Army of Darkness
Directed by Sam Raimi
Starring Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz and Marcus Gilbert
Showing at Hoyts, Greater Union, Village Roadshow and independent cinemas
Reviewed by Max Lane
Without realising it, I went the other day to see the sequel to the cult horror movies Evil Dead and Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn. This new sequel is a rather tongue-in-cheek horror movie.
I had not seen either Evil Dead film and so was not too familiar with this genre. And with Army of Darkness, the issue was even more complex. Sometimes you come across a product that you just can't categorise: is it horror? is it comedy? is it swords and sorcery? Indeed, is it serious?
The story line is simple. A young S Mart store attendant, Ash, stays overnight with girlfriend in a forest cabin somewhere in North America not knowing that the cabin had been previously used by a researcher deciphering the mystical words of the Necronomacon, a book of the black arts, bound — of course — in human skin.
First, his girlfriend is whisked away by an evil force, never to be seen again in the movie — symbolic of the role of women in the story generally. Then the evil comes back and gets into Ash's hand. He does the only logical thing and cuts it off with a chain saw (just as well the evil didn't choose his head). Again the evil comes back, and — as Ash says himself — in a way that was totally mega, he is sucked back to the 13th century.
As Ash implies, the special effects — horror effects, not sci-fi — are quite mega. So are the detail and care put into recreating a credible 12th century European civil war. This authenticity helps make the somewhat strange humour delivered in S Mart Ash's pithy 20th century one-liners about the 13th century somehow, in a quirky, difficult to explain way, funny.
But if you see Army of Darkness, especially if, like me, you are not a member of Evil Dead's cult following, you must watch it in the same tongue-in-cheek vein. If you start tsk-tsking, if you let your intellect intervene, if you start thinking about social messages and so on, you will make a different kind of judgment. This is not a movie where you should expect to find any strong female characters; nor where violence is depicted for anything but fun (although it never plays to sadistic tastes as with the Nightmare on Elm Street films); nor where even the smallest social issue has even a passing presence.
What kind of serious comment should a left-wing reviewer make about such a film? Is it useful to deny that even the most politically active and socially conscious of us occasionally like submerging ourselves in "pure entertainment"? Should you try this with Army of Darkness? Well, no doubt, if you like Evil Dead, you will. If you have never seen Evil Dead and are curious what ment might be like, then why not?
Still, one wonders: What is it that draws people to the notion and provides a basis for the emergence of a genre where evil always comes from the past, or from another world, or another dimension? When S Mart Ash fights the Evil Ash and the Deadites, when Good is a tongue-in-cheek hero riding a really weirdly souped up Oldsmobile and Evil is simply a force that hates all life, what do the mostly young people who go to see such films think Good and Evil are?
There I go again, tsk-tsking! After all, the Army of Darkness emerges from its unclean place of burial to threaten the existence of all humankind only because Ash forgot the magic words!