Films: 1990s
(1992) Army of Darkness
Monday, September 01, 2008
Army of Darkness
Director: Sam Raimi
Released: 1992
With the third installment of his Evil Dead trilogy, director Sam Raimi leaves the horror genre almost completely behind in favor of comic dark fantasy.
"Army of Darkness" picks up where "Evil Dead II" ended, as hero-lead Ash (Bruce Campbell) falls from the sky into the 12th century. He is captured, sentenced to death as a cohort of Duke Henry the Red (Richard Grove) - Lord Arthur's (Marcus Gilbert) mortal enemy - and then finds his fortunes reversed when Arthur's sorcerer learns he is connected to tome of dark lore, the Necronomicon.
As a reluctant quester, Ash must recover the real book of the dead, and return it to Arthur's castle, where the wizard Wiseman John (Ian Abercrombie) can use its power to return him to normal (if boring) life in the 1990s.
As it's Ash, much goes wrong, thanks to pronounced attention deficit, arrogance, and stupidity. With the improperly secured book in tow, Ash manages to lead the army of the film's title - a lurched horde of skeletons and ghouls straight out of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion model workshop - back to Arthur's castle and a pitched battle ensues.
"Army of Darkness" is full of genre candy. Possessed witches, undead corpses of all kinds, flying demons, and relentless animated bone people populate the screen. But none of this is meant to scare. Raimi converts the chills to thrills, the gore to gratuitous sight gags, and all of the dialogue is high camp.
And to what purpose?
In a sense, "Army of Darkness" is just a joy ride through its reference points. But in the process of reconstructing the one-set wonder of "Evil Dead," and the bizarrely over-the-top one-man-show of "Evil Dead II," he has eschewed all the intensity of those films.
No audience could take Ash seriously in the first film, and no one will in the third, but the hunger with which Raimi consumed his Lovecraft and his comic-book supernatural favorites and regurgitated them into the script of the first Evil Dead films was the fuel that made the engine run. "Army of Darkness," once one gets the joke, and the next joke, and the next joke, and the ... one begins to see the pattern.
Surrounding its sophomoric dedication, though, is a curious framing device.
The two most compelling scenes of "Army of Darkness" are thus set in his place of employment, culminating with a key final line. After shotgunning a demon that followed him back from 1300 A.D., Ash declares himself a "kind of" king.
"Kiss the king, baby," he says, and he plants one on the pretty floor clerk's swooning mug.
And that's what Raimi is dealing with here. The first flush of success, when the artist is, for a time, elevated from the mundane to the magnificent is also Ash, stepping back into the life of his own untenable day job. Maybe it's the day job to which Raimi returned after principal shooting in 1980, after the takes of "The Evil Dead" were in the can.
Like Ash, Perhaps he told his tale of battling death to disinterested colleagues. Unlike the world in which Raimi's audience lives, though, proof of Ash's otherworld credentials comes crashing out of the discount aisle. Raimi has fulfilled the artist's fantasy, by film's end. Not the fantasy of swords and sorcery, but that the awakened, creative mind can have more than the dull existence to which it is consigned. It can be the king of its own kingdom, even if the walls are made of linoleum.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
