Excessive consumption of alcohol: the cure for chronic sequelitis.

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2010)

I absolutely loved the The Evil Dead, a brilliantly inventive splatter-fest that showed how a low budget needn't be a restriction on creativity; sadly, I found the sequel to be a bit of a disappointment in comparison, being little more than a rehash of the original, only with the horror diluted somewhat by director Sam Raimi's proclivity for slapstick humour. The very last scene in Evil Dead II, where hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) is thrown back in time to defeat a medieval 'deadite', did however offer a glimmer of hope, suggesting that a third chapter might be a little more epic in scope and would expound considerably on the Evil Dead mythos.
Five years after EDII, and I finally got my chance to see how Raimi's vision would pan out, securing tickets to an early screening of Army of Darkness at The London Film Festival; unfortunately, after a long wait in a pub knocking back Jack Daniels, I was completely rat-arsed by the time the performance started. The next morning, all I could recall about the film was the final shot, an impressive post-apocalyptic vista with Ash screaming in dismay at his eventual plight; this excellent bleak ending led me to believe that Raimi had made amends for the predictability and dreadful physical comedy of EDII and that I had just sat totally mullered through a possible future favourite.
When Army of Darkness got its official release, however, a second viewing revealed the film to be far from the inspired horror classic I hoped it to be: instead, I was shocked to find that the Three Stooges inspired buffoonery had taken complete precedence over scares. Army of Darkness was a relatively horror-free effort packed with drawn-out slapstick routines (albeit ones performed by skeletons and miniature evil versions of Ash) and that Ash had been turned into a jerk of massive proportions; worse still, the cool downbeat ending had been replaced by a dreadfully cheesy crowd-pleaser. Grrrrr!
The moral of this tale: if you're a huge fan of the visceral approach of the first film, but didn't care so much for the second, watch Army of Darkness completely blotto. And make sure it's the Director's Cut.