Squish! Squelch! “EEEEEEEEEE!” These are the noises dominating the soundscape of Evil Dead Burn, overcoming even Double Danger’s original score. Would you expect anything less from the newest entry in this splattery horror saga?

This time, the Deadites are passing on college students in a cabin or city dwellers trapped in an apartment. Instead, they’re tormenting a grieving family. After Will Price (George Pullar) perishes in a car crash, his parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), and widowed wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) assemble to mourn.

It is immediately clear that Alice is the goose in this gathering of ducks. Will’s biological family is constantly hostile to the French young woman. Even as she grapples with complicated emotions arising from the death of her abusive spouse, they do not relent.

When it’s revealed that Alice’s father was obsessed with killing Deadites, thornier problems enter the fray. That kind of passion for hunting the Evil Dead’s signature monster makes his descendants prime targets for possession and mayhem. As Will’s relatives begin succumbing to Deadite power, the familial chaos ratchets up. Once the third act rolls around, it’s clear this is another entry in the “good for her” horror movie space. Given the dearth of empathy towards abuse survivors in the real world, more cinema based around these perspectives is very much welcome.

Despite this appreciated thread, Alice also reveals writer/director Sébastien Vaniček’s (who penned the Burn script with Florent Bernard) problems with scope. The escalation of events leaves the widowed protagonist oddly sidelined. She is completely absent from one of the film’s two lengthy prologues and barely has a role in the other. It’s not even initially clear that she is the film’s protagonist. As late as Burn’s midpoint, she’s still taking a backseat to Price family lore. Opportunities to visually explore her point of view are often eschewed in favor of lengthy sequences that feature set pieces like Edgar’s attempts at self-mutilation. When the movie finally attempts to wring genuine pathos from her trauma and struggles, it lacks impact.

Part of the issue is that Vaniček and company, narratively, are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Fusing midnight grindhouse cinema sensibilities with truly thoughtful explorations of difficult subject matter isn’t impossible. While they cover different thematic terrain, titles like The Devils and Possession merged shock value thrills and weighty concepts decades ago. Here, however, the dialogue and visuals about her trauma often feel half-hearted in execution, like hasty afterthoughts ripped from another movie.

Too often, those attempts struggle for breathing room as the film attempts to one-up prior Evil Dead gross-out sequences. On this front, Vaniček proves quite adept. “If you want blood, you got it,” to quote AC/DC. Evil Dead Burn certainly delivers some creative carnage. Suspense sequences—especially involving someone concealed under a blanket—suggest Vaniček’s skill with timing. However, the feature’s 110-minute runtime—a far cry from the original Evil Dead trilogy, none of which exceeded 85 minutes—ensures the gory set pieces blur together.

Despite that, especially compared to the last two Evil Dead movies, Vaniček and Bernard resurrected the dark yuks from the saga’s earliest entries. An early scene in which construction noise drowns out a funeral speech establishes its glib humor. Equally amusing is a later scene juxtaposing the sounds of downstairs mayhem with elderly Polly (Maude Davey) gently riding up the stairs. A grimy smooching scene, captured in one unbroken take, channels the “ewwww!”-and-giggle-inducing drive-in B-movie cinema the franchise was built on. Those influences endure through new entertaining creations and unsettling images.

But the biggest star here, as alluded to above, is the sound team. Sound department folks like Samy Bardet and foley artist Nicolas Fioraso conjure evocative sounds that reflect spine-tingling sights, such as silverware plunging into skin, bodies crashing through wooden roofs, or undead lips touching. Their superb work lends commendable immediacy to the Deadite grisliness.

There’s gnarly fun to be had here. Solid performances, particularly Davey’s scene-stealing work and Tandi Wright’s fraught turn channeling Naomi Watts in Twin Peaks: The Return, complement Vaniček’s timing and the film’s exceptional sound design. Unfortunately, they inhabit a film whose blood-soaked parts are greater than its whole. Rather than blending the disparate elements, the movie keeps them jaggedly apart. That robs Evil Dead Burn of a proper groovy, er, groove for its mixture of splatter and trauma.

Evil Dead Burn sets movie theaters everywhere a-blaze on July 10.

Evil Dead Burn Trailer: