ENTERTAINMENT

This Week: Army Of Darkness

ou know how it is. Sometimes, the T.V.

\ commercial for a movie is so great that

you feel you’ll ruin your underwear if

you don’t go see it. But you know what theatre

prices are like. High. Pricey. Exorbitant.

Astroeconomical. But you’ve gotta see that movie!

So you make excuses. The movie can’t be that good. All the gcod parts are in the commer- cial. That works for a little while... then you see a new commercial with even better clips...

You can handle it though. Momma didn’t raise no moronic linestanding theatre junkies. You can wait until the video comes out.

But then you see Regis and Kathie Lee talking to the star. And they show even more clips.

And Siskel and Ebert give it two thumbs up. _

It’s on Entertainment Tonight every night.

And the Six O’clock News reports that riots broke out when some people zouldn’t get tick- ets.

People are talking Oscar.

People are buying the lunchbox.

People are eating the cereal.

People are driving you crazy.

Before you even know it’s happening, you’re Standing in front of the theatre’s cash register on cheap (yeah, right!) night in last week’s under- wear wearing a bloodstained trenchcoat and are choking up that last five bucks that you pawned your left kidney to get and taking the ticket and

‘took his girlfriend out

going into the theatre and sitting downto watch... And you die of a stroke before the opening credits finish. Sometimes, life just ain’t fair.

That’s the moral of this week’s film, Army of Darkness. It stars Bruce Campbell as the heroic Ash, an ordinary guy, gets sucked into a timewarp for no apparent reason other than it being a cool premise for a movie.

More adventurous B-movie fans will recog- nize the character of Ash from those immortal horror-comedies, Evil Dead and Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn. But if you’ve never seen either of those movies, don’t worry: a helpful flash- back at the beginning of the movie fills you in on all you need to know. Ash was once a mild- mannered, square- jawed hardware depart- ment clerk, whose most important contribution to society was his ad- vice that you ‘‘Shop Smart! Shop S-Mart!’’

Then one day he

to a cabin in the woods to soak up some nature and maybe get naked for a while. Unfortu- nately, an evil demon had other plans. It killed Ash’s girlfriend. Then (I love this line) it got into Ash’s hand and it “‘went bad’’, like a three month old yogurt. Ash, x’ r thecool, logi- cal thi: <er, cut off his hand with a chainsaw and vanquished the de-

<3 Unfortunately, an evil demon had other plans. It killed Ash’s girlfriend. Then (1 love this line) it got into Ash’s hand and it “went bad”’, like a three TOL yogurt. 99

mon. To replace the hand, he modifed the chainsaw to fit snugly over the stump of his wrist. A perfectly reasonable solution, when one is surrounded by rampaging zombies.

Then he gets sucked down the timewarp, a great big whirlpool of a special effect that vacuums up Ash’s car, Ash’s chainsaw, Ash’s shotgun, and of course, Ash.

Lost in a time of warring knights and steam- ing hot days, Ash is first forced to prove he’s not one of the bad guys by killing a zombie. Then he’s forced to prove he’s the hero of legend... by killing a zombie. Then, as hero, he is forced to retreive the Necronomicon (an evil book, inked in blood and bound in flesh, that the evil forces want and the good guys must keep from them) from a graveyard. To get it out, he must defeat... Skeletons! Fooled you, didn’t I?

Okay, enough about the plot. This is a real fun movie. It’s a great way to spend an evening with drunk friends, or sober ones if that’s more politically correct. It’s arguably the best of a recent wave of movies (including Leprechaun, Beastmaster II, and the ever-popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer) made to cash in on the fascina- tion we b-movie fans have for slapped-together, slapstick B-movie schtick. So it’s commer- cial... So what! It’s great!

So what makes Army of Darkness better than, say, Hot Shots!? The difference here is that AoD (there’s that generation X laziness again...It’s not my fault, they should make movie titles shorter than three words) doesn’t bother to spoof everything, instead just concen- trating on tearing the Sword-And-Sorcery genre to bloody rags.

All the old stock characters that populate the average fantasy are here. There’s the generic nobleman, the generic princess, the generic evil force trying to strangle all life from the planet so it can be remade in its image, and the ge- neric hero from the fu- ture with a shotgun full ofammo andachainsaw for one hand.

It’s the slapstick that makes this movie, not the plot. Slapstick like the fight in the Zombie Pit (playset available soon! ), where Ash leaps what looks like ten or fifteen feet straight up to catch his chainsaw. Or when he cuts the zombies up after catch- ing the saw, and various zombie parts fly up in the air. Or when the

October 14, 1993/X-Press/27