Warning: As evidenced by the above rating, if you are a fan of the film and are looking for affirmation of your approval of Army of Darkness, I’m not your “Yes Man.” Now, on with the review.
Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, the closing chapter in his Evil Dead trilogy, is the horror equivalent to Jim Abrahams’s Airplane!. Though the director did make the wise decision to pick a side of the fence (which he failed to do with Evil Dead II), going wholeheartedly this time with explicit comedy, the work is a convoluted hodgepodge of scenes glazed with an inert verbosity that only a young teen audience would find redeeming (to say nothing of the fact that excess dialogue has no home in an action or horror flick).
Ash (Bruce Campbell), a modern day convenience store clerk, finds himself transported to 13th century England, where he has been prophesied as the one who will find the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. Unfortunately, he fails to correctly utter a disenchantment spell before removing the tome from its housing, inadvertently releasing the Army of Darkness as a consequence. He then battles the dark forces in order to retain the unholy text which contains the incantation that will cast him back into his own time.
Everything but the kitchen sink. No, scratch that, the sink is replaced by an Olds 88. So, Army of Darkness has everything and this is why it deadpans as soon as it is let out of the gate: it tries to do it all. No, I take that back, it very well could have pulled off a horror parody set in the 1300’s in the fantasy vein if it weren’t for the sophomoric humor. Possibly, but it’s a little late for “What if?”
Where do I want to begin? The film’s apron-string reliance on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a plot outline (Raimi being brazen–or merely mentally flaccid–enough to actually have a character named Arthur appear, played by Marcus Gilbert (I guess we should allot points going in considering his title is shifted from “King” to “Lord,” right?) or Raimi’s failure to learn from the movie’s predecessor that Three Stooges routines need to be a bit more delicately thought out and not haphazardly tossed in bulk between awkwardly fleeting moments merely because the director is a fanboy? (To say nothing of the re-rehashing of the film’s forerunner in having a doppelganger appear–oh, wait, right it is different because–no, no it’s not.) Perhaps a large part of the problem lies in Raimi’s prostituting of a storyline as an excuse to get to the next joke as Tim Burton implements his plots as a ruse to carry him from one special effect to the next. Whatever the reason, Army of Darkness flounders on most every level.
Like Evil Dead II, the film’s ADD never gets its shit together long enough to make a satisfying whole, unlike its paterfamilias. For example, we’re given a condensed introduction to 17th and 18th century satire when Ash comes upon a windmill (check your Penguin edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote at the door) where a multitude of sadistic, Lilliputian (that’s Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for you American lit people) Ashes appear and torment our protagonist. All to what ends? None whatsoever. This aligns (or fails to align, whatever your perspective) itself with the somewhat clever inclusion of Ash, his car, and a tree (the latter being the comic element), falling from the sky as our hero is cast into a former time. However, for the joke to work, the viewer’s memory is challenged as we are forced to recall, in detail, the climax of the previous installment in the series (for the theater audience, that’s a six year lapse). And what are we supposed to gain from another reference, this time possessing only a smidgen of relevance (in this case an intellectually superior figure entering an inferior culture) from one of Robert Wise’s works? (The previous citation is located in Evil Dead II when Ash’s severed hand is holding Bobbie Joe’s.) This occurs when Ash’s inability to recall (twice) the disenchantment spell “Clatto Verata Nicto,” a phonetic recasting of Gort’s “Klaatu, Barada, Nikto” in The Day the Earth Stood Still, unleashes the evil hordes.
Ultimately, though a comedy (such works, due to their categorization, aren’t exempt from analysis and can be more than escapist humor, i.e. the Marx Brothers), disturbs the cognizant viewer in that Ash, instead of contenting himself with a kingdom, a girlfriend, and a slew of faithful admirers, longs for his minimum-wage position as house wares clerk at S-Mart (perhaps a critique of corporate slave labor brainwashing but highly doubtful given the scenario’s surroundings). This, atop the fact that by the trilogy’s climax, our hero becomes moralistically jaded in that, instead of doing what is right, he recourses to might via his technological superiority (the claim that he sticks around to fight the evil droves don’t fly in that guilt due to his linguistic faux pas and a fair maiden play heavily into his decision), evidenced in his tyrannical declaration, “Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun” doesn’t bode well for a critical audience.
The highlight of the feature, for those of you who are willing to look beyond the frequent renter section of your local video store (which the filmmakers obviously hope you don’t as they create a work which all but nominates itself for cult status), is the Ray Harryhausen-esque skeletons which recall the glory days of stop motion animation as we are allowed an ample amount of time to joyfully reminisce about Don Chaffey’s Jason and the Argonauts without fear of missing anything of relevance as the army of darkness beleaguers its own appearance.
All in all, The Evil Dead was an admirable work for what it accomplished in relation to what it set out to do in that it creates an environment of pure terror while sprinkling itself with subtle moments of wry humor, Evil Dead II barely made the cut above a stalemate due to its fence-sitting between black humor and overt comedy, and Army of Darkness, well, obviously you’re aware of my qualms at this point. My question now stands: Since no production company during this day and age wants a filmmaker to remake a previous film scene-for-scene, considering the ingenuity and creativity evidenced in The Evil Dead, why didn’t Sam Raimi put his obviously gifted efforts into two more, equally horrifying works of terror since his forte is evidently not in the form of comedy? What would have been so wrong with a trilogy of terror instead of tainting the original as opposed to setting his comedic aspirations elsewhere? Answer, sadly enough–you got it–marketing. Can anyone say Spider-Man?
F.Y.I.: William Lustig, director of Maniac, Uncle Sam, and Maniac Cop, appears as a “fake Shemp.”
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
