Review: Home is where the hell is, with slick but diminishing returns, in 'Evil Dead Burn'

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Set us as preferred Heard about that fresh new wave of horror dominating the box office and charming even the snootiest of critics? “Evil Dead Burn” — less an inferno than a partly scorched reheating — isn’t that.Director Sam Raimi’s original 1981 “The Evil Dead,” filmed in the Tennessee woods by a bunch of hyperactive dreamers, has since morphed into a monolithic franchise that mainly serves to keep the lights on.

Some foundational elements remain: wobbly camera sprints through the forest, demons with a smiling love of bodily destruction.But the house feels dormant.Sébastien Vaniček, a French filmmaker of vigor if not vibrancy, is the fourth director to pick up the series, now on its sixth installment.

It’s hard to know from his palette what thrills him, or if he sees colors at all, given the film’s muddy, deadening grayscape.(A softly falling snow, almost mocking of the action to come, is a nice touch.) Vaniček knows where his movie needs to end up — a sloppy showdown in a home with a lot of power tools lying around — but sometimes he lingers, adding transient curiosity to a serviceable story.A tense family coalesces around the memorial of its eldest son, cut down in the prime of what seems like an argument-leaden life.

Mainly, we focus on Alice (Souheila Yacoub), his bruised foreign-born widow, a black sheep among them who doesn’t have any words to offer at the service.Already, they all hate each other, but what they don’t know is that younger failson Joseph (Hunter Doohan), a wannabe writer, has been busy going through his grandfather’s notes concerning the Book of the Dead, unwittingly summoning vicious spirits to a fractious dynamic.These people shouldn’t be around each other, but whereas a mightier movie like “Hereditary” would simmer that grief into a boiling pot of bad behavio...