Review: Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness Gets Limited Edition 4K UHD from Shout! Factory

After a brief detour to make the modestly successful anti-superhero film Darkman, Sam Raimi returned to the Evil Dead franchise to resolve the cliffhanger that ended the second installment. If Evil Dead II found a perfect fulcrum point between horror and comedy, its sequel tilted that balance almost completely toward the latter, only occasionally going for shocks amid an onslaught of gags that turn the material into a macabre, live-action version of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Though more complicated than the elemental plots of its predecessors, the narrative of Army of Darkness remains straightforward: After seemingly vanquishing the evil that plagued him in Evil Dead II, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) is thrown for yet another loop by eldritch forces and sent back in time to the year 1300, an Arthurian realm under attack by the same undead creatures that he battled in the present day. Still possessed of his signature chainsaw and double-barrel shotgun, Ash quickly becomes a godlike figure to the suffering medieval lords and peasants, whom he reluctantly agrees to help in the hopes of getting back to his own time.

Raimi brings his boundless visual invention to this meager plot structure, liberally borrowing tropes from comic books, slapstick comedies, and creature features. When someone throws a punch, the camera moves first with the fist before the image cuts to a recoiling movement backward with the flailing recipient of the blow. Camera angles aren’t so much canted as in a constant state of rotation, with added jolts of axial cuts and snap zooms to make sure that even the most sedate moment has some form of kineticism. Add to this a mélange of grotesque special effects ranging from prosthetics to computer animation to, in an extended tribute to Jason and the Argonauts’s skeleton army, stop-motion. All of this should amount to visual overload, but Raimi maintains coherence throughout, using each gag as a springboard to move the story along as much as to show off his impish sense of humor.

Also keeping this free-for-all from flying off the rails is Campbell. In Evil Dead II, the actor had transformed Ash from the pitiable victim of the first film to a Cary Grant-like screwball straight man, but here he pivots to make the character an action hero, albeit one whose every utterance of bravado or cocky pose drips with irony. Like Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, Campbell pushes every regressive macho-man trope so far past the breaking point that he makes plain the utter buffoon behind the façade of competence.

With his strong chin and laconic, John Wayne-esque delivery, Campbell looks every bit the Adonis, but in action he’s routinely slapped around, poked and muck-covered by demons who seem as content to simply mess with him as to try to claim his soul. Campbell throws himself into every pratfall, roaring with exaggerated pain over the slightest injury (as when miniature Ashes set up little pranks like stabbing him with tiny forks) and hurling himself around the frame as the hero gets his ass beaten at every turn. Campbell also undermines Ash’s attempts at rugged sexiness opposite love interest Sheila (Embeth Davidtz, playing up every stereotype of the doe-eyed waif humbly waiting to be rescued) with his deliberate mugging.

Army of Darkness, with its demented madcap vision, marked Raimi’s true entrance into Hollywood-sized filmmaking, and you can trace a straight line from this, the final installment of a series that began as an indie feature funded by dentists with spare investment cash, to the director’s eventual helming of the Spider-Man franchise. Willfully glib but precisely assembled, the film remains one of the most entertaining films of the ’90s.

Image/Sound

Shout! Factory’s 2015 Blu-ray of Army of Darkness boasted strong A/V transfers for all four of the included cuts of the film, each boasting exceptional textures and filmic grain, well-separated colors, and nicely consistent detail. Nonetheless, their new 4K disc offers a visible uptick in quality across the board. Using a new 4K restoration approved by Sam Raimi, cinematographer Bill Pope, and editor Bob Murawski, Shout presents the theatrical cut of Army of Darkness with added color saturation and richer textures, particularly in close-ups of dirt- and sweat-covered faces. In general, there’s a more pronounced bronze tint to daytime scenes, while ones set at night show deeper black levels. The same 2.0 and 5.1 audio tracks on the previous Blu-ray are recycled, and each track is well-balanced, with a good distribution of dialogue and the film’s cartoonish sound effects and sardonically rousing fantasy score.

At first glance, this is a great upgrade, but the issue is that only the theatrical cut of Army of Darkness is presented in 4K, with Shout repackaging the earlier Blu-rays of the international, television, and, most egregiously, vastly superior director’s cut. The latter, which runs 15 minutes longer and contains a different, far bleaker ending in keeping with the franchise’s spirit, is universally hailed by fans and filmmakers as the definitive cut, but because elements of the additional footage could not be accessed via their original elements for restoration, Shout opted not to include it in 4K at all rather than resort to upscaling some of the extended sequences.

Extras

Shout ports over all the extras from their 2015 Blu-ray, which isn’t disappointing considering that they left few stones unturned. A making-of documentary features interviews with numerous members of the cast and crew and extensively covers the film’s production, while an audio commentary for the director’s cut featuring Raimi, Campbell, and co-writer Ivan Raimi provide even more insight into Raimi’s aesthetic approach and vision for the film. The aforementioned inclusions of the international release version and the amusingly cleaned-up television broadcast version offer yet more ways to experience the film, while copious deleted and alternate scenes, set footage, and promotional material round out the package.

Overall

Held back by a failure to include the lauded director’s cut in 4K, Shout’s new edition of Army of Darkness is nonetheless the best home video release of the film to date.