Bruce Campbell fights off another legion of demons and gets thoroughly pummeled Three Stooges-style again and again in this great third Evil Dead flick. The first time he did it was in a low-budget horror film. The second time was in a slapstick comedy. This time it’s in a tribute to classic Ray Harryhausen-style sword and sorcery fantasy garbage, complete with fighting skeletons and an old-fashioned battle melee outside of a castle. Campbell got himself sucked into one of those inter-dimensional portals that are sometimes in movies like this and landed square in Dungeons and Dragons world. Lucky for him, he’s got a chainsaw and a shotgun. Unlucky for him, director/co-writer Sam Raimi is a lot more interested in portraying Campbell’s Ash as a complete comic fool.
He’s Bob Hope with muscles on his arms and blood on his hands. Ash here is a caricature of the day’s movie tough guys, strong, fast and blazingly arrogant. Raimi sets him up just to knock him down. Ash gets off plenty of good lines (a screen presence as strong as Campbell deserves that), but Raimi never lets him bask in glory for very long. There’s a pratfall always coming. It’s dumb humor done smartly. Raimi works with big studio money here, but, as seen in his earlier films, he’s clever with a low budget and he works some of those tricks here, such as in the action scenes that are shot largely in economical close-ups and sequences that blend old-fashioned stop-motion animation and front-projection next to mechanical effects.