Are Evil Dead I and II as good as Army of Darkness?

The first two don’t have the same production value as Army, but they have their charms. The budget grew progressively larger for the three films, so the effects get less over-the-top bad as the trilogy progresses.

Evil Dead II is pretty much a remake of I. While they’re both corny, two embraces its B-movieness a little more than the first one does. If you are a huge Sam Raimi and Bruce Cambpell fan, rent them both so you can have street cred for seeing the whole trilogy. If you enjoyed playing the home game of MST3K, get Evil Dead II.

jaredq has it about right. Evil Dead was a horror movie, really not at all a comedy or campy. Then with the second one they pretty much just remade it rather than pick up where the first one left off, but instead of playing it straight, they did what they did with Army of Darkness. ED2 was probably just as funny and in some ways far more groundbreaking than AOD, even though it was very low budget in comparison.

Did you hear Raimi and Campbell are making a new one?

I did not, but I will see that.

Speaking of Campbell, if you liked Army of Darkness, I’d suggest checking out Bubba Ho-Tep, where Campbell plays Elvis, who is still alive and living an impotent life as an old man in a nursing home. He has found himself in this predicament because in the 70s he allowed the best Elvis impersonator there was to take his place for a while, meaning for it to be a temporary rest from the spotlight, but no one but the two men knew about it, all documentation of the transaction was accidentally destroyed, and then the impersonator died, leaving Elvis himself to become and Elvis impersonator to make ends meet. Elvis’ best friend may or may not be a now black JFK (played by Ozzie Davis), who actually survived the assassination attempt, was dyed black, and was subsequently abandoned by LBJ.

The two men end up in the last great fight of their lives, in order the lives of all the other citizens of the rest home when they begin to be preyed upon by a re-animated Egyptian mummy who survives by sucking the remaining life force out of the sitting ducks in the nursing home, whom everyone will just assume died of natural causes. The problem being (of course) that should their souls be eaten, digested, and, ahem, disposed of in the toilet, they never come to rest. Elvis and JFK must, with the aid of a walker and a motorized wheelchair, defeat the mummy and release the souls of the dearly departed.

There’s a lot of Ash in this character, but Campbell also does a great Elvis impersonation. Very offbeat, weird and uproariously funny, a must see for fans of Army of Darkness in my opinion.