★★★ (3 out of 4)
If you’re expecting the grossouts to be served with an equal helping of giggles, “Evil Dead Burn” is not the gorefest for you. Back in the day, I’m talking 1983, the great Sam Raimi debuted as a director with the first “Evil Dead” and set a new standard for upchuck horror. He brought the fun to the sequel four years later. But “Evil Dead Burn,” the sixth entry in the series, means business minus the monkey. Hewing to Raimi’s initial thrust into the Book of the Dead, “Evil 6” means to scare the bejesus out of you and does so relentlessly and mercilessly. OK, there are a few laughs, but they’re of the nervous-making kind.
“Every Family Has Its Demons” announces the poster. And that’s no lie. As directed by Frenchman Sébastien Vaniček, from a script he wrote with Florent Bernard, “Evil Dead Burn” lives up to its incendiary title and to their previous spider nightmare, “Infested.”
Appropriately, the movie begins with a funeral. Alice (a game Souheila Yacoub), our final girl, has lost her husband Will Price (George Pullar) in a drunk-driving accident. Why not mourn him with his family in an isolated farmhouse that no sane person would think of entering without protective weaponry?
Will’s grieving parents, Edgar (Erroll Shand) and Susan (Tandi Wright), blame Alice because, well, she’s not one of them. And by that I mean a potential Deadite. And by that I mean a living human, corpse, or object possessed and reanimated by malevolent, parasitic spirits. Summoned via the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (the Book of the Dead), these demons feed on souls and weaponize the psychological vulnerabilities of the living.
This baby will scare the bejesus out of you, relentlessly and mercilessly.
But it’s among potential Deadites that Alice, with pink hair and purple trainers, finds herself. Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) are also present, along with Susan’s elderly, dementia-addled mother Polly (Maude Davey). But it’s clear the Deadites blame Alice for Will’s death. That’s hardly fair since Will was an abusive jerk. So why should she bother to mourn? She doesn’t.
The killing starts without much prelude with Will’s body bursting out its coffin just before cremation and entering Edgar, who already looks creepy pre-possession. High marks to New Zealand actor Shand, who raises the terror stakes with just a cold stare that truly freezes the blood. In short order, mostly everyone is evil dead and ready to pounce on poor Alice, who didn’t love their poor, perverse Sonny Jim as they felt he deserved. Yacoub, sharing the acting flowers with Shand, makes Alice raw and relatable.
Much dismembering follows with face-shredding and eye-gouging as chasers. Let me warn you, without spoiling the whole thing, that an open dishwasher is the scariest thing in this blood splattering, battering ram of a movie. “Evil Dead Burn” truly is a nasty piece of work.
The camera dips and flips, crawling up walls and practically doing somersaults to keep up the wicked ways Vaniček, a gnarly god of carnage, dreams up to dispatch Deadites in the grisliest ways possible. Spousal abuse is not a crime that Alice is ready to let go unpunished. And the finale lets it rip. Literally. There’s still life in the Evil Dead. And thinking about who and what it burns just might keep you up nights.