Ash Goes Medieval On The Undead In The Most Fun Evil Dead Movie, Army of Darkness

If you thought Ash (Bruce Campbell) was done getting into demon-enhanced trouble, well, you don't know the guy very well because his adventures related to those nefarious Candarian Demons have only begun. Following directly from the ending of Evil Dead II, Ash has been time-warped to the Middle Ages where he's taken prisoner by a local kingdom and sentenced to death along with the ruler of a rival kingdom. How will they be killed? Why, by being fed to one of the Candarian Demons that the kingdom has trapped in a giant pit. Everyone else that's been tossed into this pit has been immediately killed but Ash uses his wits and his trusty chainsaw to kill the demon and earn the admiration of the local populace.


The kingdom's wizard believes Ash to be a prophesized chosen one who can bring order to the kingdom and kill the demons that have plagued the land and though Ash isn't exactly enraptured with the idea of going on more journies involving those pesky demons, the prospect of being returned home to his own time gets him excited enough to go on a quest for this medieval kingdom. Ash will now have to retrieve the Necronomicon, an ancient book that controls the demons, but of course, this mission isn't gonna go according to plan, especially since Ash has gotta face off with plenty of those relentless demons in his excursion.

For this third entry into the Evil Dead saga, writers Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi have flipped the script, so to speak, and fully embraced the fantasy adventure genre. While the gore-filled horror of the past two movies is still here, it's now accompanied by knights, wizards and all sorts of other mainstays of the fantasy genre that immediately make Army of Darkness stand out from its predecessors. To boot, there's also a heavier emphasis on Three Stooges/Chuck Jones-style slapstick in how the demons torment Ash, which feels like the Raimi brothers taking the already stylized way Ash suffered from supernatural forces in past movies and taking it to its greatest extreme.

This clear willingness to do something new with this already established world is admirable and the execution of this desire results in easily the most fun entry in the series. While there's plenty of high-quality elements you can deeply analyze in terms of how and why they work so well in this motion picture, just that three-letter word "fun" seems to be an apt way to wrap up what it's like to watch Army of Darkness. As the plot sprints from one horror/fantasy sequence to another in its well-paced screenplay, there's a persistent sense of zaniness in the period-era adventures Ash gets into that kept me thoroughly entertained.

Bruce Campbell being the lead actor through it all is certainly a key factor for why Army of Darkness just works so well, the guy is marvelously adept at being an old-school action hero as he delivers cheesy one-liners with convincing charm and wades through skeleton armies with gusto. Speaking of skeleton armies, the boney antagonists in the film are brought to life by way of impressive stop-motion that seems very much like it was intended to be a nod towards stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen's work on Jason and the Argonauts, though these undead foes work well beyond just being an admirable homage to revolutionary visual effects techniques.

The various stop-motion animation, practical costumes, and assorted VFX trickery used to bring the enemies that Ash and the various medieval individuals face off against are well-realized and certainly demonstrate that director Sam Raimi had far more money and resources at his disposal for this chapter in the series compared to its predecessors, especially the shoestring-budgeted first film. Army of Darkness doesn't just toss out expensive special effects in place of actual fun or thrills though. On the contrary, it gets ton of excitement out of merging a classicall depiction of swords n' sorcery adventure with Raimi's trademark gross-out horror. The two elements work so incredibly well together and make for an exceptionally (here comes that word again!) fun motion picture!