Hacker Cinema
Army of Darkness
1992 · Film · 89 min
Part of Evil Dead Collection
Directed by Sam Raimi
Ash, a handsome, shotgun-toting, chainsaw-armed department store clerk, is time warped backwards into England's Dark Ages, where he romances a beauty and faces legions of the undead.
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14 comments on Hacker News
Army of Darkness seems to subvert the trend in two ways.
There’s a strong parody element to the series, Ash is basically an idiot so it isn’t that annoying/unexpected to have him redo some character development. Oh he learned nothing in the previous movies? That scans.
It also manages to continue raising the stakes by shifting to a new genre. In this case, a sort of weird… fantasy/sword-and-sorcery/post-apocalyptic(?) universe. It confronts the protagonist with a new type of challenge so it doesn’t feel like a re-do.
Oh it's definitely a great movie, arguably better than Evil Dead 2, but I will say that a part of me wished they had kind of pretended to take themselves seriously more.
Let me explain: part of why I like Evil Dead 2 so much is because it does a great job of walking the line between "horror" and "comedy". At some parts it's pretty goofy, but always in a way that kind of feels like it could plausibly be in a regular horror movie. Stuff like the moose head laughing, or Ash cutting off his hand and replacing it with a chainsaw are silly, and even slapsticky, but still kind of works in the tone of a "regular" horror movie.
Army of Darkness on the other hand is basically a just a comedy. It has no pretense of being anything else, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but a part of me wonders what it would have been like if they had kind of kept the goofiness into "potentially plausible in an action movie" territory.
And Army of Darkness is a comedy slapstick action movie. Right up there with UHF. Fantastic film!
It did, but I would argue that Army of Darkness is just as great as Evil Dead 2, and substantially better than the first Evil Dead, so we at least got three classic movies instead of two.
Though, I guess you could argue that Evil Dead 2 is much more of a "comedy slapstick remake" of the first one than a sequel.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
"Klaatu barada nikto" is a code phrase from The Day the Earth Stood Still to stop the homicidal antagonists from killing you.
It's doubly famous because Sam Raimi recycled it in "Army of Darkness" as an incantation to dispel the curse of the Necronomicon (book of the dead, portrayed as the arch book of black magic in any number of stories), which our hapless anti-hero Ash fucks up and thus unleashes the armies of the dead on a roughly medieval and wholly unprepared world.
If you like campy horror movies, there is so much camp in Army of Darkness that there's barely any room for the horror. It is technically a sequel but it works as a standalone movie. I watched it years before I finally sat down and watched The Evil Dead.
I haven't thought about .plan files in years. This takes me back to setting those on the HP-UX account I had at college, and fingering my friends' .plan files daily. That was my first real encounter with actual multi-user, family-tree Unix, though I had been horsing around with some of the various Linuxen available in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s.
Mine usually had snarky movie or TV quotes. Usually from MST3K, Babylon 5 or Army of Darkness.
>Army of Darkness intentionally bad? What what what?!? That movie is fucking fantastic.
And it's still intentionally campy and crudely made.
Btw, the magic words are "Klaatu barada nikto" -- which is a funny reference to a sci-fi movie.
> What if the movie is intentionally bad? How enjoyable is satire like Army of Darkness?
Army of Darkness intentionally bad? What what what?!? That movie is fucking fantastic.
The only bad thing here is that the director got way bigger budget than he was used to, and really didn’t know how to spend it properly.
The end result is still great though.
What if the movie is intentionally bad? How enjoyable is satire like Army of Darkness?
It wasn’t always this way. Films like Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, and pretty much the entire Hitchcock collection were some of the most iconic films of their times.
In my opinion, the popularity of the late 70s to 80s slasher films (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St, Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few), combined with studios’ ever-shrinking tolerance for risk, resulted in a particularly bland few decades of mainstream horror, with the well-known Saw franchise and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat satirical Final Destination series as typical examples of the era. Personally, I’m partial to the Evil Dead films, Army of Darkness most of all. Groovy.
Horror can be excellent when done well, and pathetic when done poorly. It is easy to go for cheap scares and bloody massacre scenes. There is a lot to dislike about modern horror films that can turn off audiences looking for more than jump scares and blood splatter. If I hadn’t dated a girl in college who was super into the horror genre, I would have never gotten into it.
Horror is best when it floods you with an emotional high that lasts long after the initial shock. For a most masterful example, try playing Silent Hill 2, if you dare.
When I was a senior in high school, Cisco offered their NetAcademy program to a few high schools around the nation. It was a pretty sweet deal: for a relatively small price, you could earn your CCNA as an optional elective. You had to get approval to take the class; basically, the 10 of us were the most technically minded and computer literate students in the school.
So, of course within a few weeks many of us were staying after school to use the top-of-the-line (circa 1999) computer equipment to play games. :) Half Life and the various mods (particular Action Half Life [0]) were favorites. Even the teacher eventually got in on the fun.
"You shot me! If you shoot me again I'll fail you!"
A lot of times a few folks would come over to my house in the evenings because we had a blazing fast (again, circa 1999) 128k ISDN line in the house, supposedly to do "homework" but really gaming, surfing the web, playing MUDs. Sometimes we'd kick on a movie like Army of Darkness while gaming.
Such great memories and an awesome time to be alive. I still keep up with a few folks from back then but I'd love to know what happened to everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Half-Life
> ...25 sequels, but none of those films will be memorable.
* Back to the Future 2 * Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom * Army of Darkness * Goldeneye * Evil Dead 2 * Terminator 2 * Ghostbusters 2 * Captain America: Winter Soldier * Batman: The Dark Knight
Yeah, none of those sequels are memorable. We should stop making sequels and only make original films so we don't waste money on travesties such as these.
You should make a movie about it. You could call it "Army of Darkness".