# Army of Darkness (1993)

### reviewed by
Lars Lindahl

Review by Lars Lindahl (larsattacks@mail.com)

"Army of Darkness" (1993) **1/2 (out of four)

    Directed by Sam Raimi
    Written by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi

Starring Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz, Ian Abercrombie, Marcus Gilbert, Richard Grove, and Bridget Fonda.

Army of Darkness, the third film in the Evil Dead trilogy, is as close as you'll get to seeing a comic book transformed into a movie. Full of cheesy one liners you'd normally hear Superman declare, the script is extremely terse and unspecific compared to others of the same genre (The story Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze presented feels like James Joyce's Ulysses compared to this one). The acting is horrendously bad, even for an Evil Dead film. Bruce Campbell, as the "everyday joe" turned macho superhero, looks like he's reading off cue cards while "damsel-in-distress" Embeth Davidtz is given a few lines and still seems to screw it up.

So why didn't this movie get zero stars? Because director Sam Raimi is making a bad movie on purpose! He wants his audience to recognize how stupid the script is and how bad the acting is, then he wants his audience to laugh their brains off. To some extent, Raimi succeeds. I laughed hard at some scenes; they were just so asinine, you really can't help but laugh.

However, having seen Evil Dead II just a few days before, the third installment wasn't nearly as impressive as its immediate predecessor. I'll invent a term to better explain my dissatisfaction with Army of Darkness: Austin Powers Syndrome, or APS. Movies with APS at first seem very funny. Though, as the film progresses, an uncontrollable feeling of familiarity begins to emerge in the back of your brain. It takes a few minutes, but once you realize it, your enjoyment for the movie is no longer there. The jokes are exactly the same as the last film in the series, only slightly modified. Not modified enough to hide the fact that nearly everything in the movie you're watching has been recycled by another movie you cherished. It's a terrible feeling. I got this feeling watching Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and I recently during Army of Darkness.

Raimi attempted a very difficult task and ultimately failed: He tried to satire the same subject using the same characters and the same story twice. The slight modification is, instead of alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, our hero Ash (Campbell) is fighting evil ghosts and monsters during 1300 A.D. with a large army of soldiers. As continued from the point where Evil Dead II left off (although some scenes from the end of Evil Dead II are oddly left out of the beginning of Army of Darkness), Ash is sucked into the past along with all of the evils that terrorized him in the present. Conveniently, he finds himself in the middle of King Arthur's castle (the only hip place to be during 1300 A.D. according to the movies). Arthur promises to send Ash back to the present as long as he recovers the infamous book of the dead from the woods, an environment inhabited by dangerous spirits.

The sense of familiarity begins to come out when Ash finds himself in a cabin preparing to find the book. He is first humorously attacked by miniature Ash's, then by another, larger monster that could pass as his evil twin. As all of these events, no matter how wacky or unique they sound, are almost exactly staged and presented like in Evil Dead II when Ash was being attacked by his own right hand. I would have enjoyed Army of Darkness a lot more if I had not seen Evil Dead II.

It is fitting that Army of Darkness is not titled Evil Dead III, because, overall, it is very different from its two prequels. The budget is more than the first two films combined, the number of actors is more than the first two films combined, and the movie lacks the horror element that the others shared and cleverly ridiculed. As a guilty pleasure, Army of Darkness is great to watch with a group of friends. Everyone involved in the film knew they were making a bad movie and they had a lot of fun doing it. As it turns out, they made one of the best B-movies of the 1990's. But the ASP sticks onto the movie very early on and not once does it show signs of letting go.

    Grade: **1/2 (out of four)

    Lars Attacks!
    A teenager attacks past and present cinema
    http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/larsattacks

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    (c) 2000 Lars Lindahl

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