

The original Evil Dead was terrifying because it felt dangerous and completely out of control. Evil Dead II took that same nightmare and turned it into a blood-soaked cartoon directed by an up-and-coming master. Army of Darkness sent Ash to the Middle Ages and somehow made the franchise even bigger without losing its personality. The 2013 Evil Dead remake stripped away most of the comedy, but it replaced it with incredible tension, memorable characters, vicious practical effects, and one of the most satisfying blood-rain finales in modern horror. Evil Dead Rise wasn’t perfect, but it understood what movie it was making. It gave us a new location, a fantastic lead Deadite, some genuinely nasty moments, and enough personality to justify dragging the Book of the Dead out for another round.

Evil Dead Burn has blood. That’s its entire fucking sales pitch. It’s not scary. It’s just exhausting. There’s a huge difference.

The movie also tries to build something meaningful around grief, abuse, and the damage that can be passed down through generations of a family. That could’ve worked. The Evil Dead movies have never needed deep themes, but there’s nothing wrong with giving all the carnage something emotional to stand on. The 2013 movie used addiction. Evil Dead Rise used motherhood and the fear of failing your children. Burn uses domestic abuse, but it handles the subject with all the subtlety of someone dropping a refrigerator down a flight of stairs. The movie seems to think that showing increasingly graphic violence against women automatically means it’s saying something about violence against women. It doesn’t. Pointing at something isn’t the same as exploring it.

Souheila Yacoub does everything she can as Alice, and she’s easily the best thing in the movie. She gives the character more emotion than the screenplay probably deserves and manages to keep Alice feeling kinda human while everything around her turns into a screaming pile of organs. The rest of the characters barely register. The dad at least stood out, mostly because he reminded me of an angry dime-store Bill Burr who’d been locked in a house with people he already hated. Beyond that, they aren’t people. They’re future gore effects waiting for their numbers to be called.

That becomes a serious problem because Evil Dead works best when the Deadites are destroying characters you either care about or enjoy watching. Here, I spent most of the movie trying to remember anyone’s name and whether the movie had given me any reason to give a shit.

There are a few visually impressive moments. Vaniček clearly knows how to move a camera, and the effects team must’ve needed a tanker truck parked outside just to keep the fake blood flowing. But impressive camera work doesn’t make an empty movie good. The worst crime of all is that this movie is boring. How? This is a franchise with possessed hands, chainsaws, boomsticks, laughing furniture, eyeballs flying into people’s mouths, and Bruce Campbell fighting tiny versions of himself. You have to work hard at making this material dull. It seems everyone involved decided to put in the work, I guess.

By the time it reached the finale, I wasn’t afraid for Alice. I wasn’t excited to see how she’d fight back or who might survive. I just wanted the fucking thing to end.

Evil Dead Burn is the worst movie in the franchise. Not because it’s the most violent. Or because it abandons the humor. Or because Bruce Campbell isn’t here. It’s the worst because it takes everything that makes Evil Dead different from the hundreds of other possession movies out there and replaces it with empty cruelty and zero soul. What a complete fucking waste!

On a side note, it does have a mid-credits and an end-credits scene. The end one is worth sticking around for.