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Army
of Darkness (1993)
In director Sam Raimi's third installment in the Evil
Dead trilogy - an offbeat horror spoof:
- the opening flashback of stranded-in-time, unbalanced
hardware store S-Mart clerk Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell), who
remarked that he once was a clerk at an S-Mart store: "It
wasn't always like this. I had a real life once. A job" -
but was compelled to chain-saw off his own possessed left hand
in a cabin's living room, and was then propelled or transported
in a whirling timewarp (with his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88) back
to medieval times of 1300 AD England, where he was captured and
enslaved by Lord Arthur (Marcus Gilbert)
- the sequence of Ash thrown in a demon-infested death
pit of Deadites (where he saved himself with his retrieved chainsaw
which locked onto his arm); he battled against the first pit Deadite
(Shiva Gordon) and lopped off the Deadite's head; a second threatening
Deadite was impaled by a spike-wall, as Ash pulled himself up to
the rim of the pit, and then challenged Lord Arthur and anyone else: "Who's
next, huh?"
Deadites - and Ash's "Boomstick"
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- Ash's intimidating speech about his "boomstick":
("This is my boomstick! It's a 12-gauge double-barreled Remington.
S-Mart's top of the line...")
- the sequence of Ash's confrontation with another old
hag Pit Bitch Deadite (Billy Bryan) that attacked several guards
and screamed: "You shall never obtain the Necronomicon";
Ash first challenged ("Yo, she-bitch, let's go!") and then
vanquished it by shooting the monstrous creature over his shoulder
with his boomstick
- Ash's seeking of refuge in a windmill, where he crashed
into a mirror, and the tiny reflections of himself in shards of shattered
glass emerged - he struggled against tiny, mischievous versions of
himself in a funny Gulliver's Travels-like segment set;
he also fell onto a hotstove when he had to use a spatula to remove
his face
- Ash's struggle against his own full-sized doppelganger evil
self (that sprouted from his own shoulder after he swallowed one
of the shard pieces), ending with his dissection of the double with
his chainsaw and its burial
- in the graveyard scene, he faced a dilemma regarding
three look-alike books - and chose the wrong Necronomicon (Book
of the Dead) -- the erroneous book, with a turning, 'black-hole'-like
center, vacuumed him into itself, until he literally had to pull
himself out with an elongated face
- the scene of his recitation of the wrong magical words
(forgetting the final word in the incantation: "Klaatu, Barada, Nikto" from The
Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)) - he substituted mumbled
N words: "necktie," "nectar," and "nickel," etc.
for the real third 'N' word ("It's definitely an 'N' word")
- the inadvertent unleashing and emergence of skeletal
Deadite 'army of the dead' (similar to Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion
creatures in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)) from the ground,
led by Ash's resurrected, zombie-doppelganger self, that grabbed
his face repeatedly
- after vanquishing the deadites (he drank a potion
and recited the three words exactly) and returning to the present
time, the scene of Ash defeating one more She-Demon (Patricia Tallman)
in the Housewares Department of S-Mart - afterwards, an impressed,
a sexy red-headed co-worker (Angela Featherstone) embraced him, as
Ash mused in voiceover: "Sure, I could have stayed in the past.
I could have even been king. But in my own way, I am king." He
then told the girl before he passionately kissed her: "Hail
to the king, baby!"
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Ash's Chainsaw Arm
Removing Face From Hot Stove
Doppelgangers
Elongated Face
'Army of the Dead' Skeletons
"Hail to the king, baby"
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