I had been looking for a DVD of Army of Darkness, the third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy by Sam Raimi. If you look around, you’ll find a lot of movies which claim to be Evil Dead V or Evil Dead XI – The Return, especially in small-town video parlours, but those are mostly bootleg namegrabbing opportunists out to make some money from the franchise, or some arbit C-movie ( in all probability dubbed from Italian, with flesh-shows and bad editting) with the label.

The original three Evil Dead movies, the second of which is not a sequel, and the third not a horror movie per se, are classics for us over-the-top gore-loving bastiches. Those guys, Raimi and Campbell, they must have enjoyed making the campy shit, and when Ash ( Bruce Campbell ) twirls his shotgun and says “Groovy!” while giving the camera the wicked Ash-look, you actually see them laughing their heads off after the shot. It’s cheesy, and it’s glorious.

Saturday, me and sasi found this place in Koti, another piratey hellhole, and got this DVD with all three Evil Dead movies and the two Species movies on one disc. Another DVD with five Bruce Lee movies, and one with four Al Pacino movies. A DVD with TWO Miyazaki movies – Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service ( spelt very indelicately as KLKLS on the cover ), and another one with 4 Pokemon movies ( now don’t ask me why I bought that, probably because I wanted to figure out what the Pokemon hype is all about )

Then I come back home, and my C-Drive is unreadable. A little bit of tinkering reveals that a disk cluster has gone bad, and that happens to be the same disk cluster with explorer.exe on it, and hence Windows cannot start. Ugh.

Decided to take a deep breath and go for dinner at Mons’ instead.

Spent the next morning alternately formatting/reinstalling-OS/running-scandisk and reading Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain. The book did not cover any unfamiliar territory, it felt like a brisk walk through a familiar road and discovering new sights and sounds. One of the few biographies that manages to say a lot without idolising or defaming the person on whom the book is written.

Once the mandatory reinstalls were done, I watched Army of Darkness. Ooh, hilarious! Ash, the guy in Evil Dead 2 is transported to the Dark Ages, and he has to help his Medieval compatriots by retrieving the Book of the Dead, and fighting off the evil army of the Dead. The whole story is a farce, a modern Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, and it starts getting funnier when Ash retrieves the Book. Because he also lets the army out of their graves – by not remembering the correct words “Klaatu Barada Nikto” that he has to utter when picking the book up. So he says “Klaatu Barada Nik-aaachchoo!!” and rides off, leaving the graveyard teeming with rejuvenated demons. You have a skeleton playing a flute made of human bones, and another playing a beat on a set of bongoes made out of human heads, leading a march of other skeletons ( the ‘army of darkness’ here ), half of them geriatric and creaky-boned critters that keep stumbling over their own spears, and you have beatzo in paroxyms, trying hard to breathe without getting frooti up his nose.

Edit: One odd thing about this version of Army of Darkness was that the ending was different from the one I had seen as a kid. In this ending, the movie ends with Ash back in his own time, working his old job in the mall – and he meets his old girlfriend ( the one he killed in Evil Dead 2 ) and all is right with the world. Well, not quite, because he has to kill one more demon in the mall. The ending I saw originally had him waking up in a world which obviously is sometime in the far future, a bleak post-War world of some kind, and he goes berserk – because there is no one around – he might as well be the Last man on this earth.

Followed that up with Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Magical Miyazaki storytelling, yet again. Next on the list are Kiki’s and Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

And now my life is a mess again. I can’t seem to get enough of being beaten in AOE2, the wonders of which I have recently rediscovered. Somebody help me!