What’s It About
After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws. As one by one they transform into deadites, she comes to discover that the vows she took in life – survive even in death.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Sébastien Vaniček wanted his entry into the Evil Dead series to be the most brutal one yet. He got his wish. What he did not get was a movie that earns all that brutality. Evil Dead Burn is the sixth chapter in a franchise that started with Sam Raimi’s wild, gleeful trilogy back in the eighties and nineties. Raimi mixed buckets of gore with slapstick jokes, so audiences screamed and laughed in the same breath. This new chapter trades that laughter for a grim, heavy mood that mistakes misery for meaning. The story picks up with a possessed young woman named Jessica rising from a lake to kill two friends on a fishing trip. She is not attacking at random, though. She is hunting for a dagger that can destroy the undead, a dagger buried in the research of a dead demonologist. That research belongs to Joseph Price, a nervous young writer who stumbles onto his grandfather’s old notes and wakes up forces he cannot control. His brother William dies first, burned alive after a car crash caused by the demon Jessica. William’s widow, Alice, is left to grieve among in-laws who never accepted her and now blame her for her husband’s death. Once the family gathers to mourn, the real horror begins, as one relative after another turns into a demon and hunts the rest. The movie makes sure to deliver graphic violence in abundance. Director Vaniček and his crew have enough good scenes, including a chaotic fight among three people inside a car that is in motion. It is obvious that the makeup and special effects group worked hard on the movie. As a result, some scenes have a distinctive feel when the focus is pulled back enough to show the entire scene. However, most of the scenes rely on anxious close-ups, which makes the action difficult to comprehend. Additionally, there are too many boring stretches, full of useless family fights. What is most notable, and not for the right reasons, is the way the film portrays its characters of color. Almost every minor character who dies in the first few minutes is a character of color, created only as a dead person. The first scene at William’s supposed French restaurant does not even feature any French food at all. Instead, the camera begins with a close-up of a Black woman’s body dancing, then zooms out to show us a club with a loud band playing under red lights. This is inappropriate, stupid, and most of all, stereotypical behavior that transforms a Black body into a simple object rather than a character with a name and a voice. This is a bad practice that needs to be abandoned by the genre, which makes use of Black bodies in this way, with no real involvement of the same in the storyline. The film also reaches for a message about domestic violence, framing Alice as a survivor of abuse even before the demons show up. That idea had promise. Sadly, the script handles it with a heavy hand, hammering the point so often that it stops feeling like commentary and starts feeling like punishment. Alice spends most of the runtime being insulted, threatened, and physically hurt by her in-laws, long before any of them turn into demons. Souheila Yacoub gives Alice real grit and quiet strength, and she deserves credit for carrying the film’s emotional weight almost alone. But the story never gives her enough room to be more than a woman who suffers. Her performance is the best part of the film, and it is a shame the writing does not match her effort. If you evaluate how Raimi’s picture made it possible for horror and comedy movies to be coherent, you’ll notice how different it is from the current movie, where Bruce Campbell’s energy as Ash was the key factor in making it a masterpiece. The new movie is very similar to the reboots because it does not keep such a balance. It aims at making people feel excited, and as a result, there’s little left to surprise people at the end. The last part of the movie is about the franchise’s traditional chainsaw – here, the scene includes some type of weed trimmer with a serious blade on it and a jackhammer; at the end of it, there’s little to feel satisfied with. The movie tries to make you laugh in the mid-credits scene and leave you interested in the sequel in the post-credits scene, but you feel bored till the end. Evil Dead Rise serves as a device made to shock viewers. If all you desire is blood and guts, the movie does deliver. However, those in search of real thrills and strong character development will surely be disappointed. The franchise continues giving opportunities to different directors to present their vision, but in the absence of Raimi’s lightheartedness and compassion, all movies in this series seem insipid. This particular installment, despite all its novelty ideas and several interesting scenes, fails to engage viewers because of its wish to use brutal violence for the sake of brutality while putting Black and brown characters in dangerous positions.
OUR RATING – A BURNED OUT 3