Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is a goofy, hyperventilated
send-up of horror films and medieval warfare, so action-packed it
sometimes seems less like a movie than like a cardiovascular workout
for its stars. It makes the dubious claim of being a sequel to
Raimi's "Evil Dead II" (1987), on the basis of a tenuous link: A
cursed Book of the Dead found by the hero in that movie has sent him
hurtling back through time to the Middle Ages, where this movie takes
place. Uh-huh.
"Army of Darkness" stars Bruce Campbell, who also starred in
the first two "Evil Dead" movies, and who looks like a square-jawed,
muscular comic book hero. The movie itself looks storyboarded; one
action sequence flows into another with only the briefest of pauses
for elementary plot details.
Campbell plays Ash, who in real life works in a discount
supermarket, but finds himself and his car deposited on a medieval
battlefield, where before long Ash assumes leadership and leads his
knights in warfare against an army of the dead. (There are more
animated skeletons here than in any film since "Jason and the
Argonauts.")
The method of the film is simple. As many action and horror
cliches as possible are trashed; the film does for medieval mythology
and horror what "The Naked Gun" did for cops. Ash, you will recall,
lost his left forearm in an earlier film, and has had the stump
modified to act as a mounting for a chainsaw. He fires a shotgun with
his right hand, and in case you're wondering how anyone could load a
shotgun with a chainsaw, the answer is: It's not necessary, because
the shotgun never needs loading.
Heads spin, body parts fly through the arm, geysers of blood
shoot into the heavens, and Ash uses his old Chemistry 101 textbook
to learn how to manufacture gunpowder, which is catapulted into the
midst of the skeleton soldiers. Meanwhile, the beautiful Sheila
(Embeth Davidtz) falls in love with Ash, during those interludes when
she has not been magically transformed into a murderous harpy.
The special effects in "Army of Darkness" are ingenious and
a lot of fun. The makeup is state of the art. So are the severed
limbs, geysers of blood, etc. The movie isn't as funny or
entertaining as "Evil Dead II," however, maybe because the comic
approach seems recycled. Then again, the movie seems aimed at an
audience of 14-year olds, who would have been 8 when "Evil Dead II"
came out, so maybe this will all seem breathtakingly original.
Few American directors would dare to show as much over-the-top glee in their chosen
craft as Sam Raimi does in "Army of Darkness." A sequel to his "Evil Dead" cult classics,
this was originally titled "Medieval Dead," since its chain saw-wielding, dead-defying hero,
Ash, has been swept back to the 14th century. That particular pun fell by the wayside, but
its spirit survives in a script that clearly aims for the jocular, not the jugular.
With the wisecracking Rambo of gore fighting off scores of Deadites, there's plenty of
blood -- a geyser's worth at one point -- but nowhere close to the unrelenting flow of its
predecessors. In any event, both genre fans and newcomers will be too busy laughing to be
offended.
Those new to Raimi's dark world get a newly shot, somewhat clumsy flashback recap of
the first two films (reportedly done at Universal's insistence), and then a setup of the new
one where Ash's predicament is familiar: Once again he's trapped in an isolated structure,
this time a castle, besieged by evil forces. In the "Evil Dead" films, the location was a cabin
in the woods, the enemy an unseen esprit de corpse manipulating its violent, irrepressibly
bloodthirsty minions. That's what you got when you messed around with the
Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead, and by the end of "Evil Dead II" Ash was the only
survivor, albeit one dumped (with his chain saw, shotgun and Olds 88) into the past after
being swallowed by a dimensional vortex. Now he just wants to go home and resume his
job at the home appliances desk at S-Mart.
This will not be easy, of course. Ash (Bruce Campbell) has a hard time convincing the
locals that he's different, until his "boomstick" makes a big impression, particularly on
damsel-near-distress Sheila (Embeth Davidtz). But Raimi's not interested in a love story,
and it doesn't take long for him to wake the dead. When Ash tries to get the Necronomicon
out of its graveyard site (a parody of "Let's Make a Deal"), he mangles the incantation (the
historically resonant "klaatu baratu niktu"). That unleashes all sorts of problems: First a
shattered mirror produces a platoon of mini-Ashes who visit Lilliputian indignities on him;
then he develops a literally split personality, with Evil Ash rending himself away to lead that
Army of Darkness; then Sheila turns on him, less bewitching now than witching.
As Ash, the only character to survive the "Evil Dead" experience, Bruce Campbell has
suffered long and painfully at the hands (or is that fists?) of Sam Raimi and co-writing
brother Ivan Raimi (and Campbell's the co-producer). It's unrepentant, visceral slapstick
with the emphasis on slap, a Wile E. Coyote-Three Stooges energy run through a meat
grinder. In that vein, nothing has changed, except that having sawed off his arm in "Evil
Dead II" (it kept attacking him), Ash is now fitted with a mechanical arm that both
Leonardo da Vinci and the Terminator would appreciate.
But "Army of Darkness" has clearly been made for a wider audience -- the title alone
suggests that -- and Raimi wisely tempers his more intense instincts by focusing on the
battle between Ash and his new Middle Aged pals and that army of skeletons and rotting
corpses (its slogan is probably "Boo all that you can boo").
The fighting skeletons bring back memories of the seminal stop-motion special effects
developed by Ray Harryhausen in the '50s. Here they are effectively integrated with live
actors in "Mad Max" battle sequences that are both technically impressive and great fun.
After the internally intense "Darkman," Raimi shows he's quite capable of bringing his quirky
vision to life on a larger, action-oriented scale. There are some obvious budget
compromises in the final cut -- the film was victim to legal wrangling between producer
Dino De Laurentis and Universal. -- but "Army of Darkness" has the last laughs.
