|
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
|