Let’s start this off by addressing the elephant in the room. I have not seen the original Evil Dead. I have not seen Evil Dead II. These are the kinds of admissions that have gotten me into trouble in the past, when some pretentious cinephile stumbles upon one of my reviews and decides to criticize me for not having seen the totality of cinema. I remember someone taking issue with the fact that I hadn’t seen John Woo’s original The Killer while reviewing his English-language remake. Here’s the thing. I didn’t plan my blindness. I didn’t know it was coming, and I certainly didn’t prioritize my movie watching around the possibility that one day I would lose my sight and find myself unable to watch the vast majority of older films because they lack audio description. This is particularly problematic with foreign-language cinema, but horror movies are another beast entirely. Watching a horror movie without audio description is largely pointless. So, enter Evil Dead Burn, the fourth film I’ve seen in the franchise, following Army of Darkness, the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, and Evil Dead Rise. While Lee Cronin decided to abandon the franchise to go make The Mummy, the door was opened for another filmmaker to put their stamp on Evil Dead, although this new installment certainly seems determined to resemble Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise as much as possible.
On the off chance that someone from Warner Brothers, HBO Max, or the production of Evil Dead Burn actually reads this review, I’d like to share the rather ridiculous journey I went on just to watch this movie with audio description. I don’t always get out to theaters, largely because I’m blind and therefore don’t drive. That means either dramatically reducing my already limited income by constantly paying for Uber rides, or finding someone willing to accompany me. And unfortunately, because many theaters have switched to accessibility devices that utilize touchscreen controls without screen readers, I often need someone to help me operate the very equipment that’s supposed to make the movie accessible. It’s a maddening reality, but one that limits my theatrical opportunities. Fortunately, Evil Dead Burn was eventually headed to HBO Max, where Warner Brothers movies generally land after their theatrical and premium VOD runs. Except, apparently, somewhere in the chaos surrounding the Paramount and Warner Brothers merger, someone forgot that blind people exist. The movie arrived on HBO Max without its already existing audio description track. When I contacted HBO Max to ask them to upload it, I was thanked for my feedback and suggestions. I’m sorry, but my accessibility is not a suggestion. Perhaps it would be if I were asking you to create something that didn’t already exist, but when I’m asking you to utilize an accessibility track you’ve already paid for, one that was available theatrically, I don’t think that’s a matter of feedback. That’s a matter of getting off your lazy ass and connecting a few dots.
Nevertheless, I persisted. With the help of a friend, I was eventually able to watch Evil Dead Burn with audio description, and lo and behold, the track is excellent. Produced by Deluxe and narrated by William Michael Redmond, this is one of the best audio description tracks I’ve encountered all year. If you’re making a horror movie, Redmond should be at the top of your list. Start with him and work your way down. He has exactly the right kind of grit in his voice to complement the violence, depravity, and general unpleasantness of a film like this. Conversely, if you’re producing audio description for PAW Patrol, he should probably be at the absolute bottom of your list. He’d be the last person I’d call to narrate PAW Patrol, but the first person I’d call for Evil Dead Burn. And Deluxe certainly gives him plenty to work with, because this movie is so relentlessly violent, so over-the-top gory, and so determined to make your stomach churn that there’s almost always something happening worth describing. If anything, the film suffers from relying too heavily on gore to carry its narrative, although depending on what you’re looking for in an Evil Dead movie, that might not necessarily be the worst thing.
The film opens by connecting itself to Evil Dead Rise, revisiting the story of Jessica and the unfortunate individuals who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a particularly gruesome encounter, Jessica resurfaces and walks directly into oncoming traffic. We then meet Will and Alice, a couple whose relationship is already contentious, largely because Will wants to have a child and Alice apparently has no intention of giving up smoking. They’re attending a party with Will’s brother, Joseph, and Joseph’s girlfriend, a character who will eventually be blessed with an actual name, although the film seems in no particular hurry to provide it. We eventually discover that Will was driving the vehicle that struck Jessica, and his fate was essentially sealed from that moment. Before they both expire, Jessica delivers the ominous declaration, “I found you.” This connects to the opening narration, which sounds like something lifted from a particularly disturbing snuff film, and introduces the mythology surrounding the Book of the Dead and a dagger created by a cult to destroy the Deadites. Jessica, herself a Deadite, was apparently attempting to locate the family and retrieve the dagger before it could be used against them. Will’s death brings the family together for his funeral, and eventually to his parents’ home, where the remainder of our relatively small cast assembles. We have a mother, a father, a grandmother, Alice, Joseph, Joseph’s girlfriend, and a dog. And while I’m not planning to spoil every detail of this movie, if you’re someone who regularly visits DoesTheDogDie.com, I’ll save you the trouble. Yes, the dog dies. It happens fairly early, and if it makes you feel any better, the dog becomes a Deadite, so technically he’s undead. Although there’s a particularly disturbing sequence involving him that might make you wish they’d just left the poor animal alone.
The curse eventually passes to the family’s patriarch after he insists on paying his respects to his son’s remains before cremation. That decision opens the door for the evil to spread throughout the household, and things escalate very quickly. Perhaps a little too quickly, because once you’ve killed off a significant portion of an already limited cast, you’re left with very few people to carry the remainder of a nearly two-hour movie. The film does eventually slow down, at least comparatively, although it continues finding creative ways to deliver increasingly disgusting moments before whittling everyone down to the obligatory final girl. And I think this is where Evil Dead Burn really starts to lose me. Of the characters who receive the most screen time, Alice and Joseph, one is substantially more interesting than the other. Unfortunately, Alice is hot garbage as a character. She’s poorly written, performed with a level of mediocrity that seems largely driven by the screenplay’s complete inability to give her any meaningful depth, and saddled with a backstory that arrives in sporadic flashbacks rather than through actual character development. We get glimpses of her troubled relationship with Will, including arguments and moments suggesting domestic abuse, but these are supposed to substitute for the kind of development that might have occurred had the filmmakers simply slowed down for ten minutes at the beginning and allowed us to get to know these people. Instead, we’re expected to become emotionally invested in a relationship we barely understand, involving characters we haven’t been given any particular reason to care about.
And it’s not just Alice. The entire family feels woefully underdeveloped, which is particularly frustrating given how few characters there actually are. Even the parents are barely defined beyond their relationships to the people around them. Joseph’s girlfriend is such an afterthought that I spent much of the movie listening to the audio description refer to her by her physical appearance rather than her name. This is something that happens occasionally with audio description, and I absolutely hate it. If a character hasn’t been identified by name, the narrator will often continue describing them based on their appearance, which becomes increasingly ridiculous when that character has been around for a significant portion of the movie. Eventually, she gets a name, but by then, well, you know. Everyone seems to exist primarily for the purpose of dying, becoming a Deadite, and participating in whatever grotesque scenario the filmmakers have devised. And not everything here is necessarily body horror taken to the extreme. Some of it is just flat-out disgusting. There’s a sequence involving someone removing Grandma’s dentures, placing them inside their own disgusting, rotting mouth, and then putting them back into Grandma’s mouth. That’s repulsive for everyone involved. There’s also a particularly unpleasant kiss between two characters that I’m sure will have audiences squirming, despite not being especially gory. This movie understands how to make you uncomfortable, even when it isn’t actively dismembering someone.
Joseph, meanwhile, is a substantially better protagonist, and for once, I think we should have bucked the horror tradition of having a final girl and gone with a final guy. Joseph is the character who seems most determined to survive, makes some of the smartest decisions, and actually behaves like someone fighting to win rather than simply stumbling through increasingly terrible circumstances. Alice, after all, is the one who discovers the material concerning the Book of the Dead and decides to read aloud the very words that should never be spoken. Not Joseph. Certainly, he deserves some blame for failing to destroy the materials as his parents requested, apparently believing there was some historical discovery worth preserving, but Alice is the one who apparently hasn’t learned the most basic lesson of every supernatural horror movie ever made. If you find an ancient text filled with ominous warnings and instructions for summoning unspeakable evil, perhaps don’t read it aloud. It’s not a particularly complicated concept. Joseph isn’t a brilliantly written character either, but compared to Alice, he at least demonstrates some common sense, and I found myself far more invested in his survival than hers.
Evil Dead Rise is simply a better movie. It has better characters, a stronger narrative, and manages to maintain an extraordinary level of violence and gore while still incorporating a sense of humor that doesn’t feel quite so relentlessly mean-spirited. I remember laughing several times during Evil Dead Rise. During Evil Dead Burn, I was mostly cringing. There are moments when I suspect the filmmakers wanted me to laugh, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. And at this point, you’re probably wondering why this isn’t an overwhelmingly rotten review. After all, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time criticizing the screenplay, the characterization, and the performances. I didn’t even care enough about the actors to look up their names, because none of them made much of an impression on me. They’re largely disposable. It almost feels like the filmmakers held a generic casting call, grabbed a handful of available performers, threw them into a house, and started dreaming up increasingly elaborate ways to kill them. The effects and makeup departments are doing the heavy lifting, while the screenplay and performances are apparently just along for the ride. I haven’t seen the director’s previous film, Infested, and I can’t say Evil Dead Burn has inspired me to seek it out.
But here’s the thing. When you consider what Evil Dead fans are generally looking for, I think this movie is still mostly on brand. If you’re a horror fan who appreciates inventive, relentlessly graphic violence, there’s an awful lot here to admire. The film rarely lets up, barely gives its characters or its audience an opportunity to breathe, and continually finds new ways to utilize the household environment to create increasingly disturbing scenarios. Some of the ingenuity is genuinely impressive. The filmmakers manage to take an incredibly small cast and stretch their suffering across nearly two hours without running out of things to do to them. That requires a certain amount of creativity, particularly when you’re committed to maintaining this level of carnage throughout. The effects work is exceptional, the violence is frequently imaginative, and even when the screenplay fails to give these characters much of a personality, the people responsible for tearing them apart certainly demonstrate plenty of their own. There’s an undeniable technical accomplishment here, even if I wish that same creativity had extended to the writing.
And ultimately, I didn’t have the worst time in the world watching Evil Dead Burn. I wouldn’t consider any of the performances particularly remarkable, the screenplay is weak, and I could have given the filmmakers several notes before production even started that might have substantially improved the finished product. But this is still, narrowly, a fresh review. Because when you’re evaluating a genre film, I think you have to consider what it’s actually setting out to accomplish. Is it trying to be scary? Is it trying to be gory? Is it attempting to deliver something inventive within a genre that frequently suffers from repetition and diminishing returns? Horror is absolutely littered with derivative, poorly constructed, painfully cheesy movies that aren’t scary, aren’t particularly creative, and don’t offer much of anything beyond their existence. Evil Dead Burn manages to rise above much of that dreck. It’s disappointing, certainly, especially coming off Evil Dead Rise, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it outright awful. Unless, of course, you have a particular aversion to graphic violence and gore, in which case, why the hell are you watching an Evil Dead movie?
I also recognize that the excellent audio description track absolutely contributes to my overall appreciation of the film, and I don’t think that should be discounted. Sighted critics regularly praise cinematography, color grading, visual effects, and all sorts of technical accomplishments that shape their experience. I don’t get color grading. I don’t get to appreciate the composition of a particularly beautiful shot. What I do get is audio description, and when it’s done exceptionally well, it becomes just as significant to my experience as any of those visual elements might be to someone else. William Michael Redmond’s narration is an enormous asset to Evil Dead Burn, and I would argue that his contribution to my enjoyment of the film is every bit as meaningful as the work of the visual effects artists or cinematographer. Without that track, I wouldn’t have experienced this movie in anything resembling its intended form. With it, I was able to appreciate the creativity, the technical craftsmanship, and the sheer depravity of what the filmmakers put together, even when I wasn’t particularly invested in the people experiencing it.
I don’t think Evil Dead Burn is going to frighten many adults. It’s simply not a particularly scary movie. But in terms of violence and gore, it’s easily an eight out of ten, perhaps higher depending on your tolerance for some of the more revolting material. We’ve reached an interesting point in horror where certain franchises seem determined to continually push the boundaries of what audiences are willing to stomach, and Evil Dead Burn certainly makes a respectable contribution to that effort. It lacks the character development, emotional investment, and occasional levity that made Evil Dead Rise a more satisfying experience, but it compensates with some truly impressive practical effects, inventive carnage, and an almost admirable refusal to let anyone have a particularly pleasant afternoon. So, in honor of the Necronomicon, if you’re someone who appreciates creative applications of gore, crack open Evil Dead Burn. It’s a horror movie that isn’t especially scary, but it is frequently horrifying. And despite the underdeveloped characters, questionable performances, and screenplay that could have used considerably more attention, there’s enough here to keep this particular Deadite from being buried altogether.
Fresh: 6.2/10
