Army of Darkness

Watch a film like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you can detect the hand of director Sam Raimi, be that the canted angles he favours or an unusually jubilant sense of cruelty in the film's superpowered action. You can come away from such an experience satisfied that a seminal talent has defied the odds, motoring through a system of blockbuster production that demands subservience to an overall brand or blueprint. Then you watch (or re-watch) an earlier piece like Army of Darkness - or to give the film its complete, onscreen title: Bruce Campbell vs. Army of Darkness - and you're reminded what Raimi's brand of constant, heedless entertainment actually looks like. Everything in this third Evil Dead film is a gag, from the sun-baked Californian scrubland standing in for 14th century Britain (a geographical fallacy that explicitly connects Darkness to the Hollywood historical epics made decades earlier that restaged European history on stolen American soil), to a slapdash grimoire quest that traps Ash, the film's bumbling hero, in a series of bizarre literary allusions. 

Ash is a time displaced American with access to engineering know-how, not unlike Hank Morgan in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he is also set upon and restrained in the manner of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver by Lilliputian-sized duplicates, all while residing in a windmill that looks like it has barely survived a tilt with Don Quixote. Tying all this mayhem together is the living special effect Bruce Campbell. The actor combines caddish, soap opera star good looks with the elasticity and indefatigability of a plotting Looney Tune. His frustrations are those of a media-literate straight man cast into the staid machinations of a movie he'd otherwise skip past when channel surfing. Somewhere in an all-action finale jam-packed with Harryhausen's living skeletons and a heavily customised Oldsmobile, you start to see the surface-level similarities between Raimi's endlessly inventive cartoon and Aleksei German's Russian epic Hard to Be a God. Both films posit that, when set against the ingrained ignorance of mankind's darkest ages, even the most unexceptional man can raise himself - through cunning and a basic technological superiority - into an unchallengeable, shamanic superhero.