Greatest Film Scenes
and Moments



Army of Darkness (1993)

 



Written by Tim Dirks

Title Screen
Movie Title/Year and Scene Descriptions
Screenshots

Army of Darkness (1993)

In director Sam Raimi's third installment in the Evil Dead trilogy - an offbeat horror spoof with many witty wisecracks uttered by stranded-in-time, unbalanced hardware store S-Mart clerk Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) who was being held captive in 1300 AD:

  • the opening flashback was of Ash Williams remarking that he once was a clerk at an S-Mart store: "It wasn't always like this. I had a real life once. A job"
  • he and his girlfriend Linda (now played by Bridget Fonda) had driven to a remote small cabin in the mountains. He described the backstory: "It seems an archaeologist had come to this remote place to translate and study his latest find, Necronomicon Ex-Mortis - 'The Book of the Dead'. Bound in human flesh and inked in blood, this ancient Sumerian text contained bizarre burial rites, funerary incantations, and demon resurrection passages. It was never meant for the world of the living. The book awoke something dark in the woods. It took Linda. And then it came for me. It got into my hand and it went bad, so I lopped it off at the wrist. But that didn't stop it. It came back. Big time"; he was compelled to chain-saw off his own possessed left hand in a cabin's living room;
  • then he was propelled or transported in a whirling timewarp (with his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88) back to medieval times of 1300 AD England, where he was captured and enslaved by Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert); he found himself surrounded, captured by medieval armored soldiers
  • due to false allegations, Ash was punished and thrown into a demon-infested death pit of Deadites (where he saved himself with his retrieved chainsaw which locked onto his arm), he battled against the first pit Deadite (Shiva Gordon) and lopped off the Deadite's head; a second threatening Deadite was impaled by a spike-wall
  • Ash pulled himself up to the rim of the pit, and then challenged Lord Arthur and anyone else: "Who's next, huh?"; then, he held up his intimidating, miraculous weapon after demonstrating its powers, and rattled off its features: "This is my boomstick! It's a 12-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line..." He told his awed audience, after holstering his weapon on his back: "Now, let's talk about how I get back home."
  • a Wise Man informed Ash that only the "unholy book," the Necronomicon, had the power to send him back home, but "Only you, the Promised One, can quest for it."
  • Ash was confronted with another old hag Pit Bitch Deadite (Billy Bryan) that attacked several guards and screamed: "You shall never obtain the Necronomicon"; Ash first challenged ("Yo, she-bitch, let's go!") and then vanquished it by shooting the monstrous creature over his shoulder with his boomstick; then, the chainsaw-handed hero Ash Williams constructed a mechanical metal hand for himself (to take the place of his lopped-off right hand), and stated to himself: "Groovy"
Deadites - and Ash's "Boomstick"

Pit Deadite # 1
(Shiva Gordon)

Pit Bitch
(Billy Bryan)
  • Sheila (Embeth Davidtz), the sister of one of Lord Arthur's knights, who had wrongly accused Ash of murder, now sought his forgiveness since he had been proclaimed the Promised One, but Ash was wary: "First you wanna kill me, now you wanna kiss me. Blow"; however, he succumbed to a kiss from her, requesting: "Gimme some sugar, baby"
  • the next day, Ash started his search for the Necronomicon in an "unholy place" - a cemetery, but first sought refuge in a windmill, where he crashed into a mirror, and the tiny reflections of himself in shards of shattered glass emerged - he struggled against tiny, mischievous versions of himself in a funny Gulliver's Travels-like segment set; he also fell onto a hotstove when he had to use a spatula to remove his face
  • he also fought with his own full-sized doppelganger evil clone (which had sprouted a head from his own shoulder after he swallowed one of the shard pieces) - ending when he shot his evil double and declared: "Good, bad. I'm the guy with the gun"; then he chained the clone to a table and dissected it with his chainsaw before burying the pieces; as he threw the chopped up remains of himself in an open grave, his decapitated head spoke: "You shall never retrieve the Necronomicon. You'll die in the graveyard before you'll get it"
  • Ash rode to the cemetery where the Necronomicon was allegedly located, but faced a dilemma regarding three look-alike books - he chose the wrong Necronomicon (Book of the Dead); the erroneous book with a turning, 'black-hole'-like center, vacuumed him into itself until he literally had to pull himself out with an elongated face
  • after selecting the third book (the correct one), Ash then recited the wrong magical incantation words told to him by the Wise Man - he forgot the words: "Klaatu, Barada, Nikto" from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and substituted "necktie," "nectar," and "nickel" etc. for the real third 'n' word ("It's definitely an 'N' word"))
  • he inadvertently unleashed a skeletal Deadite 'army of the dead' (similar to Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion creatures in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)) that emerged from the ground, led by Ash's repulsive, resurrected, zombie-doppelganger self; Ash grabbed the book and fled back to the castle
  • one of the members of the Deadite army, a Winged Deadite (Nadine Grycan), grabbed and kidnapped Sheila and flew her back to the cemetery; Ash's evil, cloned doppelganger zombie self attempted to kiss Sheila - he used the same line Ash had used earlier: "Gimme some sugar, baby" and caused her to become a Deadite (she bragged: "I may be bad, but I feel good"); during a hand-to-hand fight with Deadite Sheila, Ash told her: "Honey, you got real ugly." Ash also engaged in sword-play against his own clone; with victory, Sheila returned to her normal self and hugged Ash
  • in the film's conclusion, Sheila kissed Ash farewell before he returned to his own time (after he drank a potion and recited the three words exactly) -- to his job at the S-Mart; he was relating his incredulous tale about his adventures in Medieval England to a bored co-worker (Ted Raimi) and to a sexy red-headed co-worker (Angela Featherstone), when he was forced to defeat one more She-Demon (Patricia Tallman) in the Housewares Department of S-Mart with a Winchester Rifle, when she taunted him: "I'll swallow your soul" and Ash retorted: "Come get some"

Sexy Co-Worker

She-Demon

"Hail to the King, Baby"
  • afterwards, Ash's impressed, sexy red-headed co-worker embraced him, as Ash mused in voiceover: "Sure, I could have stayed in the past. I could have even been king. But in my own way, I am king." He then told the girl before he passionately kissed her: "Hail to the king, baby!"


Ash's Chainsaw Arm and Metal Hand: "Groovy"


Ash's Speech: "This is my boomstick!"


With Sheila: "Gimme some sugar, Baby"


Miniature Versions

Removing Face From Hot Stove



Doppelgangers


Elongated Face in Graveyard After Selecting the Wrong Book




'Army of the Dead' Skeletons, and Ash's Resurrected Zombie Cloned Self


Back at S-Mart



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