Prepare yourself for the bleakest film featuring malevolent chaos-inducing possessor spirits yet. This time, the Deadites turn into a traditional villain granted with a motivation, which turns them into an even more cruel version of their previous selves. As we are deprived of the Deadites’ most disturbing quality – aimless violence, we are instead looking at a villain who feeds on trauma and purposefully terrorises a family in possession of one of the most famous MacGuffins in film. Evil Dead Burn manages to compete with the previous installments when it comes to the level of gore, toeing on the line of brutally assaulting an open wound of domestic violence merely as a repeated plot device. Alice (Souheila Yacoub) comes out (almost) unscathed, protected by her status as an ostracised in-law who even the family dog refuses to give affection to. Alice is a central character, the only character whose trauma is being served to herself and to the viewer at any opportunity – through flashbacks, old videotapes, photographs, and questions and snide remarks. She is not a traditional final girl, but is more akin to Grace from Ready Or Not (even to the point of a matching exit line). This implies an evolution in the archetype, parallelling the unconventionality of Ash as a “final girl” in the original films.
Nevertheless, the film is a master class in setups and payoffs, a 1st year film school teacher’s dream when the time comes to talk about Chekhov’s Gun. The camera lingers on a corkscrew, a gun, a pocket knife, a prosthetic leg, a dishwasher full of utensils facing up, and a weed trimmer which becomes to Alice what a chainsaw is to Ash. While the film does not leave room for interpretation and fake-outs, it makes up for it by stubbornly forcing the viewer to witness every sharp object introduced prior end up stuck in a body part.
Despite its place in the Evil Dead universe, Evil Dead Burn does not conform to the established rules of the original films. The characters are traumatised, and their trauma is being uncorked all over the proverbial dining table of the whole film. This is not a simple “cabin in the woods” film, but a film which attempts to play seriously while maintaining the dumb whimsy of the original films. Ultimately, it struggles with the balance, and brings a fresh bleakness into the universe at the cost of camp and humour.
Evil Dead Burn is an aesthetic treat with little soul of the original films. Ultimately, it almost functions as its own product, sprinkled all over with references to the other installment but maintaining a structure of its own.