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| Images courtesy New Line Cinema |
The long running Evil Dead franchise gets another chapter in this month's release of Evil Dead Burn, an absolutely brutal film that's confused and lost in its delivery.
This is nowhere near as good as Evil Dead Rise as it fully erases the comic underpinnings of the series as a whole. This thing is a straight up gore juggernaut that doesn't quite get what always made the franchise such a beloved horror brand. There's no humor here. It's just straight sadism with no relief for its entire run time.
Evil Dead Burn looks and feels like a foreign flick that just so happens to feature some elements from Raimi's original creation. At the core, this could have been almost any genre movie about the undead coming home to cause havoc. We get numerous throwbacks, including rusty mechanical tools, a rundown shed, and plenty of smashed skulls and bloodied body parts. But, at the core, this doesn't quite mesh with the five other entries in the Evil Dead chronology. Something is amiss here. This may have the markings of the franchise, but it plays like a movie that was already in development then had the Evil Dead name tagged on for marketing purposes.
Where Evil Dead (2013) tried to reinvent and reintroduce the nightmares of the Necronomicon, Burn is a minor retread that doesn't ever live up to its namesake. Featuring brutality for brutality's sake doesn't shake out when there's no good core story and no likeable characters to latch on to. Audiences are given no new knowledge of how the book of the dead works. And every character here is a disposable cutout that fills the blanks nicely, without an ounce of sympathy. Honestly, their deaths all felt well deserved considering how awful most of them are.
When a director has no consideration of the established mythology and tries to rewrite the rules to fit the newest cinematic offering, it typically doesn't work. And what makes this even worse is it almost feels like it's a sad sack no budget Resident Evil knockoff video game movie with the realization of the big bad. Evil Dead Burn has no soul to swallow with its conveniently awful script and lack of plot.
Sure, I winced at some of the terrors on screen. But we've seen this show before. Writer and director Sebastien Vanicek should have given this script a little more meat on the bone before heading into production. This is a far cry from Raimi's original vision for the Evil Dead. Change can be good when done right. Unfortunately, it didn't work here.
-CG