Army of Darkness

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Evil Dead a few years back, you may recall. It was tongue-in-cheek enough to find amusing but also just cleverly frightening enough to feel like a true horror movie. Evil Dead 2 was a lot more of the same, really, to the point where it felt like more of a remake than a sequel. It was slightly more over the top as well. But here, Army of Darkness - which is the conclusion to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy - just goes completely off the rails and over the top, hardly even qualifying as a horror movie in my mind and coming across much more as a straight up spoof of sorts.

I liked it. Some of its lesser gags and moments made me cringe - a bunch of shrunken men giggling out the refrain to "London Bridge is Falling Down" come to mind here, as does the time where Ash gets his face half-sucked off by a book and has to rapidly shake his head - with babbling noises, of course - in order to fix it. But most of the rest of the complete absurdity made me chuckle. Dude makes a prosthetic hand and a helicopter out of fourteenth century technology? I love it. Everyone does like three backflips every time they get punched or shot? Hilarious.

A coworker of mine - an older guy, well into his fifties - considers this his all time favorite "three beer movie," and while I've never attempted to define or measure movies in terms of beers, that seems like fair praise. Had I been just a tiny bit drunk while watching this one, I could have only possibly enjoyed it more, I'm sure.