ARMY OF DARKNESS
The movie Runaway Bride should've been

  Probably the most polarizing of Sam Raimi's movies, no consensus will be reached any time soon on Army Of Darkness.  Anybody put off by Raimi taking the balancing act between horror and comedy of the original film and pushing it firmly over the edge into comedy for the sequel is gonna cover his hands with his ears and shout "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" during this incredibly goofy movie.  But, if you laughed yourself silly during Evil Dead 2, then there's probably no reason you shouldn't bust a gut here as well, even if this film much more closely resembles a long episode of Xena than it does anything in the horror section of your video store. (you can even hear Xena's war-cry at one point)

Titled The Medieval Dead for a while (title changed, presumably, to distance it from the horror genre, which was a bit of a pariah around 1993), Army Of Darkness stumbles out of the starting block by having a beginning which doesn't match up to the ending of the previous film.  At the end of Evil Dead 2, Ash (Bruce Campbell) was whisked off to some Medieval locale with lots of guys with armor and swords.  Ash saves them from an Evil Dead creature, and they hail him as a savior.  But at the beginning here, Ash is taken in as a slave and is generally treated like shit.  (come to think of it, the first sequel did the same damn thing, Sam, whassa wrong with you - your own endings aren't good enough for you?) No matter though, Ash gets where he's going soon enough when he's tossed into a pit with some of the fiends and defeats them handily, earning the adoration of everybody. (c'mon, it's hard not to chuckle at how he handles the apology of one lovely lass who minutes before beaned him with a rock)

So here's Ash, in 14th Century Europe, leading a castle of frightened soldiers and citizens against the army of the Deadites (that's the Evil Dead to you).  He needs to capture that skin-bound, blood-inked cookbook called the Necronomicon so that he can get home, not to mention defeat the Deadites.  He romances a comely young maiden of virtue true (Embeth Davidtz, a few months before her Oscar-nominated role in Schindler's List), does battle with all sorts of nasties (including evil and miniature versions of himself), and spouts off lots of one-liners by the truckload.  What were YOU expecting?

One thing that is appreciated is that we get to see, however briefly, Ash in his natural environment - the help desk guy at a department store. ("Shop smart!  Shop S-Mart!")  It's nice to see that the iron-jawed hero of the first two Evil Dead films has an even more lame job than I do. Bridget Fonda gets a one-shot, no-dialogue cameo as Linda, the girlfriend he had to dismember in part 2.  (just why he would WANT to go home when there, his girlfriend's dead and dismembered and he works at S-Mart and is thus unlikely to find another one, and here, every maiden in the kingdom is feeding him grapes, I don't know.)

On the downside, whereas the effects in the first two movies were (comparatively) sparse (with lotsa gore, though), the effects here are plentiful, and not always exactly topnotch.  A number of shots are blue-screened very poorly, such as when Ash is beset by a much of tiny versions of himself.  (like the "I'll swallow your soul!" hands, this as well was "borrowed" by the highly entertaining shooter game BLOOD)  Oh, the stop-motion skeletons are excellent, happily bringing Harryhausen to mind (Raimi even added the malevolent-looking brows to the skulls), but when the Army of Darkness actually besieges the castle, it's hard to ignore the fact that what we have are people in fifty-pound costumes which try to make them look MORE skeletal, yeah, right - the Hellraiser Skeleton Man conundrum, again.  The ideas here are ambitious; the execution, underwhelming.

The siege climax is not exactly thrilling, and while it has its laughs, it doesn't have nearly enough of them (though the lawnmower-like device Ash's Olds is converted into was a nice touch).  Actually, the comedy throughout the film is rather spotty.  Campbell is a fine comic actor, and when he's on he's on, but there are moments in the film which serve him poorly, such as the painfully extended "Who wants some of this?" sequence early in the film. The Three Stooges homages are plentiful and more pronounced than ever before, particularly when Ash is pinned down by a bunch of skeleton hands which proceed to poke him in the eyes.  State of the art comedy?  No.  Will you pitch a gigglefit at it?  Only YOU know that.  Like the Austin Powers movies, this relies too much on catch-phrases for its own good, but Ash has always been at least as funny as Austin Powers, if not quite as funny as Dr. Evil. (and the dead-Ash, or evil-Ash, or anti-Ash or whatever, that crops up later in the film and is also played by Campbell, isn't nearly as funny as any of them, leading me to wonder just what the point of this guy was)

The plot is filled with all sorts of nonsense, like how Ash's shotgun just keeps appearing even though a few shots before we could clearly see that he wasn't carrying it.  How many shells does that thing hold, anyway?  And if Ash was just sucked back in time, what's he doing on another continent?  And why is Ash training all these people how to fight, when they've already got their own warlord who should be more familiar with fighting styles that don't involve chainsaws and shotguns?  Okay, the plot (despite the irresistible setup) is hogwash, and obviously beside the point anyway; this movie's in too much of a rush to get to the next one-liner or sight gag for exposition.

Army Of Darkness tries to be a horror movie, a comedy, and a sword-and-sorcery epic.  It's way too goofy to succeed as a horror movie, and the comedy is about as subjective as comedy gets.  The movie fails the swords-and-sorcery test - all a movie of this kind needs to succeed are four things: blood, steel, fire (preferably reflected off of the steel), and tits.  There are no tits here.  Still, I giggle, and I giggle without shame.  Subjective or no, it sure worked on me, and when I first saw it I was going around saying "Hail to the king, baby" for weeks.

There are two endings for this movie, both of which I like as much as the other; it does not surprise me that the comically downbeat ending was given to the Euro market, and the goofily action-packed ending, the American market.  (western viewers, watch for a foxy Angela Featherstone in the S-Mart at the end, gawd, she was awful in that 200 Cigarettes movie) (everybody was awful in that movie) (Jeez, what a horrible movie!  Avoid avoid avoid!)

I'd still have to come down on the side of this movie - yes, I did laugh myself silly.  As for whether I'd recommend it...I don't know.  If Bruce Campbell kicked Xena's ass and took over her TV show (unfortunately removing all that lesbian subtext), would you watch? 

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