Review - Evil Dead Burn

Starring Souheila Yacoub, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand. Written by Sébastien Vaniček and Florent Bernard. Directed by Sébastien Vaniček. Rated R. 110 minutes. In theaters.

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Part of getting older is realizing when they’re not making stuff for you anymore. For those of us who grew up in the VHS era, cassettes of Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” movies circulated around the slumber party circuit, often introduced to unsuspecting tweens by mulleted older brothers who wore black heavy metal T-shirts and smelled vaguely of weed. These were the most disgusting movies we’d ever seen, yet the splatter had an anarchic, slapstick sensibility, with Raimi gleefully heaping one gory indignity after another upon his cartoonishly handsome star, Bruce Campbell. As the great critic Willow Catelyn McClay astutely pointed out, the series highlight “Evil Dead II” is basically a remake of Chuck Jones’ immortal Looney Tunes short “Duck Amuck,” except instead of Bugs Bunny tormenting Daffy Duck from behind the drawing table, it’s Raimi torturing the lantern-jawed Campbell from behind the camera. Ain’t he a stinker?

The franchise has recently been rebooted sans Campbell and with Raimi acting as a producer, serving as a showcase for up-and-coming horror directors to strut their stuff on a modest studio budget. Starting with Fede Álvarez’s punishingly grim 2013 “Evil Dead” -- which recast the zombie movie as an ugly metaphor for opioid addiction -- the new films have discarded the Raimi pictures’ zany showmanship in favor of oppressive brutality. You can see a clear generational divide in the reception to these films, with most of us old fogeys mystified by the idea of an “Evil Dead” movie that doesn’t have Bruce Campbell shrieking and making Three Stooges noises while being punched repeatedly in the face. Taking all the kidding out of films that are essentially send-ups is certainly a choice. As I noted in my review of director Lee Cronin’s 2023’s “Evil Dead Rise,” it’s like remaking “Airplane!” as “Zero Hour!”