Army Of Darkness

Army Of Darkness

Sam Raimi’s “Army of Darkness” is a silly, fast-paced spoof of horror films and medieval warfare, so packed with action it sometimes plays less like a movie than like a cardiovascular workout for its stars. It claims to be the sequel to Raimi’s “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn” (1987), on the grounds that a cursed Book of the Dead found by the hero in that movie has sent him spinning back through time to the Middle Ages, where this movie takes place. Uh-huh.

“Army of Darkness” stars Bruce Campbell, who also starred in the first two “Evil Dead” movies, and who looks like a square jawed, muscular comic book hero. The movie itself looks storyboarded; one action sequence flows into another with only the briefest pauses for elementary plot points.

Campbell plays Ash, who in real life works at a discount supermarket, but finds himself and his car deposited on a medieval battlefield where before you can say Bob’s your uncle Ash assumes command and leads his knights against an army of the dead. (There are more animated skeletons here than in any film since “Jason and the Argonauts.”)

The method of the film is simple: Trash as many action and horror clichés as possible; what “The Naked Gun” did for cops-and-robbers movies this movie does for medieval mythology and horror. Ash has lost his left forearm in an earlier episode but has had it modified so that it can mount a chain saw; he fires a shotgun with his right hand; if you’re wondering how anyone could load a shotgun with a chain saw, forget it you don’t load the shotgun because it never needs loading.

Heads spin around at about head level, body parts fly through the air below waist height, geysers of blood shoot up toward heaven,. Ash uses his old chemistry textbook to learn how to manufacture gunpowder, which is then catapulted into the midst of the skeleton soldiers. Meanwhile, Sheila (Embeth Davidtz), who is beautiful until Ash’s arrival causes her to be transformed into a homicidal harpy and vice versa, falls in love with him anyway.

The special effects in “Army of Darkness” are ingenious and a lot of fun. The makeup is state-of-the-art. So are the severed limbs, geysers of blood, etc. But the movie isn’t as funny or entertaining as “Evil Dead II,” maybe because we’ve been through this territory before; maybe it’s aimed at 14-year olds who would have been only 8 when “Evil Dead II” came out and never saw it; maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff.

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