This article contains full spoilers for Evil Dead Burn.About halfway through Evil Dead Burn, Bruce Campbell finally makes an appearance. No, he’s not there in person, nor does he seem to be playing Ashley Williams, the put-upon protagonist of the first three Evil Dead films. Instead, we just see his portrait on a wall as the camera pans to follow grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) as she rides her wheelchair elevator up the stairs.Fittingly, Bruce’s appearance coincides with one of the few moments of levity in Evil Dead Burn. For most of its runtime, Evil Dead Burn follows the model set by Fede Álvarez‘s 2013 remake of The Evil Dead, as does Lee Cronin‘s 2023 follow-up Evil Dead Rise. These movies set out to challenge their audience, daring viewers to endure their grueling story beats and unrepentant nastiness. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach and even Burn, easily the weakest of the three, has its good qualities. But for as much as these movies pay deference to the original films by Sam Raimi, they do lack the humor that once made Evil Dead so special.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The Birth of EvilReally, it’s all the fault of The Evil Dead from 1981. While most prefer Evil Dead II to its original, and as much as the 1987 second movie is essentially a remake of the first, The Evil Dead is a nasty movie. Shot for just $90,000, which Raimi and producer Robert Tapert raised from Detroit-area businessmen, The Evil Dead sets the premise that each subsequent movie (with the exception of Army of Darkness) will follow: a small group of people goes to a remote location, accidentally reads from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, and unleashes demons called Deadites, who torment them through the night.In The Evil Dead, that group consists of friends studying at Michigan State University, including Campbell’s Ash. After Scott (Hal Delrich) reads from the Necronomicon, Ash’s sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) runs into the woods and gets sexually assaulted by the trees. From there, the Deadites use Cheryl and the rest of Ash’s friends to torture him, doing everything from stabbing him in the leg with a pencil to forcing him to decapitate his would-be betrothed Linda (Betsy Baker) with a shovel.Raimi plays none of this for laughs. He uses his manic camera movements to make the characters seem as if they’re constantly under attack, and asks Campbell to play Ash’s emotional trauma without a smirk. But the camaraderie between Raimi and Campbell, and especially the former’s puckish spirit, still shines through. So by the time the duo remakes the first for Evil Dead II, the slapstick gags and Campbell’s hammier take on Ash feels less like a course correction from the first film and more like it’s accentuating what is already there.Of course, humor becomes the driving force in the 1993 sequel Army of Darkness and the TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, which ran for three seasons between 2015 and 2018. Those works turn Ash into a lovable blowhard, a gigantic doofus who tosses off one-liners with all the confidence in the world, despite just barely surviving each encounter with Deadites.No Laughing MatterComedy came to so define the Evil Dead franchise that it felt like breath of fresh air when Fede Álvarez remade The Evil Dead in 2013. He and co-writer Rodo Sayagues seemed to be recovering something lost in the franchise, restoring all of the nastiness that Raimi and Campbell had left behind. Moreover, Álvarez and Sayagues added a level of thematic depth, making the MSU students go to a secluded cabin to help Mia (Jane Levy) overcome her drug addiction. The punishing visuals get so excessive, climaxing with gallons of blood poured on Mia, who must sever her own arm to survive, that it felt like the spirit of Raimi remained in the work, even if the humor was gone.Lee Cronin moved his movie from a cabin in the woods to a metropolitan apartment for Evil Dead Rise, but he followed in the footsteps of Álvarez and Sayagues. By focusing on a fractured family brought back together, Cronin used the Deadites to explore the unspoken hurt feelings between people who love one another, adding more thematic weight to the franchise. Evil Dead Rise has just as many extreme moments as its predecessor, including needles and a cheese grater, but save for some character-driven reaction shots, it lacks humor.This is where Evil Dead Burn swerves from the previous two movies, but only a little. French director Sébastien Vaniček, who co-wrote the script with Florent Bernard, imports much of his homeland’s New Extremity movement of the 2000s, crafting stomach-churning scenes involving a pen in the ear and the grossest possible example of parents kissing. It uses the Deadites as a metaphor as well, as protagonist Alice (Souheila Yacoub) must spend time with her cruel in-laws after the death of her abusive husband Will (George Pullar), in-laws who become Deadites.Nasty and heavy as the movie often is, Evil Dead Burn does find moments for humor. The opening scene whip pans from the Deadite Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) stepping on the hand of a person she boiled alive to a hard cut to a woman’s butt shaking at Will’s restaurant. The jokes made at the expense of Polly’s dementia may be tasteless, but they are jokes, even if it’s just the asides she mutters to herself as the world around her gets increasingly strange. In perhaps the best scene, the Deadite Thya (Luciane Buchanan) pulls out Polly’s false teeth, slurps on them a bit, and then returns them to the older woman’s mouth. It’s so uncomfortable and strange that the audience can’t help but laugh, despite how icky the whole thing is.Great as the bit in Burn is, it also reminds us that such weird jokes regularly appeared in Evil Dead movies, back when they could be more than just dire gorefests.More Than GoreAgain, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a dire gorefest. All three later Evil Dead films have instances of top-quality filmmaking, and there’s clearly an audience for nasty, mean-spirited cinema. But as anyone who has seen a Rob Zombie picture can tell you, it doesn’t take a lot of skill to be nasty. All one need do is throw the unthinkable on screen, and that’s enough to make the audience cringe. In some cases, they’ll look away from the screen so hard, be so viscerally affected by the mere idea of what’s happening, that they won’t notice how poorly the idea is executed. The inference of effect exists without any cinematic cause.Contrast that to the predecessor to the false teeth bit in Evil Dead Burns. In Evil Dead II, when an eyeball pops out of the Deadite Henrietta and lands in the mouth of Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). Gross as the scene gets, it also comes directly from The Three Stooges, and has a vaudevillian sense of showmanship that keeps us watching, despite the ick. We laugh and shudder at the same time, in part because we cannot look away.Such moments used to regularly occur in Evil Dead films, but rarely happened in even quality horror comedies, which set the franchise apart from its contemporaries. For all they do well, the modern Evil Dead movies don’t offer too much that can’t be found in other recent nasty films. To make Evil Dead films special once again, the modern entries need to put some humor back into the mix, just like Grandpa Bruce used to make them.Evil Dead Burns is now playing in theaters worldwide.The post Evil Dead Burn Proves That the Franchise Needs More Comedy appeared first on Den of Geek.