Rarely does the third film is a trilogy hold up to what has preceded it. Here, it...kinda...does? By pulling a genre switch on us yet again, we can laugh and simultaneously cringe at that magnificent scamp Ash Williams as he fights the Deadites once again. In 1300 A.D. It’s all quite not-convoluted and rather goofy. And nice to see a little old-fashioned stop-motion animation in use, Ray Harryhausen would be proud. Or embarrassed.
Picking up from where Evil Dead 2 left off, Ash finds himself transported back to the past. His pussiness and braggadocio collide as he is forced to fight the local castle-dwellers AND Deadites in physical form once again. There’s blood. There’s romance. There’s a graveyard with some bastard Necronomicons. But he just wants to get back to his own time.
I dunno. I can appreciate this one as the comedy that it is. It’s hard to beat Evil Dead 2, so what they did here makes sense. Kinda. While I appreciated the comedic moments of part II, this one goes full fledged 3 Stooges. Is it funny? Yeah, there are some funny bits. Is it Evil Dead? Tangentially so, I guess. I had to go to a fuckin mall theater to see this back in the day. Walked out thinking, that was kinda lame. Funny, but lame. The macho/cowardice shtick for Ash just didn’t ring quite right here. Some great lines, some funny sequences, but yeah, even now still doesn’t stick quite right, at least for me. So when they finally revisited this property in a new series in 2015, I was a bit apprehensive. But I gotta say, overall the Ash vs Evil Dead follow-up to this, in my opinion, did a pretty great job of properly following up on the character Bruce Campbell made iconic in the horror gore comedy genre, a great mesh that ED2 perfected. The first season has some issues, I won’t argue that. But I think it got better as it played out, with an ending that was pitch perfect. Ash is the unwitting hero that for some reason can fight the evil dead, flaws and all. Glad to see Raimi and Campbell’s creation get a decent resolution there. This? Medieval Slapstick undead buffoonery that gets a few laughs. Still a decent chapter in the overall arc, just not the best one, at least for me.
