‘Evil Dead Burn’ review: horror sequel never quite catches fire

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 Pearl) 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 Evil Dead 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.

All the ingredients for a ripping horror yarn are in place. Much like in Evil Dead Rise, we have a family at loggerheads, a single location ripe for claustrophobic frights and savage kills, and the now almost customary smart and savvy young woman trying to navigate trauma and increasingly spooky goings-on. But somehow, it never quite catches fire – even though flames provide much of the strongest on-screen imagery.

Evil Dead Burn isn’t a bad entry in the series by any stretch, but fundamentally it just isn’t scary enough. And aside from a small smattering of impalings and sliced fingers, it isn’t particularly brutal either. Where Rise went full-on gory with cheese graters and so forth, Burn regrettably pulls its punches. Yes, there’s some solid mutilating with a garden strimmer, but even this feels like a slightly lame callback to the franchise’s trademark chainsaw fun. Admittedly, even a not-quite-prime Evil Dead entry is entertaining enough, especially taken in isolation. But as a follow-up to a five-star horror riot, this film is slightly disappointing.