glee

Naya Rivera and Ryan Dorsey’s son is making his film acting debut.

The “Glee” star’s 10-year-old son, Josey Hollis Dorsey, booked an on-screen role in “The Burning Valley” alongside his dad, Ryan. The two will play the role of father and son in the debut feature film from writer-director Evan Coury that started shooting this month northeast of Pittsburgh.

In an interview with the Tribune-Review, the filmmaker said the movie is about a steelworker who loses his job when the mill announces a shutdown. “It sets him on a journey as he wanders through his Rust Belt town,” Coury said. “My hope is to encapsulate the history of our region through one guy’s personal experience.”

The news of Josey’s big-screen debut comes six years after the tragic death of Rivera in 2020, when she accidentally drowned after renting a boat to take Josey, then 4 years old, fishing in Ventura County’s Lake Piru.

Josey’s foray into acting seems only natural considering his pro parents. Rivera is best known for her portrayal of the Afro-Latino queer cheerleader Santana Lopez in “Glee,” and Dorsey has acted in TV shows including “Justified” and “Palm Royale.” In a 2021 interview with “Entertainment Tonight,” Rivera’s mother, Yolanda Previtire, and sister, Nickayla Rivera, described Josey as the spitting image of his mother. “His tenacity, his drive, his zeal, his adventure for life. He’s just Naya in boy form,” Previtire said.

“He loves entertaining,” Nickayla added. “He loves singing at the top of his lungs.”

And last year, Dorsey told People that Josey, or “Jojo,” had already acted in a couple of plays. “He hasn’t had the the lead part or anything, but he’s so good,” he said, adding that Josey wasn’t “begging” to be an actor just yet.

“I’m just trying to expose him to all the things,” he continued. “He’s playing violin, he’s playing piano, he’s in the chess club, he’s pretty good at baseball. He’s not very good at basketball. He’s played soccer, but I want to continue to expose him to things. I think it could be an outlet for him as he gets older; he can have a good life being creative. It’s definitely in his blood.”

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 behavior, “Evil Dead Burn” has something more obvious and darkly funny in mind. The spirits (we call them Deadites in this universe) slip into a human host, we see a telltale contraction of the irises, and it’s off to the races.

The gore comes like a tide, shockingly for a mainstream studio wide release. Vaniček is clearly inspired by the extremity that has marked so much horror from France over the last two decades, in notorious exports such as “High Tension” and “Martyrs.” But it’s also show-offy and ill-considered: When a family dog receives a furious fork-stabbing, it’s hard to know who the film is for. Elsewhere, heads are exploded by guns, cleaved and gashed, though not so irretrievably that a possessed couple can’t enjoy a long lip-lock (“You haven’t kissed me like that in years,” a partner says, her mouth bloodied).

As it goes on, “Evil Dead Burn” itself feels possessed by a kind of narrative impatience: Can’t we just get to the good stuff? Raimi was capable of shapelier storytelling than this. These reboots in his name — on which, it should be said, he is a producer — somewhat demean his legacy by reducing “Evil Dead” to a viscera delivery device. I can’t say the audience I saw it with was particularly juiced.

But a loopy grandma (Maude Davey), stricken with dementia, gets her licks in via a brutally deployed fountain pen that is notably not used for writing. There’s a hint in that. This movie is not for those who want anything beyond a steak served blue.