Trailer
Plot summary
Transported through time, Ash lands in the Middle Ages, where Lord Arthur's soldiers seize him as a suspected spy for Duke Henry, the rival Arthur is fighting. Ash is enslaved beside the captured Henry, his shotgun and chainsaw taken from him, and locked in Arthur's castle. Thrown into a pit, he kills a Deadite and wins back his weapons from Arthur's Wise Man. After he demands Henry's freedom and kills another Deadite in front of the crowd, the people hail him as a hero, and he finds himself drawn to Sheila, whose brother fell in Arthur's service. The Wise Man tells him that only the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis can send him back to his own time, so Ash sets out to find the book.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Army of Darkness (1992)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The film's original ending had Ash miscalculate a magic potion dose and wake up in a post-apocalyptic, ruined London; Universal found it too bleak and had a more upbeat ending filmed for theaters instead.- Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi, and producer Robert Tapert put up $1 million of their own collective salaries so the production could afford to shoot a new ending, cutting a planned scene of a possessed woman toppling giant pillars.
- The Motion Picture Association gave the film an NC-17 for a shot of a female Deadite being killed; after Sam Raimi trimmed it hoping for a PG-13, it still landed an R, so Universal had outside editors cut separate 81- and 87-minute versions.
- While filming a stunt where he flipped a stuntman down stairs, Bruce Campbell's face struck a piece of armor and began bleeding; the plastic surgeon treating him, seeing his many prop scars, asked which cut was the real one.
- Universal would not hand Raimi the $3 million he needed to finish the film and delayed its release over a dispute with De Laurentiis about the Hannibal Lecter rights the studio wanted for a Silence of the Lambs sequel; the film moved from summer 1992 to February 1993.
- A crane rigged to drop the car gave way: its support legs went, the car crashed to the ground early and the crane fell off a cliff into a gravel pit. Campbell noted, "Ironically, after all the hassle, we wound up using the footage from 1986."
- Visual effects supervisor William Mesa showed Raimi storyboards he had kept from Victor Fleming's film Joan of Arc that depicted huge battle scenes, and 25 of those shots were picked out for use in Army of Darkness.
