We came home from Evil Dead Burn still smelling smoke. The hype going in was loud (people online kept saying you’re not ready, you’re not ready), and usually that sets you up to be let down. Not this time. This is one of those movies that starts fast and never once bothers to slow down. We both landed around a seven and a half to an eight digs, and honestly, it earned every point.
If you have seen it, you already know what we mean. If you have not, gird your loins. Here are the six things that stuck with us the most.
The action does not stop
“It starts and it doesn’t end,” Arthur said, and that is the whole movie in a sentence. Vaniček drops you in within about five minutes and then just keeps his foot on the gas. There is no breather, no scene where your attention drifts off, because it physically cannot.
You don’t really find your attention wandering because it can’t, you don’t have time.
Vaniček said his goal was to “create a visceral sensory experience that punches audiences in the gut,” and he clearly meant it. The car sequence alone, where Edgar goes after the Thya mid-drive, is unhinged.
There is so much action and gore packed in that he reportedly had to trim a scene just to hold onto the R rating. “Shit’s happening all the time, all over the place,” as Arthur put it. That is not a complaint.
The practical effects are unreal
This was Meaghan’s number one, and it is hard to argue with. “Oh they’re amazing,” Arthur said, and he was right. Edgar spends a big chunk of the film with holes blown through the side of his head, and Vaniček keeps framing him so you have to look. There is a kissing scene between Edgar and Susan that basically only exists so you can stare at the ruined side of his face. “It looked so good.“
We think it was mostly practical with some VFX layered on top for the glistening and the blood, but it holds up either way. Even the fully burned character reads as real.
The effects are so, so, so good.
Meaghan said. If gnarly practical horror is your thing, this movie is going to make you very happy.
The franchise lore actually connects
Arthur’s second favorite was the layering, and this is where the movie surprised us. We learn that Joseph and Will’s grandfather, Benjamin, was part of the Circle of the Wise Men, the people who recovered the Necronomicon and then went hunting for weapons that could put the deadites down (the Kandarian dagger shows up, of course). Their grandfather knew Professor Raymond Knowby, the voice on the tapes from the original film, which quietly ties the whole thing together.
There is good layering of story there that helped solidify it in your head actually what’s happening.
Arthur said, “and it’s not just the bucket of dead, don’t read from it and then everyone just fucking reads from it all the time.” That thread runs from the first movies through Army of Darkness and into Evil Dead Rise, where the returning deadite at the lake shows up again. We loved seeing it woven in.
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There is real weight under the gore
Here is the part we did not fully see coming. Meaghan’s second favorite was the depth of the character arcs, and there is a surprising amount of poignant messaging in here about toxic relationships and abuse. Alice is not just grieving the loss of a husband. She is grieving a person who treated her atrociously, which means she has to work through something far messier than plain loss to get any closure at all.
What we appreciated was how lightly it was handled.
It’s layered very lightly for you to understand what’s happening and to have an impact.
Arthur said, “but it’s not like, This is what this movie means, you have to think about it.” It gives you enough and then trusts you. Susan, the mother, gets her own hard history too, which makes her more than just a cold matriarch. “I just wasn’t expecting it to be quite as deep as it was,” Meaghan admitted, “and I really appreciated it.“
The cast is stacked with people who commit
Meaghan’s third favorite, and ours too, was the performances across the board.
There was no one that I was like, I don’t buy anything that this person’s doing.
Hunter Doohan takes Joseph from a guy you expect to root for into “a pathetic spineless character,” and pulls it off (“that actor is amazing“). Erroll Shand plays Edgar as “instantly hateable,” which is exactly the point.
These movies live or die on this, because half the cast turns into deadites and has to flip completely mid-film. Watching Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Luciane Buchanan, and Maude Davey swing between human and deadite is where you really see the range. Buchanan’s Thya was the one we felt for the most, and Davey’s grandma, Polly, is the comic relief who somehow stays funny even after she turns. That is not easy to do.
The cinematography goes hard
Arthur’s last pick was the camera work, and there are shots in here that are genuinely insane. Philip Lozano shot this thing (he also worked on Mads and handled director of photography on The Nun 2), and it shows. There is one image of the dead-eyed dad standing outside with the dog that we could not stop thinking about.
And then the house burns down, because of course it does. “Ergo evil did burn,” Arthur joked. The shots of the fire ripping through everything are wild, and there is a real eye behind them. It is a great-looking movie front to back, and that look carries a lot of the tension even in the gaps between the gore.
Where we landed
Both of us sat around seven and a half to eight digs, and the more we talk about it, the more it holds. This is a strong entry, maybe our favorite since Evil Dead Rise, and it has us genuinely excited to see where the franchise goes next.
Evil Dead Wrath is coming (a prequel, apparently set way back), and if the Circle of the Wise Men becomes a recurring thread, we are all the way in. Stick around for both post-credit scenes while you are at it. The second one is the good one.