It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Thanks to the enthusiastic fan response and the international profits for Evil Dead II, Dino De Laurentiis was willing to finance a third film, so while working on his next film, the superhero adventure Darkman, Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan developed the script for Army of Darkness, continuing Ash’s adventures into the Middle Ages. Drawing inspiration from Ray Harryhausen classics like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, not to mention the slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges, the film relies heavily on stop-motion animation to bring an army of skeletons and other demonic monsters to hilariously quotable life.
While Evil Dead II had shifted more into a horror-comedy approach, Army of Darkness is almost pure comedy; it just happens to be set in a medieval fantasy setting and involves the dead returning to life. Hell, it was almost titled Medieval Dead!
Continuing the tradition of retconning the events of the previous movies in the opening prologue, Army of Darkness allows Ash to describe his life leading up to his landing in 1300AD. This also includes another recast of his girlfriend Linda, this time played by Bridget Fonda. We learn that Ash worked in Housewares at S-Mart and instead of being instantly hailed as the prophesied hero to battle the Deadites, he was instead enslaved by Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert) alongside the defeated Duke Henry (Richard Grove). The Wiseman (Ian Abercrombie), however believes in the prophecy and intervenes as Ash is tossed into a fighting pit to battle a couple of captured Deadites, tossing him his weapons (the iconic chainsaw and sawed off shotgun).
This also leads to the beginning of instant classic quotes as Ash refers to the crowd as “primitive screwheads” and holding his rifle above his head declares, “This is my Boom Stick!” Army of Darkness may be the most gleefully quoted movie in geek fandom. Not only is the dialogue hilarious, but the film also features a number of set piece scenes help to elevate Army of Darkness into a full-fledged classic of horror-comedy.
From the battle with a possessed witch (played by an unrecognizable Patricia Tallman of Night of the Living Dead and Babylon 5 fame), to the forging of Ash’s new robotic hand, to the slapstick antics of Ash battling a group of miniature Ash duplicates, to forgetting the magic words (“Klaatu barada nikto,” itself a clever inside joke referencing The Day the Earth Stood Still) he is supposed to speak when retrieving the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, to the Ray Harryhausen inspired raising of the skeletal dead by Ash’s evil duplicate, Evil Ash (who was actually played by Campbell, not as commonly thought, Bill Moseley, who played Evil Ash’s right hand man). The film’s climax is a massive skeleton army attack on the castle/compound of Lord Arthur, involving hundreds of warriors and skeletons alike, with huge battle scenes inspired by storyboards for Victor Fleming’s film Joan of Arc.
Once the final battle has taken place, with Duke Henry’s army showing up in the nick of time to help turn the tide, Ash is given a potion and instructed to drink six drops in order to sleep for six centuries and return to his own time. The film closes with Ash telling his story to a bored S-Mart co-worker before being attacked by a Deadite and leaping into action, killing the demon and getting the girl.
This wasn’t the original ending, though. Universal Pictures balked at the much darker ending where a distracted Ash miscounts the drops of potion he drinks and wakes up a hundred years too late and emerges in a nightmarish apocalyptic London.
While Raimi and Campbell stepped away from the world of The Evil Dead after Army of Darkness, the franchise expanded into video games, comic books, and was even turned into a stage musical. There wouldn’t be another feature film until 2013’s Evil Dead, written and directed by Fede Alvarez, and it would be another two years until Ash returned, this time to the small screen to headline three seasons of Ash vs Evil Dead!
But more on those in the coming days of our 2025 Easter Zombie Movie Marathon!