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.
Season Three kicks off under a cloud of controversy. If you give a shit about this sort of thing.
The previous showrunner, Craig DiGregorio is out, and depending on the source, either old-school producer Rob Tapert is in charge or Mark Verheiden (he’s got a fantastic track record) is. As far as most sources go; Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell haven’t weighed in on what happened. But according to DiGregorio, Tapert wanted more control and felt that the series so far hadn’t been true to the Evil Dead vibe.
Which is nutso, if true.
DiGregorio claimed that Tapert wanted less humor and more horror, but if the premiere episode of Season Three is to be believed, Tapert just wanted humor that wasn’t as funny. Because Season Three starts off rough, with the commercial for Ash’s new hardware/sex toys store, and boy is it terrible. Not only is it terrible, but this is also apparently Ash’s dad’s old store??
Okay. Whatever. That’s only new information, not supported by anything that came before.
During the grand re-opening, which is insufferably annoying, we see on the TV that a woman we’ve never met in-show before brings the Necronomicon to an Antiques Roadshow knockoff (I guess she’s the ADR’d voice in the post-credit scene in last season’s finale?) and the host, of course, reads a passage and reawakens Evil. The TV show feed cuts out and everybody dies before Blonde Ruby (Lucy Lawless) shows up to claim the book.
Oh yeah, as if to explain it away, Pablo (Ray Santiago) mentions in passing just how weird it was that nothing was different when they go back to the present after changing the past in the finale.
Seriously?
Meanwhile, in Elk Grove High School, a couple of teenagers are cleaning graffiti off of lockers when Evil comes calling in the form of the school mascot. One of the girls, Brandy Barr (Arielle Carver-O’Neill), tries to call her mom, but the call is cut off and Candy (Katrina Hobbs), who happens to be at the hardware/sex toy store grand opening confronts Ash, claiming to be his wife and tells him his daughter is in danger.
We then get a series of demonic attacks that lack the creativity and the humor of the past two seasons, as Ash rescues his daughter, but her mom is decapitated by a Deadite. Then, as Ash is nearly killed by the Deadite school mascot, a stranger who was lurking around earlier shows up with Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo) and they explode the mascot’s head. The new guy, Dalton (Lindsay Farris), is a Knight of Sumeria and is part of an order who have been fighting this evil for centuries but we’ve never heard of before this episode.
Okay, whatever. They had an opportunity to connect them to the armies of Arthur and Henry in Army of Darkness. Hell, Kelly suggests they’ve maybe been around since 1400. Why not just say 1300, and make the connection?
The episode ends with Ruby smearing her blood all over the “Ash is the Chosen One” page of the Necronomicon and becoming painfully pregnant with what I guess is the baby of the picture?
The second episode, “Booth Three,” is focused mainly on jokes about semen being thrown around. But we’ll get to that.
We open with pregnant Ruby driving erratically down a nighttime road, when she comes across a hitchhiking couple. As they watch, she explodes in the car, and the dude finds a baby inside, which immediately turns demonic and kills him. Ruby then emerges, gored out but alive, finishes off the dude, and takes his Norwegian girlfriend, Natalie (Samantha Young) hostage.
Back in Elk Grove, Brandy is having major trouble getting comfortable in Cheryl’s old room, since Ash feels responsible for her, what with being her dad and all. Ash takes her to school where she meets up with her friend, the school counselor Ms. Prevett (who is Ruby, of course), while Pablo is visited by a naked female spirit sent by the dead Brujo to convince him to embrace his destiny. This is when Dalton notices Pablo’s tattoos and decides that they need to kill Pablo before he kills them.
The rest of the episode is a slapstick battle to destroy the gallons of sperm Ash has donated to a local sperm bank over the years. I can’t believe that Tapert thought the possessed colon gag wasn’t Evil Dead enough but signed off on this nonsense. This episode lacks the humor of the previous two seasons, because how can you make a fight with Deadites surrounded by tons of semen unfunny?
Two episodes into Season Three and there’s a definite shift in the tone of the show.
That might not be totally right. The tone seems kind of the same, it’s just not funny anymore.
Is Rob Tapert just not funny?
Episode Three, “Apparently Dead,” kicks off with Candy’s funeral, as Ash shows up in a terrible suit that is supposed to be funny.
Of course, Ash ends up in the coffin with a Deadite version of Candy with all of the sexual innuendos you can imagine before killing her for good and, for some reason, staying in the coffin until the funeral. It all plays out exactly as one would expect, with Ash interrupting Brandy’s speech by busting out of the coffin with a newly decapitated corpse.
It’s not funny.
Luckily, it’s cut short as we focus on Pablo receiving another vision from the naked lady, telling him where the Kandarian dagger is – surprise, it’s at the sight of the now-buried cabin in the woods. Kelly finds the knife, the Evil Dead come after them, Pablo impales a possessed Dalton on a tree branch, then disappears. So Kelly takes the truck and heads home with the dagger.
Meanwhile, Ruby goes to the cemetery and for some reason reanimates Brock’s (Lee Majors) corpse. However, instead of killing Ash’s spawn, which is Ruby’s big plan, Brock bonds with her and makes Ash look bad, until Ash returns home and kills him in front of her. So, Brandy leaves to stay with Ruby, who she doesn’t believe is a demon.
As “Unfinished Business” begins, while dismembering and disposing of Brock’s body, Ash is visited by the actual ghost of Brock who shows him a vision of 2012, where a Knight of Sumeria visited him, looking for Ash. But Brock accidentally killed him in the basement of the hardware store we didn’t know he ran until this season, nailed the door shut, and abandoned the store with no one ever the wiser.
What the fuck?
He literally just turned out the lights, locked up, and never went back.
And Ash didn’t even know there was a basement?
Seriously?
This guy had missing pages of the Necronomicon that could save the world and he’s been dead in the basement of a hardware store that has been closed for half a decade with nobody noticing.
This was apparently the important secret that Brock had to share with Ash before the Delta ran him down, killing him, and then again before he was drowned in the Season Two finale.
Then, four episodes into a ten-episode season, we start to get some real plot movement? I have to say, it feels like nothing has actually happened at this point. There are some minor plot movements, but there’s definitely a sense of just spinning wheels and no real story advancement.
Anyway, while Ash and the ghost of his dad enter the basement and discover that the Knight wasn’t dead but died eventually after being trapped underground, surviving on Brock’s stash of Spam. That’s funny because Spam is a funny word. In the meantime, he drew a giant mural of Sumerian stuff on the basement walls. Then Ash has to fight some possessed roots that poke through the wall, and then vanish back after Ash chainsaws them.
Meanwhile, Ruby goes to the site of the old cabin, finds the possessed Dalton, tries to get information from him by suppressing the demon in him but he kills himself first. She literally says if he doesn’t give her the information, she’ll let the demon back in and get the answers anyway. Why did she suppress the demon anyway, then?
Meanwhile, Kelly returns to Ash’s house and finds the bloody chaos of dead Brock, and Brandy returns to get her phone. Before they can leave, though, possessed Pablo attacks them and they have to hide out in Ash’s trailer while possessed Pablo tries to break in and murder them. He ends up biting Kelly’s leg in the process, which eventually turns into Pablos’s mouth taunting her from her own leg. How did he get possessed? Who knows?
But the episode ends with Ash showing up at Ruby’s home, finding Natalie (the Norwegian hitchhiker) and having to deal with Ruby’s demonic spawn.
Oh yeah. I almost forgot. At some point in the middle of all of this, Ruby is contacted by the sorceress Kaya (Chelsie Preston Crayford) who is imprisoned in Hell and wants Ruby’s help saving her and warns her about the opening of the Rift, whatever that is. It’s literally just dropped in with no explanation. Apparently if they open the Rift they will have enough power to defeat all the other Dark Ones, who are already in Hell.
“Baby Proof” opens with Ash shows up at Ruby’s house, finds Natalie and Ruby’s baby, determines that the baby is his just by looking at it – and noticing that it has a built in tiny fleshy chainsaw hand, and decides that he needs to capture it to get some leverage on Ruby.
Meanwhile, Pablo breaks into the trailer, where Brandy stabs him with the Kandarian dagger, sending him into a realm between life and death where he meets up with the Brujo in a jungly afterlife. After completing a ritual that echoes Ash choosing between three Necronomicons in Army of Darkness, but here makes no real sense, Pablo returns to the real world with a new purpose and immediately abandons Kelly and Brandy. This is stretched out over the course of the episode.
This leads to Ash discovering a duplicate of the Knight’s mural on Ruby’s office wall, and pictures of him and Candy in Las Vegas. So, Ruby has been following Ash’s life for years, we can assume so that she can get her hands on the mural, which is probably the Rift?
Anyway, Natalie knocks Ash unconscious and promptly gets herself killed by the baby. Who then, in the best gag of the season so far, crawls up inside of Natalie’s headless body, and fights Ash with his baby head popping up out of the severed neck and sometimes slipping out from between her legs. It’s gross and glorious, finally capturing some of the feel of Seasons One and Two.
Finally, ash traps the baby inside Natalie’s body by sealing both entrances with bowling balls, before wrapping the corpse up and stashing it in the Delta’s trunk.
Kelly vows to take out Ruby, while Brandy hurries to the hardware store just as Ash pulls up. Then Ruby shows up, a cop shows up, and Ash reveals the baby in his trunk, who has eaten all of Natalie. Luckily before Ash can be arrested, Brandy steals the car, ordering her Dad to get in, and they flee the scene, leaving Ruby with her baby again.
Well, I was afraid of this. Season Three is off to a rough start. So rough that apparently when it first aired, Dr. Girlfriend and I watched the first episode and gave up. So, the good news is that this whole season is brand new for me!
Plotwise, we’ve gotten a few interesting crumbles. Ruby’s plot of destroying all of Ash’s seed, so that when Ash is then killed all of his “power” will transfer to her magic Ash spawn, is a bit overblown and introduces ideas about the Chosen One’s “power” that haven’t really been explored. Is Ash supposed to be more than just destined to defeat Evil?
I don’t know about that one.
Opening some unknown and undescribed Rift is interesting, especially if they actually do tie the Knights of Sameria back to Army of Darkness. It’s an easy shot, why not take it? And the next episode is called “Tales from the Rift” and that sounds promising.
And I still think making Kelly Ash’s daughter would have been a better way to go and would have really paid off in big ways for Dana DeLorenzo, rather than keeping her in the angry tough gal persona.