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| Review |
| "You ain't leading but two things right now, Jack and shit. And Jack left town." |
| Easily the most well-known of the trilogy, Army of Darkness is the most recent Evil Dead film to be released. Following directly on from the ending of the second film, Ash finds himself, his chainsaw, his boomstick, and his 1973 Oldsmobile taken back to medieval times, where the people of the land are troubled by a plague of deadites, and look to the reluctant hero as the foretold one that would save them all from the Evil. Boasting almost as many cool moments as its predecessor Dead By Dawn, Army of Darkness tips the balance of horror vs humour well towards the humour end of the scale, and the result is pretty damn funny. Ash has become almost a caricature of the badass macho hero, but at the same time he manages to pull it off better than most. The one-liners in particular are fantastic in this film, probably becoming some of the most quoted by Evil Dead fans. Aside from the one above (my favourite), such classics as "Hail to the king, baby" and "Gimme some sugar baby" originated in this film. "Groovy" is used again, not quite as good this time around, but still pretty funny. Another great source of humour in this is the inspired use of Three Stooges style slapstick, even more apparent than number two (especially in the graveyard, and the little Ashes). There's only one key element missing from this film that helped make the others so much fun from a horror movie point of view: BLOOD. Nearly all the deadites in this are skeletons, and when they're not, they don't bleed enough. There is one bit at the start with plenty of it, but after that it is sadly lacking. Ah, well. There's not much else you can really say about this film, because it succeeds at what it does so well. I have never met a person that does not like this film (at least from my generation), but I have met far too many people that have never seen it. It's definitely worth watching, and it doesn't even matter if you haven't seen the other two, it makes you want to see them. Score: 9/10 Additional Discussion on the Ending and Evil Dead 4 The first time I saw this, one of the parts I liked the most was the end sequence, although strangely enough it wasn't even the one that was originally intended. The original ending (I think it's on the Japanese release of the film), shows Ash being instructed by the Wise Men to place six drops of a certain liquid on his tongue. Each drop makes a man sleep for a hundred years. Ash seals himself in a cave, but, being the moron that he is, mistakenly puts seven drops on his tongue. He wakes, covered in spiderwebs and with a rather lengthy beard, only to discover that the world was become an apocalyptic wasteland. This was to lead directly into the fourth film (if it ever gets made), where Ash is the only human alive in a world overrun by deadites. As cool as the S-Mart ending is, why the Hell didn't they keep an ending that would lead to the next one, the same way Evil Dead 2 did? Lousy studio politics. It may not matter though, as Sam Raimi has very recently said during a press conference for Spider-Man that he would love to work with Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert (Tapert has been a producer on all three) again to do ED4, and that he would again do it on a shoestring budget. Don't hold your breath though, Sam's already contracted for Spider-Man 2, and my guess is he'll probably do a third. So it's still a long way off. |