Get ready to get spooky! Our Paul has a great reaction for EVIL DEAD BURN, the latest entry into the long-running horror series. Read more below!
About: Evil Dead Burn (2026) follows Alice (Souheila Yacoub), whose abusive husband Will (George Pullar) dies in a drunken car crash. Seeking closure, she joins her hostile in-laws at a remote family lakehouse for his cremation. The gathering devolves into a nightmare as Will’s corpse and family members are possessed by Deadites, forcing Alice to battle her toxic relatives to survive.
Reaction: Unrelentingly gory film loosely based on the original $350,000 Sam Raimi cult hit from 1981. The Book of the Dead unleashes malevolent spirits that beset a family whose grandfather had hidden a dagger with the power to terminate them somewhere in the family attic. Fast-paced, pulse-pounding, featuring finger-severing, eardrum-puncturing, skull-splitting by buzz-saw, you name it, this film will try to outdo itself in imaginative ways of desecrating the human body as it races to its climax. If you are into this kind of cinematic pummeling, masquerading as horror, you will love it. It even has a few traveling-camera/spirit-pov shots that will recall Sam Raimi’s roving camera from the original (long before drone cameras made this easy). What this doesn’t have is a single memorable performance that comes close to Bruce Campbell’s rubber-limbed bug-eyed original, nor any of the humour that made both the movie and the stage play so much fun (audience members in the first few rows were warned they would end up covered in stage blood). What is truly shocking is not the film, but the fact that this level of violence warrants a mere R rating from the MPAA in this day and age. It is the same rating they will give to a film that has only one or two “fucks” in the dialogue. People forget that the original Evil Dead (also released by New Line Cinema before it made Lord of the Rings and was bought up by Warner Brothers) was rated NC-17. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was also originally rated X, until distributor Bryanston Pictures (the mob pornographers behind Deep Throat) convinced Tobe Hooper to make cuts to merit an R rating. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was released unrated by United Film Organization due to concerns about gore. Even recent envelope pushing films like Terrifier have gone out unrated. This film is far gorier than the original Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and certainly Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so what is going on here? Have we become this desensitized to on screen violence, because we live in a world of school shootings, political assassinations and genocide masquerading as the collateral damage of war? This is not a call for a return to the era of film censorship. At least Canadian ratings boards can differentiate between a 14A and an 18A in their classifications. But when a film like Evil Dead Burn gets the same rating as a film like Power Ballad from the MPAA, it is time to overhaul the system, as it no longer serves the interests of parents or general filmgoers. When it comes to Evil Dead Burn, buyer beware.
Rating: 6 out of 10
