Starring: Ian Abercrombie, Deke Anderson, Andy Bale, Billy Bryan, Bruce Campbell Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC Label: Universal Studios Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Letterbox Region Code: 1 Release Date: August 19, 1998 Running Time: 81 minutes Theatrical Release Date: February 19, 1993
Don't mess with Ash! This, the best & third entry in the Evil Dead series, is an absolute blast! It's funny, exciting, scary, well acted, beautifully designed and choreographed, and, most of all, imaginative to the extreme!
Bruce Campbell is fantastic here (as usual), but here he's really allowed to excercise his funny bone, and man does he stretch (in more ways than one). You'll be laughing and cheering along with him the whole way through!
As for plot: Ash, our scrappy hero from the first two Evil Dead movies, is sucked through a dimensional vortex thingy (courtesy of Necronomicon, the demonic book of the dead) and finds himself lost in time...the middle ages, more specifically. Before you know it, he finds himself saving the kingdom and setting things right when the Necronomicon's evil minions, the army of darkness of the movies title, start causing trouble. Epic, silly gold!
The Medieval Dead Having abandoned genuine scares in favor of all-out slapstick, Army of Darkness, the third entry in the Evil Dead series sees Bruce Campbell lost in time, low on gas, surrounded by evil and facing the Medieval Dead with only a chainsaw, a '73 Oldsmobile, his trusty boomstick and a lot of attitude in a film that owes more to Ray Harryhausen than George A. Romero, albeit with an R-rating (it's one of the last films to use stop-motion extensively, with more sword-wielding skeletons than Harryhausen managed in his entire career). Never quite as much fun as you'd like it to be, it's certainly aged much better than expected - initially regarded as a disappointment, today it stands up rather well, especially when seen away from its two more small-scale predecessors. Joe LoDuca's unapologetically old-fashioned epic score is a lot of fun too, particularly cues like `Manly Men' and `Building the Deathmobile.'
There's no shortage of different editions of the film on DVD, and the fact that Amazon have lumped all the reviews for them in one big identical heap that appears on every editions page doesn't help sort them out. Seeing the two versions of the film side by side on Anchor Bay's 2-disc DVD (issued as the Special Edition and the Boomstick edition) - the US theatrical version with the S-Mart ending and the longer director's `Bootleg cut' with the original `Planet of the Apes' ending, the differences in the longer version are mainly extended scenes rather than deleted ones, though the use of a few alternate takes means that some of the most quotable lines from the shorter version are lost ("Good, bad, I'm the one with the gun." "Maybe my men can hold them. Maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot." "Hail to the king, baby.") and the picture quality is a lot softer. It has to be said that both versions have their merits: there's a bit of repetition in the long version (Marcus Gilbert's every other line in the last half hour seems to be "We are deserted!") and while a lot of good stuff was lost when the film was trimmed for the US, the shorter version IS a lot snappier and the S-Mart Dedite ending is quite fun even if it doesn't set up the will-it-ever-get-made Evil Dead 4 promised in the original ending.
Slapstick horror comedy for you! In one word this movie is fun, completely over the top and with a lot of silly moments, but there is a reason for all that stuff! Director Sam Raimi making fun of himself and of all the "Horror" he had put Ash trough in the previous two movies (the evil dead and the evil dead 2) that was still silly, and over the top!
Ash being pulled by the power of the Necronomicon gets sent to a weird version of medieval England (even though he is in the states) where he has to get the Necronomicon to get him back in time. What is totally ridiculous about this movie (aside from EVERYTHING) is that Ash is such a moron that he just gets thrown back in this evil time by the Necronomicon, but when he hears mention of the book, its like he never heard of it before, but he is smart enough to build himself a robot hand, and make explosives.
This is not a movie that you would watch for the really smart dialog, or for a well made horror flick, or even a sci-fi adventure that makes any kind of sense, but laughing out loud fun!!!
Oh... the memories. I will be honest and say this movie is cheesey as hell, and is a bit different. But it is a lot of fun, and brings back many fond memories of when I was younger and Ash was my hero. My cousins and I loved this stuff.
If you don't have a sense of humor, or if you can't stand old movies with dated special effects, don't watch.
And if you're not a fan of the one-liners, get out of here. I think they are damn funny in this movie.
Silly Mindless Time Killer When I saw this HD DVD featured on Amazon, I thought it was a recent movie. I purchased the movie and upon watching it, realized I had rented it several years ago, 1993 I think. The date the manufacturers are putting on the box is the day it became HD, not necessarily the year it was produced. Yes, you can package something HD and it will look better for all intents and purposes, and this one does, but nevertheless this one is very forgettable. The plot is a different spin on a "Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain. Bruce Campbell plays a manager in a department store who is catapulted in vintage Pontiac back to the days of Camelot. The plot involves a book that unleashes dead zombies that attack the castle and the plot gets sillier and sillier. Adding profanity, including the "f" word in an attempt to make this asinine infantile excursion into something more adult completely missed the mark. This performance by Campbell is probably why he has been relegated to second and third tier supporting roles in subsequent movies.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
