Programme notes
Army Of Darkness 1992 Theatrical Cut (Bruce Campbell / Embeth Davidtz)
Summary
Sam Raimi's 1992 film, the third in the Evil Dead sequence, with Bruce Campbell as Ash — a department store employee stranded in the fourteenth century with a shotgun, a chainsaw hand and no patience. This is the theatrical cut.\n\nWhat separates it from the two films before it is genre. The Evil Dead (1981) was a brutal low-budget horror picture and Evil Dead II (1987) was that film remade as slapstick; Army of Darkness abandons horror almost entirely for medieval adventure comedy. The debts are to Ray Harryhausen and to The Three Stooges in roughly equal measure, with stop-motion skeleton armies on one side and sustained physical comedy on the other.\n\nCampbell's performance is the engine. Ash is a coward, a braggart and mostly wrong, and the film's jokes are constructed around puncturing him — the character is an action hero played as a fool who happens to survive.
Why it matters
It is one of the clearest examples of a horror series mutating into comedy without losing its audience, and it made Bruce Campbell a permanent cult figure. Ash became a template for the wisecracking, incompetent-but-lucky genre protagonist that later films, comics and games drew on repeatedly, and the character eventually returned in a television series decades later.\n\nRaimi's technique here — the kinetic camera racing along the ground, the extreme wide-angle close-ups, the willingness to break physical logic for a gag — carried directly into his mainstream work, and the Spider-Man films he made a decade later are recognisably by the same director.\n\nThe film also demonstrates something specific about the era: it flopped commercially and found its audience on video and cable, which was still a viable second life in the early nineties. A great deal of what is now called cult cinema was made possible by that window between theatrical failure and home rediscovery.
Controversy
The film exists in materially different versions. The theatrical release carries an upbeat ending imposed by the studio, while Raimi's preferred cut ends on a much bleaker joke, and there are further differences in international versions. Which ending a viewer saw first tends to determine which they consider the real one, and the studio's intervention is a standard reference point in arguments about final cut.