"Hail to the king baby!!!!"

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2008)

Many people have tried to make crazy horror-comedies, and many has failed. But those who have succeeded, has really made a tasty goulash of horror and humor. Two other good examples I can think of is Peter Jackson's cult movie "Braindead" and the modern British cult-classic "Shaun of the Dead." But still, my favorite remains "The Evil Dead trilogy", and especially "The Army Of Darkness."
The movies takes place shortly after the second movie ends. It opens with a small flashback to the moments when Ash has been forced to cut off his possessed hand, and replacing it with a chainsaw. He then escapes through a time vortex he summoned with the aid of the Necronomicon (the book of the dead) which all the movies plots are based upon. The book, covered in human skin, and written in human blood contains a direct gateway two the underworld and in the wrong hands it may provoke the end of the world. In the first movies Ash has his hands full trying to fight off his friends which all are turned in to horrible demons. In the third movie Ash find that in the past people are living in constant fear of the living dead who roams the land. It's time to fight back. Good ting he brought his chainsaw and boom-stick (a twin-barrel shotgun which can fire a surprisingly high numbers of shots in a row.)
This is the final movie in the "Evil Dead" trilogy," and the movies goofiness and crazy-humor is accelerating from the original and comes to it's climax the third movie. The Army of Darkness is like the first two "Evil Dead movies" hovering gracefully in the strange spot between a "low budget horror turkey" and a well directed epic tale of bravery and bone-chilling terror. It's a movie poorly made in many ways. The "sceleton army" looks like a bunch of those plastic skeletons your biology teacher used to drag out from a closet, and the voice overs is sometimes done with a goofy German accent. There's one thing that saves Army of Darkness from being ridiculous, and that is that it's fully aware of it's own flaws. Sam Raimi is by my opinion a genius, and manage to turn the sometimes terrible special effects into a vital part of the movies humor. It's not a bad, it's just not taking itself very seriously! This movie is far from a "low budget turkey." It's got a great plot, a great cast (wonderfull overacting by Bruce Campbell) and it got some really god laughs.
It exist two versions of this movie. The original theater version and the directors-cut. The main difference is the endings. One containing the well known catchphrase "Hail to the king, baby!" and a sort-of happy ending to the trilogy. The other version a much darker anticlimax which leaves everything in a worse condition than when the trilogy started. I recommend seeing both :)