For almost 40 years I’ve been a fan of the Evil Dead series. The Original Trilogy featuring Bruce Campbell is the most entertaining horror mixed with comedy films that I have seen and that includes “Shaun of the Dead” . I was also a big fan of the reboot in 2012 that took the Grim story of demon possession to a straightforward horror film without the presence of our heroic character Ash.

This film and its predecessor however go a long way toward making me question whether or not I should be seeing any future Evil Dead films. In addition to lacking very much humor, “Evil Dead Rise” and this film, “Evil Dead Burn” lack characters that you care much about and the films  go over the top in ways that suggest that there isn’t any good storytelling available to the filmmakers.

The technical aspects of this film are solid. The makeup effects and the various and sundry deaths and injuries are rendered in all too believable detail. So the incompetence of this movie has nothing to do with the technical abilities of the filmmakers but with their storytelling skills. This movie wants you to try and remember that there is a narrative structure but it mostly ignores that so that we just get from point to point to wallow in the most graphic and unpleasant visual images you’ll probably see on the screen this year.  It’s bad enough to have a body whose face gets smashed in, but then to have another character forced to shove their face into the smashed in face of the Dead character, well it’s just unnecessary. This movie is full of the unnecessary gross flourishes that the filmmaker seems to believe  would make a horror film fun. They are wrong, this was not fun, it did not horrify me so much as gross me out. You could probably accomplish the same effect by filming somebody taking a dump, looking up through a glass table that they’re pooping on. 

The premise of the film is that somebody in a family vaguely connected to the original Professor who discovered the Book of the Dead has uncovered a weapon that can in fact destroy the deadites. So the Monstrous dead are attempting to find the weapon and destroy it so they can continue to take over the rest of the world and turn it into the hellscape that the deadites want. 

This time instead of an apartment building or a cabin in the woods we have a decrepit old mansion that the living are occupying as the dead try to take over. Frankly the biggest problem that I have with this film is that I forgot so much of what happened. I’ve been guilty of posting the last few entries about a movie days or even weeks after seeing that film. What happened here in this movie did not benefit from that pause but rather clarified for me how dull and boring the story really was. 

I didn’t hate this movie, but I didn’t love it either and from the point of view of the Evil Dead series, that seems to be a pretty important failure. Sam Rami and Bruce Campbell were both executive producers on this movie. , but they seem to have had very little creative input and somebody should have told the writers and the director that action needs to move a little quicker to have more zip to it