31 Days of Halloween Day 1: Army of Darkness (1992)
October 3rd 2010 11:09
So as I am nowhere near the town of Hall-o-we-en this year, I decided the way to get myself into the spirit would be to watch a horror movie every night of the month of October. For the most part I'd be dependent on tv listings and hope that something decent would be on, but I'm endeavouring to watch horror classics I've not yet seen (but should), or give myself an excuse to watch something horribly cheesy (perhaps Twilight if paired with copious amounts of alcohol and snarky friends).
I've already drummed up a list of movies, and have been fairly stringent with my own rules (no sci-fi and no torture porn), and if the gore-fest gets to be a little too much, I'll take a break and watch a bloodless B&W classic or a family-friendly Hallowe'en movie (or anything Tim Burton made after he had kids).
October 1st's choice was a classic, and, for me, a personal enduring favourite: Army of Darkness. Ashamedly, I have not yet seen the first two Evil Dead movies, although a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine encouraged me to look up a sickeningly funny, OTT scene involving a possessed hand, so that's made it onto the provisional list.
Directed by Sam Raimi, this is a cult classic and quite a departure from the content of the first two movies - namely, the fact that it's set in medieval Europe and the zombies are actually referred to by locals as "dead-ites". Ash, the hero from the first two instalments of the series, is now an embittered, grizzled, boomstick (gun)-wielding, one-handed badass (again a character development I missed from his meek beginnings at the start of the series). Oh, and he has a chainsaw where his right hand used to be. Well, it fell off, but he gets them to reattach it and forces them to prematurely invent gunpowder after shagging one of the local wenches.
He is told by town officials that the only way he can return to his proper time is by retrieving the Necronomicon (book of the dead), a book which also happens to hold the key to ridding the world of the dead-ites but, naturally, getting that book is not as easy as it sounds. Confounding the quest are booby-trapped graveyards, complicated, mandatory spells and the moronic laziness of our hero. And a few armies of those pesky dead-ites.
Tying up the loose ends of the first two films, we have considerably more mythology here than in most zombie movies, and the result is some bizarrely fascinating mash-up of Robin Hood and, well, Evil Dead, with the kind of set-pieces you'd expect to see played out at a Hallowe-en-themed medieval banquet. This, of course, is where Raimi's IRL SFX wizards really shine, sparing no eyeball-popping, brain-exploding, skeleton-dancing pandemonium, and notably the set design and lighting add a suitable eerie accompaniement to the gory slapstick of the movie.
At the centre of this, then is Bruce Campbell, who manages to pull off some of the cheesiest lines in cinematic history ("Honey, you got real ugly") with remarkable aplomb. He genuinely owns the role with a presence reminiscent of 1950s noir actors, and suitably displaced within the subject matter and timeline of this film, as he himself is.
By all accounts, this final part of the trilogy is both an ending to and a bit of a piss-take of the first two chapters. Much of the movie is reliant on its anarchic humour, which appears to be quite the departure from the other films, but the biggest kicker is in the film's director's cut ending, which I won't spoil (unless you click this). 18 years later, this has still held up well, and has even gained its own cult following, and it's very easy to see why. Give it a go; even if you don't like horror, this is borderline-spoofy enough to heavily dilute those traditional zombie moments of ick.
I've already drummed up a list of movies, and have been fairly stringent with my own rules (no sci-fi and no torture porn), and if the gore-fest gets to be a little too much, I'll take a break and watch a bloodless B&W classic or a family-friendly Hallowe'en movie (or anything Tim Burton made after he had kids).
October 1st's choice was a classic, and, for me, a personal enduring favourite: Army of Darkness. Ashamedly, I have not yet seen the first two Evil Dead movies, although a Facebook conversation with a friend of mine encouraged me to look up a sickeningly funny, OTT scene involving a possessed hand, so that's made it onto the provisional list.
Directed by Sam Raimi, this is a cult classic and quite a departure from the content of the first two movies - namely, the fact that it's set in medieval Europe and the zombies are actually referred to by locals as "dead-ites". Ash, the hero from the first two instalments of the series, is now an embittered, grizzled, boomstick (gun)-wielding, one-handed badass (again a character development I missed from his meek beginnings at the start of the series). Oh, and he has a chainsaw where his right hand used to be. Well, it fell off, but he gets them to reattach it and forces them to prematurely invent gunpowder after shagging one of the local wenches.
He is told by town officials that the only way he can return to his proper time is by retrieving the Necronomicon (book of the dead), a book which also happens to hold the key to ridding the world of the dead-ites but, naturally, getting that book is not as easy as it sounds. Confounding the quest are booby-trapped graveyards, complicated, mandatory spells and the moronic laziness of our hero. And a few armies of those pesky dead-ites.
Tying up the loose ends of the first two films, we have considerably more mythology here than in most zombie movies, and the result is some bizarrely fascinating mash-up of Robin Hood and, well, Evil Dead, with the kind of set-pieces you'd expect to see played out at a Hallowe-en-themed medieval banquet. This, of course, is where Raimi's IRL SFX wizards really shine, sparing no eyeball-popping, brain-exploding, skeleton-dancing pandemonium, and notably the set design and lighting add a suitable eerie accompaniement to the gory slapstick of the movie.
At the centre of this, then is Bruce Campbell, who manages to pull off some of the cheesiest lines in cinematic history ("Honey, you got real ugly") with remarkable aplomb. He genuinely owns the role with a presence reminiscent of 1950s noir actors, and suitably displaced within the subject matter and timeline of this film, as he himself is.
By all accounts, this final part of the trilogy is both an ending to and a bit of a piss-take of the first two chapters. Much of the movie is reliant on its anarchic humour, which appears to be quite the departure from the other films, but the biggest kicker is in the film's director's cut ending, which I won't spoil (unless you click this). 18 years later, this has still held up well, and has even gained its own cult following, and it's very easy to see why. Give it a go; even if you don't like horror, this is borderline-spoofy enough to heavily dilute those traditional zombie moments of ick.
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