Evil Dead Burn!

A mostly spoiler-free review and rant

Army of Darkness is one of my top two favorite movies, and Evil Dead 2 is not far behind. I think Ash vs Evil Dead is absolutely delightful, top marks. With that out of the way…

Just got back from seeing the new one. It’s nasty as fuck. At a certain point (feels like the whole back half of the movie but I wouldn’t trust my time-guessing skills from a theater watch) it is just relentless, it just will not stop with the grievous (and creative) bodily harm, it’s almost (but only almost!) overkill.

I could not believe some of what I was seeing. More creative than I’ve ever been with gore, that’s for sure, and I was wincing and turning away and muttered “oh Jesus Christ…” out loud multiple times. It was another one of those “people really have no grounds to give me shit over my content if this gets a global wide release…” situations I was having mentally while watching it.

And when I left the theater to look at the poster, IT’S ONLY RATED 16. What the fuck do you have to do these days to get an 18 then? I was almost overwhelmed by the damn thing. Me!

And all the violence and gore is just right on screen, doesn’t cut away, it’s as sadistic with the viewers as it is with the characters in the movie. I hope people know how good they have it with wide-release horror these days, both in quality and what is allowed to be shown, and remember how movies of decades past had to get cut to shit to make it into theaters. Hell, I got addicted to CSI and similar shows because that’s where all the good gore was for awhile, horror movies had gotten so watered down. Remember that one early episode of NCIS where the guy in the elevator was disemboweled, and there he is with his intestines all over the place, right there on prime time US broadcast television?

I can’t even imagine what could possibly be left for any potential unrated version when it comes time for the physical release. (And now that I check, I see this in the imdb trivia section: “Director Sébastien Vanicek said that he was forced to trim a brutally graphic scene from Evil Dead Burn to avoid receiving an NC17 rating and to secure an R rating for theaters.” Must have been some scene.)

One thing I do appreciate is that they did what the previous two movies did not: They’ve moved on from Ash Williams. 2013’s Evil Dead and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise had a lot of Ash-isms (and a chainsaw) in their final battles which made me roll my eyes. If Bruce Campbell is not going to be in the movie, you’ve got to retire all the Ash-like characteristics as well, because otherwise you’re just reminding us that the best damn character ever invented by humans isn’t in the movie. This one does some fake callbacks, which worked because I was like “oh no, don’t do that…” and then they didn’t.

Thing is though, Sam and Bruce and Rob are giving the movies over to new talent to do their thing, and their things all seem to be darker, nastier, gorier. I don’t know how much further one can go with that at this point, really. As long as you don’t try aping Ash, having a more lighthearted protagonist (especially opposite the more nasty 21st-century movie deadites) should be very doable and in line with what these movies have been. I have a horrible idea of Paul Rudd or Ryan Reynolds (hey, he did The Voices) starring in one of these movies doing their usual schtick.

I’d say it was pretty good, and the family drama aspect (of a different sort than Rise’s) of it made it all feel different enough from the others to justify its existence.