Army of Darkess, (a.k.a. AoD), being the third installment of the Sam Raimi / Bruce Campbell Evil Dead trilogy, is merely the main course of the party. Historically, the challenge has been to find different "side dishes" for it each year. I say "challenge," because it's not always easy to find horror movies that manage to exist in that quantum state of being both Bad and Good at the same time.
Horror is easy to do badly, but the problem is that even when it's done splendidly, it's eventually riffed-on and ripped-off until the meme becomes stale. (Although Mel Brooks's--ahem!--"homage" to Hitchcock's Psycho in High Anxiety was sublimely sick and brilliant at the same time.) But that's pretty much academic anyway--pairing AoD with Hitchcock would be like washing down Kraft Mac 'n Cheese with vintage Grand Cru Bordeaux. So that basically rules out reasonably nuanced, well-plotted stuff like The Gift, The Sixth Sense, or Ju-on. (I'd lump George C. Scott's The Changeling into that class, except that its biggest horror was the nepotism that cast Trish Van Devere as the love interest. You'd think that a husband-wife team would have on-screen chemistry. You'd be wrong.)
Then again, pure Jason/Freddie/Chucky slash doesn't fit the bill either. If I want shallow, trashy, Shakespeare's- off-his-meds-again schtick, I'll dig up the Cliff Notes for Titus Andronicus, kthxbi.
The classics might be a viable bet--although guests my age likely suffer from a uniquely generational affliction of vision that superimposes the silhouettes of two robot heads flanking a human head over the bottom center of any black and white horror movie screen. Mostly, though, you really can go home again when Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Claude Raines are keeping the torches lit just for you.
Still, going straight for MST3K won't steer away from the overall theme of the day. The safer bet, however, is to pair cheeseball with more cheeseball. Yet even there, some discretion is required. It's basically because cheeseball comes in about three different flavours:
- Cheeseball that knows it's cheeseball and just rolls with it. Army of Darkness falls squarely into this category. Snappy dialogue delivered with tongue firmly lodged in cheek. Why burn calories suspending disbelief for a whole 90 minutes when the entire cast clearly isn't taking it seriously either? See also Big Trouble in Little China. Ditto Shawn of the Dead.
- Cheeseball that refuses to acknowledge its artery-clogging goodness--and thus ruins the whole taste. No organic, gluten-free artisanal cracker in the world would make this kind of movie respectable, yet an entire studio is trying to convince us that caviar is really nuclear orange. Into this category I'd lump Re-animator and the steaming $40M mess that Francis Ford Coppola made of Dracula. Or even a (cough!) "classic" like the silent Phantom of the Opera, whose bizzaro dominance-and-submission subtext made it the 50 Shades of 1925.
- Cheeseball that is inadvertently, hilariously bad to the point of being watchable. (Admittedly, this cheeseball pairs best with alcohol.) Forget Star Trek, Kingdom of the Spiders gave William Shatner most of the A-grade B-list street cred. he has today. And I broke my two-glass wine limit the night we took Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus out for a swim. (Which was probably why the shark vs. airliner thing was so darned funny. At the time, anyway.) Beware of the Blob is probably a solid candidate, but Mom had the great, good taste to turn the channel when it was on TV back in the 70s. And strangely enough, I don't think it'll be on Netflix or even DVD anytime soon. (Fortunately, there may be more hope for C.H.U.D.)
