'Evil Dead Burn' Review: A Gory and Mean-Spirited Evil Dead Entry You've Seen Before
- 23 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Dan Bremner - July 9, 2026
The sixth film in the decades-running Evil Dead franchise and one of my most anticipated of the year (and am very much sticking to my newfound tradition of seeing this franchise early at its English home: The Prince Charles Cinema). As a genuine and comprehensive fan of the series, I maintain there has not been a bad instalment across its various iterations, from Raimi's original trilogy through the 2013 remake and Evil Dead Rise, which stands as one of the more genuinely impressive horror franchise revivals in recent memory. The current direction of handing individual entries to lesser-known horror directors for their own mostly standalone takes on the mythology is one I'm fully onboard with as a creative strategy, and Lee Cronin's (Lee Cronin's The Mummy) Rise demonstrated exactly why that approach works when you pick the right filmmaker.
This time it's Sébastien Vaniček's turn, hot off the acclaimed Infested, to deliver his particular brand of Deadite carnage. Unfortunately, while Evil Dead Burn is far from terrible and has enough of what makes this franchise worthwhile to justify the ticket, I have to be honest, it is the weakest entry in the franchise so far. Far from bad, but merely just fine. Which is incredibly disappointing.
The most glaring and frankly heinous error is that this is a very ugly film, and not in the grimily oppressive, deliberately grimy way the 2013 film weaponised its ugliness as part of its overall atmosphere. This is ugly in a flat, muted, colour-drained way that feels like someone has accidentally run the entire thing through a desaturating filter and then decided to leave it. It's an aesthetic choice that makes almost no sense for a franchise whose visual identity has always been expressive, tactile and energetically colourful in its nastiness, and it's compounded by a ropey prologue stuffed with wonky over-editing and some dodgy visual effects work that sets exactly the wrong tone for what follows.
Things do thankfully regain their composure after that rough opening, and when it commits to its nastiness through the reliably disgusting and mean-spirited practical work that is the series' birthright, it becomes the disgustingly beautiful experience the franchise demands. There's nothing here quite as skin-crawlingly horrible as the needle in the eye moment from the 2013 film, and if you're a dog person I would counsel keeping some distance from this one, but the practical carnage when it arrives is executed with genuine craft and appropriate brutality, even if the editing does make it not feel as nasty as I was hoping for. Then again, maybe I'm just so desensitized to this point that nothing really affects me. There's enough here to make the casual audience squirm: decapitations, fingers being slammed in car doors, impaling on a loaded dishwasher, power tools, heads crushed into mulch. It's all there, but I can't help but feel we've seen it all before.
The CGI is the films other deeply frustrating problem and the one that cuts most directly against the Evil Dead's fundamental identity. For a series that built its entire reputation and cultural legacy on gory, DIY practical special effects delivered with creativity, charm and a glorious sense of physical reality, Evil Dead Burn is surprisingly and disappointingly ripe with digital effects that feel philosophically wrong for what this franchise is supposed to be. The climactic final boss battle, which takes place over the last twenty or so minutes in a setting that looks as though it's been entirely ripped from Stranger Things, features a main antagonist who bears such a striking resemblance to that show's villain Vecna that I spent portions of the sequence wondering whether this was an intentional homage or a spectacular coincidence. It is neither, I suspect. It is simply a lazy design choice that ends the film on a genuinely puzzling, visually repulsive and deeply anticlimactic note that the outing absolutely did not earn and did not need.
Vaniček does bring something genuinely interesting in terms of lore, with Evil Dead Burn taking a more mythology-heavy approach than recent entries and finding a fresh angle on the Necronomicon's involvement that avoids the standard find the book and read from it structure that the franchise has been circling for decades. The horror-comedy balance is also handled considerably better here than you might expect, with a reintroduction of the darkly comic sensibility of Sam Raimi’s entries that adds levity to the grimness without undermining the genuine nastiness. Everything involving the dementia riddled grandmother, specifically, with the her lack of understanding the situation and Deadite transformation generates, is genuinely comedy gold, hitting the register of horrifying and hilarious that the franchise at its best consistently achieves and that this entry only intermittently reaches elsewhere.
When it comes to the characters this is where the film most frustratingly squanders its setup. The extended family gathering the Necronomicon tears apart is not a particularly likeable collection of people to spend time with, a mix of the abusive, the cowardly and the frequently stupid that makes investing in their survival feel like more of an obligation than a genuine emotional engagement. The cast in Erroll Shand, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Maude Davey, Tandi Wright and George Pullar are solid and committed throughout, there is no weak performance here, but solid committed performances in service of characters you don't much like or care about produces exactly the muted emotional stakes the film suffers from. The clear exception is Souheila Yacoub as Alice, the final girl, who brings genuine scream queen energy and watchable fear turning into action in the role that makes her sequences the film's most consistently engaging. She earns her final girl status rather than simply being assigned it, which in a franchise with a strong lineage of excellent final girls is exactly the right approach.
Evil Dead Burn is the weakest of the franchise while still containing enough of what makes the series worthwhile to frustrate rather than disappoint entirely. Vaniček is clearly a capable filmmaker and there is genuine craft here alongside the genuine misses. The practical gore work is as committed and as revolting as the franchise demands, the lore additions are interesting and the cast are committed. It's just a shame that some of it is incredibly ropey when it comes to dodgy CGI work, questionable editing, the bland and colourless cinematography, a terrible green screen heavy finale and not really any characters worth following. Not a disaster, but a disappointing misstep when compared to the rest of the series.
'Evil Dead Burn' releases in cinemas on July 10, 2026.
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