Heads are severed and mutilated yet again in the latest “Evil Dead” installment, which understands, at the very least, that any inheritor of the 1981 cult classic by Sam Raimi must strive to unleash a torrent of shamelessly nasty thrills. The blood feast “Evil Dead Burn” is the second in a series of fresh reboots intended to give promising early-career horror directors a shot at flexing their meanest muscles. Its story we can already guess, so the inventive orchestration of slicing and stabbing is essential here — though the director Sébastien Vanicek delivers only in moments and bursts.
Written by Vanicek and Florent Bernard, the film begins at a lake where a dudes’ fishing trip unearths a demonic spirit whose weapon of choice is heat. Boiling, searing and burning its way through the plot, the entity causes a fiery car crash that drops us directly into the central drama involving Alice (Souheila Yacoub), the widow of crash victim, Will (George Pullar), and Will’s surly parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand). Will’s funeral occasions a laughably tense family reunion at a creaky colonial mansion, where the evil spirit — via fitful camerawork that judders its way around multiple floors and cluttered rooms — swiftly takes possession of the family members and pits them against their living counterparts.
“Evil Dead” acolytes will know better than to stack “Evil Dead Burn” against the original — a D.I.Y. marvel from what feels like a long, lost era of independent filmmaking — but the previous installment, “Evil Dead Rise,” is fair game. Against Lee Cronin’s finely calibrated joyride, Vanicek’s version, for all the tricks up its sleeve, never feels in control of its chaos. Individual face-offs in which the violence is contained in cramped quarters — such as the inside of a car and a bathroom — stand out, whereas more sprawling set pieces often feel like we’re in a haunted house playing Whac-a-Mole.
In any case, the film’s vibes are convincingly, impressively rotten to match its grim ideas about the false promises of the nuclear family, as in a feel-bad dinner scene nodding to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” Alice, who is French, has always felt like an outsider in Will’s family, and fuzzy flashbacks to unhappy scenes from their marriage reveal the ambivalence of her mourning. These emotional detours aren’t particularly convincing; Vanicek and Bernard’s attempts to deepen Alice’s inner struggles are more distracting than meaningful.
On the other hand, the duo’s weird and cruel sense of humor meshes nicely with the series’ mandate of blasphemy. Rounding out the crew of potential victims is Will’s soft-spoken brother, Joseph (Hunter Doohan); Joseph’s girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan); and his grandma, Polly (Maude Davey), whose electric stair lift and dementia are weaponized to induce nervous laughter in some of the film’s darkest bits.
Vanicek, a French director who broke out in 2023 with his chiller “Infested,” about deadly spiders that overrun a high-rise in the Parisian suburbs, winks to his viewers back home with choice needle drops and sneaker styles. But between the references to Tobe Hooper and “The Terminator,” the film also pays homage to a generation of American horror hits that made the United States — its dreams, houses, and, yes, people — nightmare fuel for the rest of the world.
Evil Dead Burn
Rated R for pyromaniacal violence, bloodshed and severed limbs galore. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters.
