March 28, 2023 — Army of Darkness
6 min readApr 1, 2023
- (previous notes: Evil Dead II)
- (Army of Darkness on IMDb)
- Been a while since I saw this! Saw it in the theater, and although I don’t think I’ve had a beginning-to-end viewing since then, it seems like it’s frequently been on screens that have been adjacent to my eyeballs. And I certainly never objected. For sure this one is even more clearly a comedy, right? Not even horror, really, on account of the story being so different and it being all medieval like.
- “My name is Ash, and I am a slave”. Opens with Bruce Campbell a slave, and he narrates it. Will he be narrating the whole thing? It’s flashing back to catch us up, and Bridget Fonda is playing the girlfriend in the flashbacks, even in a redo of the shot where she gets POV-monster’d.
- Then it’s a title credit, in ghost-y animation, which says “BRUCE CAMPBELL”, “VS”, “ARMY OF DARKNESS”. A little odd, but we’re caught up… except this time instead of him killing a flying demon, that does NOT happen and they enslave him. More retconning!
- The narration told us it was around 1300, which would mean the English language would have been completely different. This movie gets around that by not caring, so everyone just sounds like modern Brits. /shrug
- There’s Embeth Davidtz who was in Schindler’s List and Matilda, we like to see her.
- BC has an exchange with one of these warlord people where he’s all “…jack and shit, and Jack left town.” Super funny contrasting dialogue and BC’s delivery is funny, have we really not seen him have funny delivery until now?
- “I never even saw these assholes before!” Such an American accent!
- BC got thrown into a torture pit with a demon that he has to do combat with. There are spiked walls closing in on him, but for a second it seemed like the demon had a special little passage that he got to use, but why doesn’t BC use that to get away from the spiky walls? Whatever, the wise man threw him his chainsaw, which he leapt up and attached to his hand in an elegant movement, and then he did a neat belt trick to get out of the pit.
- “This is my BOOMSTICK!” “You’ll find this in the sporting goods department!” “Shop smart, shop S-Mart!” Good lord this is so much funnier than the other movies.
- 0:21:40 — A witchy demon starts a fight with them in the castle and the camera work is very unique, I’m not sure what the idea is but it’s very shaky, but not in a normal shaky-cam way, totally enjoyable.
- Then this super comical shot of BC shooting her over his shoulder, then a pause, then the wise man steps oddly into the shot and changes the subject!
- Then, a striking montage similar to when he made the chainsaw hand in the last movie, but this time he makes a mechanical hand. Then, again, “groovy”. #callback
- “Gimme some sugar baby.” This is a significant evolution in the area of Bruce-Campbell-talking-all-funlike.
- 0:26:10 — Hehehehehe, they’re telling BC to go to a special place and say the magic words, Klaatu Verata Nicto (a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still, right? Odd choice?) but anyway he’s all overly cocky about how he remembers them, it’s so funny how arrogant the characterization is in this.
- Then the POV monster chases him into a windmill, and it’s more of that unique camera stuff, it’s really energetic, so cinematically interesting.
- Then he breaks a mirror, and each shard has a little BC reflection, and they become little mini-BC monsters. It gets pretty slapstick with him getting his cheek stuck on a hot iron and he has to pry it off with a tool of some kind.
- Jeez I’d forgotten about all this crazy stuff with the mini-BCs, with one of them diving into his mouth and he tries to kill it by drinking boiling water but somehow it results in an evil-BC spawning off of his body, so weird.
- So after all that oddness, he goes to where the book is, except that it’s three books. He’s not sure what to do about that so he opens one and it does evil magic stretches to him! His head becomes a weird shape and he does cartoonish wriggling to undo it. “Wrong book,” he decides.
- The second book is bad too and attacks him physically, but the third book he tries the phrase on, but he can’t remember the last word, so he tries to get away with muttering it under a fake cough, then says “okay then, that’s it”! Hee!
- He’s now running through the forest and skeleton hands are attacking him from out of the ground, but it gets very silly how he fights them with slapstick choreography. But also a very scary monster arrives that seems like it will be the main bad guy later.
- “That’s just what we call pillow talk, baby, that’s all!” Hee! And he just calls her Shelia!
- They’re all mad at him for messing up the words, though, and even though the situation is silly, it is kind of a legit beat in a hero story.
- Sure enough, he has a change of heart and does an inspirational St Crispin’s Day speech about staying and fighting.
- Oh but ED has been monsterified! She says, “I may be baaaad, but I feel gooooood”, so naughty now.
- The Army of Darkness is descending upon the castle, including a cavalry and even bone-fifers, and it seems to be all makeup and puppetry, no stop motion animation that I can see in this scene (we have seen some of that stuff earlier in the movie, though).
- Okay this is actually hella satisfying… BC had taught them how to make gunpowder in a quick montage, and now the archers have attached dynamite to their arrows, and there’s this suspenseful moment when they are ready to fire them, and they’re lit and the fuses are burning down and BC is having them hold steady… and you wonder if he’s going to screw up and not have them fire before they explode, but they fire in time and blow things up and I like it!
- Okay there is some stop motion animation now as some skeletons bust open the castle door with a battering ram.
- The battle is in the castle now, but BC shows up with his car, not only drivable despite falling from the sky, but it’s pimped out with a whirling blade thing and lots of Mad Max-looking spike armor things!
- Lots of castle war stuff happening, fast paced, occasional fun visual choices. Dark Sheila is dead now maybe? He stabbed her and threw her off a wall after calling her ugly.
- BC then does a one-on-one fight with the chief bad guy and sets him on fire and sends him flying. He is a respectable sword fighter, that is handy.
- Here’s how cartoonish it’s gotten, he’s fighting with a skeleton and the skeleton has a moment where it realizes it’s in a pickle, and its skull cap lifts up a bit and we hear a train whistle sound effect. THAT cartoonish.
- Everything is pretty much resolved after that, that was the climax. He rides off to drink the potion and say the phrase, and it cuts to him back in the present, working at S-mart telling the story to a co-worker! And he says he didn’t get the words right again! And that’s why a demon shows up!
- “The name’s Ash. Housewares.”
- Surprising credits in that they begin with “written by” and then do “directed by”, huh.
- So, okay, yeah, big pivot toward comedy in this one. Hard to imagine anyone considering it a “horror movie” or even particularly scary. But there is a ton of comedy juiced out of Bruce Campbell’s caricature of a macho American hero being stuck in the Dark Ages. Almost everything he says is funny! I don’t know if I’d go so far as to pick any as my favorite, because this third one is going for something so different. It’s just a fun, silly trilogy with lots of creativity and particularly inspired directing choices. I haven’t yet decided if I will re-watch the 2013 remake for you, which I think I remember being a gory horror movie that isn’t particularly unique or edgy.
