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Evil Dead Burn (2026)
JULY 10, 2026
GENRE: POSSESSION, SPLATTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
As this review of Evil Dead Burn is one of the increasingly rare updates here, here's a fun little bit of HMAD lore: the 2013 remake was the first movie I reviewed after "retiring" five days before its theatrical release. The 13 years and change in between is more than double the amount of time the original "daily" run of the site lasted, and any review I post now could very easily be the last one I ever write here. Do I PLAN for that to happen? Of course not, I'll never give it up for good by design - it's just that life gets in the way, and it certainly doesn't generate income anymore, so I pretty much only post when I really want to get my thoughts out about a movie that got me thinking (like Obsession, or last year's Companion) or it's a franchise entry, because I'm a completist. If someone decides to kill a lunch break seeing what I thought about a certain franchise, I won't disappoint them by skipping one!
But even if this was an original, I feel I'd probably be inclined to write something, because I thought it was a damn good time at the movies despite two bad decisions (one franchise related, the other not) that threatened to leave me cold and indifferent. The "bad for Evil Dead" one was at the very end and I'll get into that later, but the other I feel I need to get out of the way early to save you time reading the review and also seeing the movie if it's a dealbreaker. So, SPOILER FOR FIRST 30 MINUTE STUFF: a possessed person kills the family dog. And while it's nowhere near as gratuitous as all the human violence we see throughout (which no one ever minds), there are a few quick shots of the poor pooch being stabbed, along with its whimpers as he takes the hits. If it makes you feel better he gets to come back as a Deadite, but it's still a pretty tough moment. However, I was warned about it beforehand, so it didn't play as much as a (negative) shock as it might to someone going in cold, especially someone who may have lost their own furry friend recently. So I feel it's one of those necessary spoilers, because it could seriously affect your ability to enjoy the rest of the movie and maybe if you're warned about it, as I was, it'll go down easier.
Because otherwise this is a solid addition to this series, and renewed my interest after the last two. While not without their high points, I felt both the 2013 remake and 2023's Evil Dead Rise suffered from a curious lack of escalation, instead offering a series of gnarly moments that were largely interchangeable and (especially in Rise's case) weirdly ignored after they happened. The heroes in that film would see something creepy, get hurt and/or run away, and then somehow sort of calm down and approach the NEXT creepy moment as if it was the first weird thing they saw. It kept the movies from ever really taking off for me; I found myself bored because there was no buildup or increasing intensity, instead offering the "and then this happens" kind of plotting that wore me out. That doesn't happen here; director Sébastien Vanicek (who cowrote with Florent Bernard) rarely lets the pace drag at all, and is constantly building up the threat and (naturally, since this is an Evil Dead movie) the amount of bodily harm our heroes endure as they try to stay alive.
It helps that, for a change, the Deadites actually have a clearly defined goal. The protagonists are the surviving family members of a guy named Ben Price who researched the Book of the Dead and Kandarian Demons and all that other lore stuff I barely pay attention to (which is to say I don't know if this guy was mentioned before. but the name didn't ring a bell), and apparently he found a dagger that could actually kill them. The Deadites, naturally, don't want such a thing to exist in the world, so they're basically trying to drive his grandson Joseph (Hunter Doohan from Wednesday) insane by killing off his family until he gives up the location of the dagger, which they all assume to be in their big isolated house somewhere. Is it the most complicated story? Hell no, but it's *something*, and gives the movie an energy the last two lacked, as the makers of those entries were seemingly more concerned with finding as many different ways to make trailer-worthy injuries as they could, without caring much about momentum.
Not that it lacks injuries. There's a moment involving an ear that I actually had to look away from for a second, due to my own ear issues (they get clogged super easy and I had numerous ear infections as a kid; to this day I almost never go underwater), and Vanicek has a particular love of having sharp things go through jaws, cheeks, etc. No one is completely covered in blood this time, but they all get tossed around, through walls, smashed on mirrors, etc throughout the film's slightly overlong 110 minutes. I also thoroughly enjoyed when he demonstrated what passes for restraint in a film like this; there's a terrific one take sequence where our protagonist makes their way around the house looking for a hiding spot as we see (sometimes not even in complete focus) three of the family members beating the hell out of each other in the background. And when a character is making their way down a chimney only to be caught, instead of watching yet another dismemberment (as we've seen plenty), the director cuts to the fireplace, letting us use our imagination a little as blood and viscera pour down over the logs below.
He tosses in a lot of great details like that throughout, more than making up for the occasional Raimi wannabe stuff (closeup shots of a dinner being prepared in the same quick-cut style of Ash preparing himself for battle, for example). I particularly liked when a Deadite stepped a bit on a corpse who had just been boiled alive, with their foot dragging away some of the skin and exposing the bone underneath (it's basically like when you step in dog poo and it smears a bit). And there's a mirror gag that is more of an homage to Contact than anything in Evil Dead 2. In fact fan service is incredibly/thankfully brief - there's a "Dead by dawn!" shoutout of course, but the only other big one is a picture of Bruce Campbell on the wall of family photos, which you could even say is more of a possible storytelling hint (is Ash part of this family?) than something that's there for no other reason than to make us nerds happy. Hell, they even successfully fake us out at one point, showing a chainsaw and then using a different construction item instead.
On that note, Vanicek is a big fan of payoffs! There's a Chekov's gun, a Chekov's pocket knife, a Chekov's prosthetic foot... it felt like a well constructed movie as opposed to a series of highlights, as everything is set up beforehand and put to use later. But my favorite had to be a gold pen, given as a gift to Joseph in the film's early moments when we're meeting everyone. The payoff is good, but it also made me chuckle, because anytime someone gives a character a fancy pen in a movie, my mind instantly drifts to Jason Takes Manhattan, when heroine Rennie is given what is apparently Stephen King's old pen. But that usual thought took on extra weight here, because this is an Evil Dead, and many a fan in the early '80s was inspired to check out this little independent feature because of King's infamous blurb in the marketing: "The most ferociously original horror film of the year!" And if Vanicek is a Friday fan, he is also probably aware that according to Jason Goes to Hell, the big lug is actually powered by the same Necronomicon that gave us the Deadites, so it all kinda ties together. Or it's just a pen that'll be used to harm someone. One of those.
Joseph is one of the movie's two main protagonists, with the other being Souheila Yacoub as Alice, Joseph's sister-in-law. His brother/her husband Will dies early on, which is why the family is together (another nice bit of Vacinek's: blood splattering the TV showing their wedding video as she fights his possessed parents for her life in the background), and it's clear early on that Will wasn't exactly the most loving and caring husband, nor did his mother approve of her. Being that this is an Evil Dead movie, it's not a spoiler to say she lives out the dreams of every woman who ever got put down by her mother-in-law by using more than words to fight back. But unlike the previous movie's rather dull "I don't want to be a mom but now I have to be" character arc, here we have an abused woman who is somehow seen as the real problem by his family, who believe him to be perfect. A dinner scene prior to everything going to hell via Deadites is just as tense as the horror stuff, honestly, as Alice butts heads with Will's parents and Joseph tries to keep the peace - it's like the dinner scene in Hereditary, which isn't the vibe these movies tend to offer and the film is the better for it. Over time we get the extent of what he put her through, and possessed family members even taunt her for being too weak to leave him, which gives extra weight to her standing up for herself in the here and now. And I like how the French filmmaker (he made the enjoyable killer spider movie Infested) paid tribute to his origins; Alice is French and in moments of extreme stress she (realistically) speaks in her native tongue, which again is just a nice touch that proves they were putting together a real movie here, not stringing together a bunch of "moments" that make it much less interesting to revisit.
Bonus: there's also a senile grandmother in the mix, who gives the movie most of its rare but mostly on point touches of humor. Yes it can feel a little Ready or Not-y at times (there's even a runner about Alice wanting a smoke, and a comment about her footwear that almost seems like an INTENTIONAL nod to RoN), but the movie I kept thinking of was Final Destination Bloodlines, which also offered a woman who was outcast from her dysfunctional family and a curse that has followed them for generations. I used to hold the impression that watching a family all get killed was too much of a bummer (as opposed to a group of friends, which is what the first film offered), but here it worked (except for the dog) just fine. And by giving equal weight to Joseph and Alice, there's a bit of "OK but who is our "Ash"? suspense that was also lacking from previous revivals.
But as mentioned, there is one blunder that I found just as hard to forgive as the dog, and the one that I felt was conduct unbecoming an Evil Dead movie. While digital effects are hardly a stranger to the series by this point, the entire climax revolves around a guy that is clearly aided more by computers than practical makeup, which bummed me out. It also committed the sin of leaving the house for a new location in the final fifteen minutes, something that always irks me as it deflates a lot of the buildup and makes the movie seem longer (which, again, at 110 minutes, it already WAS a bit too long). Maybe if this sequence took place at the house without a little break in between as they made their way from one location to the next, or if they left to give us a practical showcase that could have been cool even if they suddenly went to the moon, I could have been more forgiving. But having both seemed like a bad call to my eyes, and there's just no way I can accept such a CGI-heavy "final boss" in an Evil Dead. Indeed, I am convinced most of Rise's inflated good rep is because of its glorious chainsaw vs latex monster finale, so I can't help but think if they confined this junk to the first half I might have forgotten it entirely by the end if they putting their best foot forward right before the credits rolled.
Speaking of the credits, there are two extra scenes; one a little gag for this story, the other tying it into Rise (which is also how the movie starts, with that blonde girl at the lake). Since the 2013 one never got a followup, even though I didn't care much for Rise I'm glad they're finally trying to give this series some kind of continuity as opposed to just slapping the brand name on random stand-alone stories. Since this is literally the first time in the franchise's history I've liked one more than the installment before (honestly, since I never took much of a shine to Army of Darkness, it's my favorite since ED2), I'm kind of interested to see where it goes from here, as opposed to seeing it just because of the same obligation that has me still seeing Jurassic Park or Crow sequels. Well done, new team! Just leave animals out of it next time, please.
What say you?
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