Originally titled “Evil Dead III: the Medieval Dead”, this sequel to the sequel to
The Evil Dead marks the end to one of horror’s holy trinities. When we last left our hapless hero and S-Mart employee Ashley Williams, he’d just finished fighting the forces of evil in the Tennessee wilderness, as brought about by Lucifer’s overdue library book, the Necronomicon. He had to kill his fiancé (twice), cut off his own hand and mutilate several strangers while being attacked by demonic ghouls, harassed by a pissed off tree and laughed at by a desk lamp, all before being sucked into a dimensional vortex and dropped onto an Arthurian battlefield, where he killed a flying Deadite (the name now given to those known as the Evil Dead) and was deemed the chosen hero of legend by the locals. That was then and this is now and somehow Ash has since been shackled and is now on a PoW march through a desolate wasteland on his way to his new life as a slave. The footage that helps explain this was cut from the original release version of the movie to accommodate the running time required by Universal Studios, the corporate fancypants types who bought the rights to the movie and thus helped make it into the lesser installment of the trilogy that it ended up as. This isn’t me being one of those “down with Hollywood, up with independent films!” jerk-offs, it’s just me being honest.
So Ash is beaten down, whipped, pelted with stones by angry villagers (who think he’s a member of their enemies in the neighboring kingdom) and finally tossed into a pit where he’s to fight a couple of Deadite nasties if he wants to keep his head and limbs and other cherished body parts intact. With a little help from the king’s wiseman (who still believes Ash to be the Chosen One despite the jealous ego of the king), his trusty chainsaw and his James Bond-ish magic grappling belt, Ash makes short work of the Evil Dead and escapes the pit, earning his freedom, his boomstick (aka his shotgun) and his new role as the BMoK (Big Man of Kingdom). After being waited on hand and foot and establishing some new cooz in this time, Ash eventually gets around to doing his Chosen One thing. Building himself a robotic hand (what the fuck?!), Ash battles evil miniatures of himself, a Deadite doppelganger grown from his own torso and some unfriendly (and hungry) copies of the Necronomicon before botching a few magic safety words and unleashing the bad guys into our world. Now our hero must rally the villagers into a fighting force, make peace between the feuding kingdoms and lead the good guys (and the dickheaded King Arthur) into battle against the Army of Darkness and their leader: Evil Ash. Limbs fly, people are impaled, shit blows up and Ash turns his Oldsmobile Delta into a steam powered carnage train. Fun for the whole family.
Depending on which version you’re watching, Ash’s story ends in one of two ways: he either gets transported back to the modern day where he returns to his job in the housewares department at S-Mart, or he manages to screw up yet again and winds up oversleeping, waking up 100 years into our future where the world has been ravaged by Armageddon. The less depressing version (Captain Supermarket gets to play hero for one last scene and make tongue time with a hot co-worker) wound up as the studio supported ending and that’s pretty much that.
Army of Darkness not bearing the name of it’s predecessors works for two reasons: from Universal’s point-of-view it makes sense because it’s a sequel to two movies that 95% of the viewing audience hadn’t made friendly with at the time of AoD’s release, so putting it out as such would’ve just turned potential viewers away. Second, this isn’t enough like the Evil Dead movies that you’d really associate it as such. The faceless horror, demonic possession, sensation of isolation and flawed “everyman” type hero are replaced instead with an army of skeletons and winged demons, explosions and big action sequences, wide open battlefield settings and a hero who’s snide, cocky and generally acts more like a jock type prick than a scared, confused, at-the-end-of-his-rope Joe Schmoe. Furthermore, if this guy can build a working artificial hand (complete with kung-fu grip) and a super car of spinning doom, why the fuck is he a register-jockey at a second rate K-Mart?! Besides, the poster for the movie shows Ash with his much-loved chainsaw hand in all it’s glory and he only uses the damn thing for one short scene?! It would’ve been far cooler (and believable) to just leave the damn chainsaw on and forget the retarded “super gauntlet” thing altogether! Blah.
Despite my gripes, I can still sit down and enjoy this movie. The pacing is good, Raimi’s direction is still fun to look at and Bruce Campbell’s still a great lead despite his character turning into a complete dick bag. It’s not as good as the first two movies, but it’s still better than the majority of the crap taking up perfectly good shelf space at retail stores. Yay…
