Army of Darkness

The punk resembling Waldo from Where’s Waldo? grabbed his behind while Edwige, my steadfast kangaroo companion, feasted on the punk’s bag of Smarties. I kicked him in the shins and he crumpled to the floor. 

“Where did they take the Revenging Manta?” I said, attempting to pin him to the ground. “More importantly, who destroyed the wax statue Apollo Creed?”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, reaching for his can of green spray paint. — To be continued. 

This week’s movie is 1992’s Army of Darkness from director Sam Raimi. Yes, we’re wrapping up the original Evil Dead trilogy on this humble blog. Evil Dead II had one of the greatest endings to a movie ever with our lead hero Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) falling through a portal in time right into the Middle Ages. I can only imagine how audiences reacted to that surprise ending back in the day and the sheer delight they must have felt upon watching that first trailer for Army of Darkness.

Yes, we have a man from the late twentieth century complete with a chainsaw arm, sawed-off shotgun, and Oldsmobile. And he’s surrounded by knights in full armor and an old, wise wizard. The wise wizard (Ian Abercrombie) thinks Ash is the chosen one who will deliver their kingdom from the terror of the Deadites, the demon possessed corpses from the first two Evil Dead movies that apparently ran rampant in medieval England. The leader of the knights, Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert), figures Ash is just an enemy soldier of a kingdom he’s been at war with.

The crowd jeers at Ash and throws rocks at him before he falls into an execution chamber known as “the pit.” In the pit, Ash squares off against a Deadite, but gets a leg up when the wise wizard tosses him his chainsaw. With the Deadite in pieces, Ash turns his ire to the crowd. He calls them “screw heads” and shoots off his “boomstick” to get them in line. Ash wants to return to his own time, but the wizard tells him he must quest for the Necronomicon, the book of the dead. He must also repeat the words, “Klaatu barada nikto,” before he retrieves the books or else something terrible will happen.

The quest has Ash fighting little versions of himself in an abandoned windmill and eventually leads to him fighting an evil version of himself. Evil Ash laughs at him, calling him a “goodie little two-shoes.” Then regular Ash blows his face off with a shotgun before dismembering his evil doppelgänger’s corpse. Next up is the trial of the three books which plays like a riff on the pick the right Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Naturally, Ash picks the wrong book twice before settling on the right one. And then he fudges the words he was supposed to say before retrieving the book and the army of the dead rises from their graves. 

I haven’t seen this many stop motion animated skeletons on screen since Jason and the Argonauts.  Army of Darkness truly is the stuff of dreams and a pure example of the magic of cinema. 

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, and episode 598) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.