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Army
of Darkness
viewed April 4, 2000 on laserdisc
For full
information about this film, click
here
Once upon a time, years before went mainstream with A
Simple Plan and the horrible For the Love of the
Game, Sam Raimi was an amazing small-budget
filmmaker. I have faint but fond recollections of Darkman,
his well-accomplished unintentional spoof of Batman,
with Liam Neeson in a soulful performance, back when he
was easy to be mistaken as Al Bundy of Married...
with Children. I had never even heard of Army
of Darkness when I was pulled along by friends to see it
as part of a college revival series. After the
viewing we busied ourselves looking for excerpts of the
priceless dialogue on the Web. It remains one of
most pleasant surprises I've had in a
theater.
The perfectly cast Scott Campbell (anyone know where
he is now?) is swept away by an evil force from his life
as a hardware store clerk into 12th century England,
along with his Chevy Nova, 12-gauge shotgun, and
chainsaw. Raimi's clever script exploits the humor
implicit in these anachronisms: Campbell wields his
arsenal of weaponry, hardware and action-movie
one-liners ("Gimme some sugar, baby!") to
entertaining effect as he defends a castle village
against the legions of the dead. His initial trial in
the pit of doom, his foray into the wilderness to
retrieve the book of the dead, and the final showdown at
the castle are all excellently realized sequences,
mixing humorous dialogue with gruesome action.
Often times the gruesomeness of the action supplies the
humour (it helps that the enemy is already dead, so that
their decapitations and disembodiments work like punch
lines rather than ugly shocks). The quick-cut,
sudden zoom editing also enhances the cartoonish
surreality of the film.
Technically the film is impressive even though the
seams of its low-budget often show. Blue screens
are heavily used to superimpose subjects on backgrounds,
and you can often tell when they are. For the most
part, however, the special effects range from amazingly
good to hilariously cheesy. The sequence where
Campbell smashes a cursed mirror, only to have a dozen
little Campbells emerge from the shards, is flawless,
and hilarious, as Campbell is served up by his own
obnoxiousness a dozenfold. But the true fun comes
when the effects get campy, and you can't get much
campier than in the battle of the army of dead, which
for the most part consist of plaster skeletons held up
by strings and sticks. Raimi lets it all hang out
as he pulverizes the skeletal soldiers as many ways as
he can think of: exploded by flaming arrows, crushed by
falling rocks, decapitated by wooden blades slung from a
steam-powered Chevy Nova. This is what the
climactic battle of Naboo in Star Wars Episode I
should have been, and it cost 100 times less.
Sometimes money just can't buy fun.
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