In Review: ‘Evil Dead Burn,’ ‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’

Evil Dead Burn
Dir. Sébastien Vaniček
109 min.

Since reviving his signature franchise by stepping into an executive producer role with 2013’s Evil Dead, Sam Raimi has used it as a showcase for emerging horror directors who could have been selected for having styles and sensibilities that bear little resemblance to Raimi's. Fede Álvarez’s Evil Dead, Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, and now Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn offer none of the slapstick comedy and only flashes of the knowing wit that defined Raimi’s three Evil Dead entries. And, in many respects, that’s perfectly understandable. Trying to imitate, much less top, Raimi is a fool’s game. Instead, each new Evil Dead head has gone sadistic and maximalist, largely throwing out humor in favor of intensity and discomfort. The nü-Dead entries have borne little resemblance to their progenitors beyond the presence of malevolent, demonic foes with nebulous powers that seem to shift to accommodate whatever the movies need them to do from scene to scene.

The results have been fairly mixed despite some intriguing ideas (The Evil Dead’s use of the series’ Deadites as manifestations of its protagonist’s addictions) and unexpected changes of scenery (Evil Dead Rise’s shift from the series’ usual remote wilderness setting to a big city). In Evil Dead Burn, most of the action takes place at a country estate that’s fallen into deep disrepair for reasons the film mostly handwaves away. It’s the site of an uncomfortable reunion between Alice (Souheila Yacoub), the recently widowed wife of a restaurateur named Will (George Pullar), and her in-laws. While Alice gets along well with her brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), Will’s mother Susan (Tandi Wright) and father Edgar (Erroll Shand) don’t attempt to hide their distaste for her, or that they blame Susan for Will’s death in an apparent drunk driving accident after an argument. And while Will’s dementia-stricken grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) can’t remember her name, that doesn’t stop her from accusing Alice of attempting to steal her money.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for none of this family drama to matter all that much, particularly once the family starts talking about a late grandfather with an interest in arcane, possibly evil artifacts. Though Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard make a half-hearted attempt to make Evil Dead Burn about something by revealing Will’s abuse of Alice, the film’s primarily interested in what kind of havoc the Deadites can unleash in and around an old house, much of which is telegraphed well ahead of time. (Never mind Chekhov’s gun. The entire sharp object-filled house might as well have been designed by Anton Chekhov.)

This takes quite a while to get going and, once it arrives, it’s relentless and meanspirited. (There’s already an extensive entry up at Does the Dog Die?.) But it’s also undeniably stylish. Vaniček builds on the technical skills evident in his 2023 debut Infested, in which deadly spiders invaded an overcrowded apartment building on the outskirts of Paris. Here he pulls out all stops, employing a creepy, washed-out color palette and attempting everything from birdseye shots to an impressive extended take in which Alice attempts to flee on her hands and knees while chaos erupts behind her. The story doesn’t hang together and the film often favors distastefulness over wit (unless a rare denture-based gross-out gag counts as witty). Yet its inventively brutal effectiveness is hard to deny. If that’s what you now want from an Evil Dead movie, here it is in abundance. —Keith Phipps

Evil Dead Burn sizzles into theaters everywhere tonight.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
Dir. David Wain
94 min. 

Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is in trouble. Some goons have tied her and a friend back-to-back on wooden chairs, with ropes around their torsos and lower legs. But not to worry, because Gail has a special talent that we’re only learning about at this moment: She can dislocate her ankle, which would presumably give her the flexibility to wriggle out of the rope and allow them to escape their captors. So she does it and it’s a comically disgusting little parlor trick. Yet it doesn’t work. Gail and her friend are still stuck and she dejectedly snaps her angle back into place. 

That’s a quintessential David Wain joke, a sly and silly bit of meta-comedy that plays off the audience’s understanding of conventions and clichés. (See also: The ragtag underdog baseball team in Wet Hot American Summer ultimately cancelling a game against their polished rivals across the lake because it’s too shopworn a scenario.) His appealingly ramshackle new comedy, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, has an offbeat cadence that takes some getting used to, because like previous Wain projects, it’s not an Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker-style spoof but spoof-adjacent in its knowing deconstruction and light, anything-goes surreality. It’s the type of movie where Jennifer Aniston (as herself) turns up promoting a cookbook full of generic recipes. Or John Slattery (also as himself) rattles off the six shows ranked ahead of Mad Men on a list of the greatest TV shows of all time. 

Offering itself as a giddy perversion of The Wizard of Oz, Gail Daughtry opens in a generic small town in Kansas, where the naive and bubbly Gail is getting ready to marry Tom (Michael Cassidy), her off-the-rack high-school sweetheart. The two get to talking about their “celebrity sex pass” for an extramarital fling and Tom brings up Aniston, just because she happens to be in town on a book tour. What was intended as a light-hearted conversation topic turns serious when Tom opts to use his celebrity pass that night, Gail is thrown for a loop. Accompanying her friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to a hairdressing convention in Hollywood, Gail decides to track down her own celebrity sex pass, Jon Hamm, and convince him to help her redress the balance. 

On her journey through a filthier Land of Oz, Gail brings along new companions that loosely map on to Dorothy’s friends, including Ken Marino as a tabloid photographer who considers Hamm his white whale, Ben Wang as a CAA intern who’s loose with client information, and Slattery as a washed-up actor who can’t even get Hamm to return his texts. There’s also some flimsy business involving mobsters trying to retrieve a suitcase Gail accidentally picked up at the airport when they stopped to take a picture with Henry Winkler. The hit-to-miss ratio in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a bit lower than Wain’s better films, and the indifferent digital photography leaves the impression that this is more a let’s-get-the-gang-together project than something more carefully planned. Yet the gang is still hilarious, and the additions to the Wain troupe are mostly a pleasure, from Deutch’s plucky sexual adventurer to contributors on the margins like Richard Kind and Fred Melamed. If you’re the type of person who perks up at the notion of A Serious Man supporting cast reunion, you’re the target audience. — Scott Tobias

Gail Daughtry opens in limited release this weekend.

Also in theaters this week: Two films we wrote about via festival coverage, both of which are very much worth your time. Ross McElwee's Remake, a devastating reflection on his troubled son, was Scott's favorite movie at this year's True/False Film Festival. And for those in search of a deliciously sleazy thriller with a strong Brian De Palma influence, seek out Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse. After seeing it as part of this year's Sundance, Keith described it as playing like "the most thematically rich ’90s direct-to-video erotic thriller ever made." Both films open in limited release this week.