His big-budget “Spider-Man” films notwithstanding, Raimi is a filmmaker born to make B’s, and DiGregorio too is an inspired choice to run the show, “Reaper” having been made much in this spirit.
(It’s family casting: Lawless starred in and as “Xena: Warrior Princess,” which Raimi produced with career-long collaborator Rob Tapert, who’s also Mr.
Though Ash is something of a knucklehead when it comes to women, the series has invested heavily in strong female characters, including Dana DeLorenzo as a tough new sidekick for Ash (Ray Santiago, less tough, is his other one) Jill Marie Jones as a state trooper and Lucy Lawless as a woman whose intentions are not yet clear - but still, Lucy Lawless. As in earlier editions of the series, his own sloppiness will be responsible for letting the demons out. Now middle aged, puffy, easily winded and conflict-averse, he lives in an untidy trailer (much as Campbell, playing a version of himself, did in the 2007 film “My Name Is Bruce”), to which he sometimes brings prostitutes and where he has, apparently for old times’ sake, stashed a copy of “Necronomicon Ex-Mortis,” a book of bad magic bound in flesh and written in blood. Never the likeliest of heroes, Ash has been hiding out more or less where we left him, working as a stock boy at a big-box store. The series will premiere on Halloween, starring, from left, Ray Santiago, Bruce Campbell and Dana DeLorenzo. Fans will know that this is meant to recall Ash’s strapping on of the Deadite-dispatching chain saw he sometimes wears where his right hand used to be and also that, given the many years since “Army of Darkness,” released in 1992, it’s actually a corset he’s wearing. The series, whose first episode Raimi directed and co-wrote (with brother Ivan Raimi, show runner Craig DiGregorio and his fellow “Reaper” vet Tom Spezialy), begins with close shots of laces being drawn tight. SIGN UP for the free Indie Focus movies newsletter >
Let us now praise Bruce Campbell, the strong-chinned star of “The Evil Dead,” “Evil Dead II,” “Army of Darkness” and now “Ash vs Evil Dead,” which splendidly, even triumphantly converts the comedy-horror movie franchise into a TV series, premiering Halloween night on Starz.įor all of creator Sam Raimi’s directorial inventiveness, there would be no “Evil Dead” worth celebrating without Campbell, a genre unto himself: a hero no less heroic for his buffoonery and no less a buffoon for his heroism.