Listen up, you primitives
Ash has lost everything. Ash has lost his girlfriend, his home and now he is officially lost in time. Picking up where Evil Dead II left off, Ash is transported somewhere in 1500 A.D. He’s confused, alone and he still has the chainsaw on his arm. When he stirs, he finds himself captured by King Arthur and sentenced to death for helping out Henry the Red. Quickly people find out that he’s not part of Red’s group and that he is in fact part of a prophecy that the wisemen of Arthur’s group has foretold. To get back to his own time, Ash must find the book of the dead, which is in a cemetery that lies between safe and not-so safe lands. Armed with his wits, his shotgun and a very badass metal hand, Ash is determined to get back. Regretfully, he messes up in obtaining the book of the dead and unleashes the army of the dead on Arthur’s court; which sucks.
This is a classic! A young Bruce Campbell stars as Ash, an obnoxious, fed up employee at S-Mart (shop Smart, shop S-Mart) and the role couldn’t have been more perfect for Campbell. The role of Ash pretty much laid down the groundwork for Campbell’s career as a wise-cracking, but tough, individual. If you want details of this please see all three Spider-Man films. Campbell made this movie with his one-liners and tough act, and created a perfect anti-hero. He made the movie good and without him the movie is not anything special.
With that said, the film’s story is naturally goofy. Sam Raimi filmed the first Evil Dead while he was a grad student at Michigan State (find the sweater in the flashback). He used awkwardly generic techniques to get some of his shots (such as evil chasing characters) and combined goofiness and horror together perfectly. In Army of Darkness, for example, there is a scene where Campbell’s character hides in a windmill after being chased by some ungodly evil. He accidentally bumps into a mirror, which breaks it, and quickly finds that his tiny reflection in the shards of glass come to life (little Ashs – spelled with an ‘e’? No, it’s a name). The little Ashs do horrible things to the big Ash, one even jumps down his throat and is quickly burned by Ash drinking boiling hot water. The concept and reaction of these little Ashs is nothing short of goofy, but it will make you cringe when you see what they do and what happens to them. It’s a great combination of goofiness and horror. Raimi knows how to combine both perfectly.
Aside from Raimi, the film works because it never has a downtime. Army of Darkness is almost self-aware of itself. It understands that there is a deep story here, but rather a light horrific story that needs constant entertainment to survive. From the moment Ash lands until the end of the film, you’ll be entertained. So, don’t come in here expecting a huge amount of horror or a huge amount of laughs; you’ll simply get an equal amount of both with a good side dish of action.
This is my BOOM stick!
Nothing could be finer than HD and Army of Darkness. It’s the perfect combination and as usual Universal Studios hits their transfer right out of the ballpark. I’ve said this over and over, I’m not sure how they do their transfers, but whatever technique they’re using they are doing it right. I haven’t seen a blu-ray from them that I didn’t like. The audio is perfect too, as you’ll get all the wonderful sound effects that make the grotesque portion of the film just gross enough to make you cringe a bit.
As for features, I was a bit disappointed. You get an alternate ending and you get an HD featurette on Creating the Deadites (which is very interesting, but still). Other than that, you get some nice production photos and of course you have BD-Live. I wish there was more here, but there simply isn’t. For a film this good it needed some really good stuff. The fanbase is there, so I’m not sure why there wasn’t a large amount of features.
