Warner Bros. There was never any question of whether Evil Dead Burn was going to be a gory movie. With the exception of Army of Darkness, every film in Sam Raimi’s gonzo franchise has done its best to one-up the bloodshed seen in previous installments — a difficult task, considering that the original was banned in the U.K. for seven years thanks to its intense horror brutality. But French director Sébastien Vaniček’s desensitized late-period entry into what used to be a consistently solid series misses one important point: Evil Dead movies are also supposed to be fun. Without a sense of mischief to keep the story exciting and unpredictable, intensely violent movies can have a numbing effect. Evil Dead Burn hits this point quickly — which is unfortunate under any circumstances, but especially for a movie that’s 110 minutes long. A lot happens, and all of it is outrageous: As in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, the emphasis here is on creative weaponry, so that every time the camera rests on a wine-bottle opener or a dishwasher full of knives, we know that someone is about to do something horrifying with it. One of the best of these comes when a woman, recently impaled in the neck by a car seat headrest, pulls it slowly out of her neck and drops it on the floor, cackling the whole time. But this, too, gets dull after a while through sheer repetition.Curiously, although Vaniček (who also co-wrote the script) doesn’t hold back in terms of extreme gore, his attempts at more psychologically-driven transgressions fall flat. Again, this might seem like an odd thing to say about a movie where a man fatally stabs the family dog at the dinner table. But even Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, with its perverse commingling of death and domesticity, was more impactful than the hacky provocations at work here. (Neither of them are Hereditary, but what is?) This scene is also featured in the trailer, just FYI. | Warner Bros. The basic idea is that French photographer Alice (Souheila Yacoub) has married into a dysfunctional family scarred by intergenerational trauma. Her husband Will (George Pullar) is physically and verbally abusive. Will’s mother Susan (Tandi Wright) is resentful, his father Edgar (Erroll Shand) is mean, and his brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) is too weak to do anything about it. Alice’s sister-in-law Thya (Luciane Buchanan) is a rare bright spot, but her kindness isn’t enough to protect Alice, who’s left isolated and vulnerable after Will dies in a car crash in the opening scene. Will all of this matter when Alice accidentally reads aloud from Grandpa’s Book of the Dead, unleashing a ruthless evil upon a family in mourning? Not really. Vaniček is primarily a stylist, with no hangups or preoccupations beyond flashy camerawork and making things look cool. And although it’s probably better for his personal life, the director’s seeming lack of mommy issues is a negative when it comes to crafting a transgressive horror film. (He does play Grandma’s dementia for laughs, so...good for him?) For a story this loaded with themes, Evil Dead Burn is remarkably empty, which makes Alice’s fight for her life as her in-laws turn Deadite also feel hollow. Yacoub does her best to bring emotional weight to her character, but she’s the only one who’s given the opportunity to do so, as the rest of the family transforms into skittering, giggling nightmare machines and are pounded into pulp. What stands out instead is the inconsistent exposition (is this a vacation home or a primary residence? These people are supposed to be rich, right?) and the sheer cruelty. Grandma, no! | Warner Bros. The counter-argument here is that a horror movie doesn’t have to be deep as long as it delivers the goods. This is where the lack of fun becomes an issue. Evil Dead Burn does include some shockingly violent moments — as other critics have pointed out, there’s a bludgeoning in this movie that makes the steering-wheel scene in Obsession look tame. In this way, Vaniček pays tribute to his progenitors in the New French Extremity, who also took pleasure in crafting dimly lit movies packed full of grim ultraviolence. But some of the films in that loosely organized movement have aged better than others, and the one it resembles the most, High Tension, has not held up very well at all. That being said, some people like that sort of thing. I often do, but was unmoved by Evil Dead Burn, perhaps because it’s part of a franchise. The closest this movie comes to fun is when it makes winking reference to other films in the series: A brief shot of a chainsaw, a familiar voice on a dusty reel-to-reel recording. But that just makes you think that you could be watching another, better Evil Dead movie right now. Evil Dead Burn comes three years after Evil Dead Rise, and another, Evil Dead Wrath, is set for 2028. If the shepherds of the series want it to last for another 40 years, they’ll bring back the demented sense of glee. From Warner Bros., Evil Dead Burn is in theaters now.