‘Evil Dead Burn’ Review: The Gonzo Comedy Is Gone, but the Series’ Sixth Entry Is an Effective Piece of Gross-Out Guignol

The original “Evil Dead” films were pivotal in the creation of the multiplex gore matrix. Yet there was a lightness to them; the second one, “Evil Dead II” (1987), was even a kind of gonzo comedy. (The very phrase “evil dead” was a joke, a knowing redundancy.) But there’s nothing light, or funny, about “Evil Dead Burn.” The third movie in the series since its 2013 reboot (and the sixth entry in the franchise overall), it’s a stand-alone drama of family rancor and family demons — at times, it suggests a Eugene O’Neill play staged by Herschell Gordon Lewis. But on those terms it’s an effective piece of gross-out guignol.  

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Alice (Souheila Ycoub), who is French, with pink hair and an air of pouty aggrievement, is married to William (George Pullar), one of those sensitive-types-who’s-really-a-controlling-bastard. The two own a restaurant and are considering having a child, but their marriage has turned toxic. He is soon killed in a car crash, hitting the she-demon from the film’s lakeside prelude in a head-on collision.

After the funeral, as his body is being prepped for cremation, it bursts out of the coffin, and the roving spirit of evil deadness enters Edgar (Erroll Shand), the family patriarch — though I must say he’s a pretty scuzzy patriarch, resembling nothing so much as an extra from “The Hills Have Eyes.” As Edgar and the clan gather in their second home (a woodland manse in a state of high decay), each family member, in turn, goes evil dead on Alice, the interloper who none of them can stand (she’s not even pretending to be bereaved).

As staged by the French director Sébastien Vaniček, the violence, while nonstop, remains aggressively “thematic,” as the bottled-up family tensions and angers come out in the form of gnashing, bashing, gouging, severing, impaling, dismembering. “Evil Dead Burn” should win the approval of those who favor practical effects, even if in this case that means watching someone’s face forced down into the contents of a gooey head cavity. The demons in “Evil Dead II” had a prankish insolence, but here, for what seem to be commercial considerations, they have a low-voiced, bent-spider-limbed “Exorcist” aura. In essence, the evil dead are now what Linda Blair’s Regan would have become if she wasn’t trapped in that bedroom.

But if they’re more spirits than zombies, this raises a question: How does one kill them? It is never spelled out, and the whole issue of how the physical and the metaphysical interact in “Evil Dead Burn” is more than a little fuzzy. One of the evil dead might be stomping around in her Doc Martens with a hunk of car upholstery plunged into her neck, but that will not deter her; she’ll just pull it out. Remember “kill the brain and you kill the ghoul” from “Night of the Living Dead?” In “Evil Dead Burn,” the closest thing I could spot to a hard-and-fast rule is “apply a power tool to the face and head until it’s literally shredded to bits…and you kill the ghoul.”

The actors have to communicate domestic resentment through the desire to slaughter, and they mostly do a good job of it. Erroll Shand as the deranged Edgar (who shoots himself in the head three times and just keeps going), Tandi Wright as the mother, who is feral in her hatred of outsiders, Maude Davey as the dementia-afflicted grandma (who would be the Lin Shaye character in a cheekier movie) — all make their presence felt, especially when they have to speak lines like “I miss you — I miss us!” as rotting harpies. Souheila Yacoub invests Alice with an unwanted daughter-in-law’s righteous wrath, playing her as the Final Girl in Gore-Gore Land. There’s a long-gone grandfather whose scrapbooking investigation of the Book of the Dead, complete with reel-to-reel taped messages, unleashed all this madness in the first place; it appears that he might be the archaeologist from the original “Evil Dead” film. I do wish that Sam Raimi, the inventor of the series (and still its producer), found a way to make it all mischievous again. For now, though, he has at least presided over a movie in which the evil dead feel alive.