Ted Raimi .... Cowardly Warrior/Second Supportive Villager/S-Mart Clerk
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No caption could be better than
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Army of Darkness is one of those movies you might consider your favourite, even if you don’t consider it one of the best you’ve seen. It’s a ridiculously entertaining combination of slapstick comedy, medieval adventure, and tough guy action. The main character Ash (Bruce Campbell) is the main reason it’s so much fun. He’s both a kick ass, wise-cracking hero and a hapless put-upon adventurer. He has charisma, and a ton of quotable one-liners; a case of a great character played by an actor who can truly carry a movie. Overall, the movie isn't the greatest, but it’s a ton of fun.
Though the title doesn’t say it, this is actually a sequel to Evil Dead I and II. The first couple of minutes give as much of a recap as you need to get into the third one, which isn’t much. Where we come in Ash has been sucked back in time to medieval England by a force he unleashed at the end of Evil Dead II. And that's all you need to know to get started.
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| Please see the caption above. |
Ash is taken captive by Arthur, who believes he’s an ally of his enemy Henry the Red. He gets taken back to Arthur’s castle and thrown into a demon-infested pit. Luckily he has a chainsaw for a hand, and battles his way out. After calling them all "primitive screw heads" and threatening them with his shotgun, they realise he’s the hero of prophecy who’s come to save them from the Deadites.
He hooks up with Sheila (Embeth Davidtz) by using the immortal line "give me some sugar, baby". And then he heads off to retrieve the Necronomicon, a book with the power to defeat the Deadites, from a haunted graveyard. On the way he manages to spawn an evil twin who, when Ash messes up the incantation needed to take the Necronomicon, comes back to lead the army of Deadites (basically skeletons and guys in padded foam) against Arthur.
Story-wise, there were a few things that bugged me. For example, I didn’t quite buy why Evil Ash wanted to attack Arthur to retrieve the Necronomicon so badly, it had just been sitting on a pedestal in the graveyard before without anyone seeming too keen on it. And, despite the fact that the book is useless to the villagers (except to send Ash back to the future) why were they defending it with their lives? In theory it’s because it contains the power to help the Deadites rule the world, but that just leads back to the question of why the Deadites just left it sitting around the graveyard on a pedestal anyway.
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Lindsay Lohan comes on to Bruce
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Which may sound like the sort of griping you shouldn’t make about this kind of movie, but I think it is a big reason why the first half is a lot stronger than the second half. The attack by the army of the Deadites doesn’t exactly fall flat, but there’s nothing invested in it. At the start Ash is going places, making jokes, questing. But then he isn’t in it as much, there’s comedy skeletons and a battle that doesn’t seem to mean much.
But the movie is so damn funny that it can kind of glide past this. Aside from Ash's great one-liners, the majority of the physical gags are Three Stooges-inspired. It’s almost like the Raimi’s really wanted to make a Three Stooges movie, had a successful franchise, so found a sneaky way to get funding for it. They do a pretty good job of replicating a Three Stooges short, the gags are a real mixed bag. There’s some great ones, and there are some that are just silly. But, overall Army of Darkness pulls it off because it’s so good natured, and Ash is such a likeable character.
I heartily recommend watching Army of Darkness. For one thing, you need to see Ash in action to be a culturally well-rounded person. And there really aren't many (or any) other movies quite like it. Maybe it won’t get on your top ten list, but like me, you’ll probably end up watching it far more often than any of the movies that are.
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