Sam Raimi Goes Full Looney Tunes with ARMY OF DARKNESS

I’ve given variations on my spiel regarding the difficult reality of sequels; they’re hard, they’re frequently borne out of financial goals rather than creative, and they invite so many opportunities for failure that it’s frankly shocking that Hollywood has essentially kept itself alive in the 21st century through the practice.

What I haven’t had a chance to talk about much (outside of, oddly enough, THE SANTA CLAUSE 3) is the threequel. Third installments in a series usually exist for one of two reasons:

a) the second installment did box office and/or critical numbers beyond anybody’s wild dreams, and studios are trying to ride the wave;

b) the second installment didn’t quite live up to the original, and the studio wants to give it one more try to wring some money out of its would-be intellectual property before giving up the ghost.

In the case of this week’s subject, we’re firmly in A territory. EVIL DEAD II managed to almost double its $3.5 million budget, bringing in around $6 million at the box office. However, much like the gap between 1 and 2, Raimi didn’t roll into EVIL DEAD 3 right away, knocking out DARKMAN in 1990 first. The success of that Liam Neeson superhero vehicle is what allowed Raimi to leverage his newly penned deal with Universal Pictures to unleash what might be considered (in some circles, at least) his most popular film.

Yes, ARMY OF DARKNESS, a movie with a great name and an unforgettable pseudo-old-school aesthetic, with a truly goofy, go-for-broke lead performance in the middle of it all. It’s possible that this movie represented a truly foundational moment in the lives of many modern cinephiles. Naturally, I had never seen it. However, Halloween Night seemed like as good a time as any to check out a movie where a guy with a chainsaw arm takes on an army of stop-motion skeletons.

Let’s wind down EVIL DEAD Month with ARMY OF DARKNESS!

ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz

Written by: Raimi, Ivan Raimi

Released: February 19, 1993

Length: 81 minutes

The plot of ARMY OF DARKNESS is pretty simple: Ash is still recovering from the events of both THE EVIL DEAD and EVIL DEAD 2, which naturally concluded with him being sucked back into time, stranding him in the 1300’s. Believed to be a rival prince’s spy and stripped of his chainsaw arm, he’s immediately rounded up and led to “the pit”, which leads to the funny visual of his stump shoved into one of the holes of a yoke. Inside “the pit” is a Deadite, which Ash disposes of easily with his sawed-off shotgun. It’s this same shotgun (my apologies, boomstick) that he uses essentially to conquer everybody, with the support and aid of a Wise Man (played by Ian Abercrombie, which warmed this old Seinfeld fan’s heart) who believes Ash to be the prophesied Man From the Sky.

From there, he’s tasked with the retrieval of the Necronomicon and must speak the sacred words that will send him back to his own time (“Klaatu Varata Nicto”, a homage to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL). Ash half-asses the phrase, and instead unwittingly unleashes the titular Army of Darkness, led by an evil version of himself (it’s a long story). Ash must now fortify all defenses for one final stand-off. In between, there are many, many, MANY shenanigans.

First of all, the on-screen title indicates the movie’s true title is BRUCE CAMPBELL VS. ARMY OF DARKNESS, which is rad. Just one or two syllables too many. People should call this movie BRUCE CAMPBELL VS. ARMY OF DARKNESS.

Second, I was awestruck at how quickly this movie goes down. It’s listed at 81 minutes, but the credits start rolling at 76, which means you feel it wrapping things up at around an hour and nine minutes. It’s SHORT, efficient to the point of near-austerity. It’s all A-plot, with a half-attempt at a romantic “arc” that almost feels like self-parody.

Part of this is due to the fact that the movie was whacked down in order to achieve a PG-13 rating, which explains a lot. Also, despite mega-producer Dino de Laurentiis putting up much of the initial money to get EVIL DEAD III made, Universal Studios ended up taking over in post-production. The original ending, where Ash takes too much of the potion that eventually sends him home, waking up in a post-apocalyptic England, was deemed too bleak. A new ending was created, where Ash returns to his time, bringing Deadites with him.

(Also, side-bar: there are apparently four different versions of this movie; the theatrical cut that I watched, a 96 minute director’s cut, an 88-minute international cut, and another 88-minute US TV version. Does shit like this give anybody else immense anxiety? It all feels like a nasty trap meant to fool me into watching the “wrong” version of something, as well as condemn me into having long conversations with somebody trying to recommend me the version that’s the most “real”. It’s why I’ve never been able to fully engage with BLADE RUNNER, which by my count has 300 different cuts. No thanks!)

Third, there’s a lot to love with ARMY OF DARKNESS. Yes, it leans all the way into the goofiness this time around, with many scenes feeling like the result of some sort of fever dream (did I make up the existence of a sequence of four little Ashes splitting up to torment the real Ash?). Yes, as a result, its sense of humor is much broader than even EVIL DEAD II, with moments of actual slapstick and sections of the film that genuinely operate on Looney Tunes logic. Thus, it’s not going to be for everybody (it wasn’t universally warmly received at the time of its release).

But there’s something admirable and respectable about a third installment of a franchise that decides to pivot away from the balance of elements that made the previous ones work in order to see if something entirely new can be created. It helps that EVIL DEAD is not a multi-million dollar franchise (just a remarkably profitable one), so the stakes aren’t quite as high as they would be for, say, THE MATRIX or STAR WARS. But it takes genuine creative nerve to intentionally alter the formula to see what else can be created.

As a result, ARMY OF DARKNESS stands apart from its two predecessors in terms of its comedic tone and cartoony inspiration. But it also feels like the movie has its own distinct fanbase, separate from the bigger EVIL DEAD fandom. As mentioned last week, some of the movie’s advocates speak about it like it’s a stand-alone movie instead of a second sequel to a film that had come out a decade prior. It’s notable that it isn’t called EVIL DEAD III. ARMY OF DARKNESS is dang near an island unto itself.

Where I sometimes struggled with ARMY OF DARKNESS was with its characterization of Ash this time around. To be clear, one of the great virtues of the EVIL DEAD trilogy as a whole is that all three movies are more or less stand-alone takes on the same basic idea (dashing hero takes on evil special-effect monsters in bloody fashion). In that sense, it’s fun to track Campbell broadening up his performance to match the material being put before him. And the wisecracking hero archetype actually fits him quite well. It helps that, outside of having movie star good looks, he kind of looks like a normal guy. He’s not particularly muscle-bound like similar actors who took on these types of roles earlier in the 1980’s. You buy him just as much as a sales associate at a Walmart knock-off as you do heroically chainsawing bonies.

It’s just…I dunno, some of these one-liners are awfully broad. “You ain’t leadin’ but two things right now, jack and shit! And Jack just left town!” feels like something someone would come up with at a an improv class, met with brutal silence. Also, it feels like a longer sentence than anything he’s ever said in either EVIL DEAD I or II. It’s especially jarring considering that in in-universe time, something like five seconds have elapsed from the end of PART 2 to the beginning of PART 3. Not sure why he’s so cocky all of a sudden.

It all makes Ash just a little too cool, for seemingly no reason than “we haven’t tried this angle with him yet”. In a vacuum, this is fine: the EVIL DEAD series is all about its audacity, and it says something about me that this seemed like the most audacious move yet. It just all made me glad there’s no real EVIL DEAD 4, lest Ash start becoming an actual animated character running around like the Tasmanian Devil.

It also often crosses over from the camp notes of EVIL DEAD 2 straight into legitimate hamminess. The scene where Ash runs through the three Necronomicon books feels like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, complete with enormous animated reactions as he gets his hand bitten and his face sucked in by the magical books. As always, it’s ever audacious, but it’s a major jump from where we were with EVIL DEAD 2.

(Okay, I did genuinely like Ash’s “welcome to the 21st century” line, made all the funnier given that the movie was made firmly in the 20th.)

I think part of what I’m having a visceral reaction to with Ash’s comedy act is what this movie so clearly wrought in the young and teenage boys that consumed this movie like so much Mountain Dew. I didn’t know it at the time, but I grew up with a lot of people in the periphery who were clearly trying to copy this version of Ash, the smart-ass action hero who also mugs for the camera. Imagine, if you will, the seven year old version of Campbell’s performance here. These were the same kids whose senses of humor were triggered into existence the first time they saw ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE. There’s nothing wrong with any of this on the face of it! But they were EXHAUSTING kids to be around. I say this as someone who actively tried to be like Bugs Bunny for the entirety of the first act of my life. Little Ashes were rough, even for me.

Back to the good! Easily the stars of this show are those skeletons that make up the titular Army of Darkness. It’s all so intentionally an homage to stuff like JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, it’s a nice natural extension of where Raimi drew his influences from as a young man, AND they look so good. If this was the sole reason for this movie existing, it would have been worth it.

Sam Raimi’s legitimate talent as a director (and director of traffic) comes into play during this “final sequence”. He has a great sense for spacing and, for lack of a better term, what’s going to look cool. Production notes indicate that the fight choreography was particularly hellish, given that…you know…most of the fights he’s in are with people who aren’t there. He had to rely on a numbering system in order to keep everything straight. Raimi chose the audience over his actor in this regard, almost gleefully upping the ante and difficulty for every sequence. “Make him go through torture!” he allegedly stated.

It paid off. Campbell fighting off fully realized stop-motion skeletons with a sword on the steps of a castle goes as far to make Ash Williams the cool-yet-rubberfaced hero they were going for as a mountain of quips do. This battle scene, and its many mini-arcs and abundance of bits, are absolutely the highlight of ARMY OF DARKNESS. Also, maybe the biggest belly laugh I’ve had in a long time came from this sequence, and it’s where Evil Ash gets launched into the sky by a catapult before exploding like a firework for no apparent reason. Perhaps this says something about me more than ARMY OF DARKNESS. But there it is.

As far as the finale, set in the S-Mart that Ash otherwise works in? It’s fine, and feels in line with Ash as the cool action hero guy, although it seems to take on an almost satirical tone by the time they reach the movie’s final seconds. It’s big, it’s brash, Campbell completes his legacy as a dashing goofball (BRISCOE COUNTY JR. is right around the corner!), and it helps tie in the little glimpse of pre-EVIL DEAD Ash we get right at the beginning.

But I can’t help but think that the “alternate” ending fits the overall vibe of the EVIL DEAD franchise as a whole. Ash is nothing if not kind of a dummy barreling his way through a bizarre situation (another reason why his cool guy act is a little off-putting here), and the idea of him accidentally sleeping too much and ending up in the post-apocalyptic world is intriguing and totally in character with where Ash theoretically should be.

Looking back, I think what I respect the most about ARMY OF DARKNESS is its go-for-broke nature, as if everybody involved was imbued with the understanding that they weren’t going to be able to keep getting away with it forever, so they decided to cram in everything they ever wanted to do with the first two and then dared anybody to complain about it. In a world now where blockbuster movies keep teasing better movies ahead (as long as you keep showing up), it’s really, really satisfying to see an imaginative action-fantasy-horror flick that refuses to leave anything on the table.

If just for that reason alone, ARMY OF DARKNESS was pretty groovy.