It’s awesome when a long-running horror franchise delivers a late entry so impressive it reminds you why you cared in the first place. The Evil Dead films have mostly delivered the gory goods since the first one crept out of the woods and onto big screens in 1981, but you’d never expect the fifth in the series, more than 40 years later, to impress. Yet Evil Dead Rise from 2023 was an all-timer: a five-star masterclass of blood-letting brilliance. Follow-up Evil Dead Burn, then, is hotly anticipated – no pun intended.
Starting reasonably enough with a doomed fishing trip (and two mates who clearly regret setting out on a lake of deathly undercurrents), the action is well-paced and packed with peril. Director Sébastien Vaniček proved he could mount a fierce fright scene with his debut feature, 2023’s Infected, and looks to step up a gear here – once again, he shares screenwriting credits with Florent Bernard. We’re thrown into a blazing row at a restaurant that ends in a brutal and deadly car accident for Will (George Pullar), placing the focus on his widow, Alice (Souheila Yacoub from Dune: Part Two).
After navigating Will’s funeral, which is distractingly though amusingly soundtracked by the incessant thud of adjacent building works, Alice finds herself stuck with the in-laws at Will’s family home. They’re not huge fans of Alice’s, at least partly blaming her for his untimely demise. Mum Susan (Tandi Wright from Ti West’s brilliant arthouse horror ) is the archetypal difficult mother-in-law, while gran Polly (Maude Davey) provides much of the comic relief on her stairlift journeys. Erroll Shand as Will’s dad, Edgar, proves particularly ferocious. As we’ve come to expect from the films, he – and others – become possessed by the spirits arising from the Book of the Dead, which has been recklessly stashed away in the house by a relative.
