ARMY OF DARKNESS

Subtitled The Medieval Dead, Army of Darkness represents the third part of perhaps the oddest movie trilogy ever. Evil Dead was the source of the original video nasty controversy, an extremely low budget, deeply nasty and frankly scary haunted house movie that introduced not only director Raimi bu the even more talented collaborators the Coen brothers.

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn was not so much a sequel as a remake with a decent budget, as much the same party of young people arrived in the same haunted house to spend a night battling a variety of terrible forces from beyond the grave. Mixing humour and heroism with the horror, it was possibly the finest tongue in severed cheek movie ever made, shot with a spectacular inventiveness that suggested Raimi would be a talent to reckon with.

Crimewave and Darkman barely fulfilled that potential, and now Raimi is literally back where he started. At the end of part two, hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) was deposited in the middle ages with a chainsaw strapped to his wrist . . . which is not quite where the long awaited (and, in fact, long shelved and frantically re-cut) third part begins.

Instead, Raimi rapidly retells and reconstructs the original story once more, making it the third time he has filmed this particular tale, this time with a non-speaking Bridget Fonda appearing as Ash's girlfriend (not long for this mortal coil). Then Ash gets lost in the middle ages and Raimi gets lost in his own surfeit of imagination.

Raimi is a director who simply cannot contain himself. Let out of the confines of his haunted house he has churned out a kind of slapstick sword and sorcery adventure, kind of Mad Max In King Arthur's Court, that forsakes horror for humour to a fatal degree.

Through pure hocus pocus and spectacularly unheroic ineptness, Ash splits in two, brings the dead back to life and is forced to defend a city in an interminable battle against an army of rattly skeletons. The humour harks back to the three stooges and the stop-motion effects appear equally dates in this computer graphics era, reminiscent of a Ray Harryhausen B-movie.

The first Evil Dead was sick enough to get banned in this country, the second is a genuine over 18's chiller but, in attempting to widen his series appeal, Raimi has produced a 15-rated film highly unlikely to appeal to anyone over that age. This dead is not so much evil as misguided.