At the end of Army of Darkness, the final film the Evil Dead trilogy, we see our hero, Ash (Bruce Campbell) back at his workaday job as a clerk at S-Mart department store. Having just survived a barrage of challenges after being transported back to the Middle Ages (everything from dangerously skeptical knights to monstrous Deadites), Ash looks comfortable and assured in his familiar, modern-day surroundings. Ever the show-off, Ash brags that the people he encountered in the 1300’s – from commoners to royalty – offered him the chance “to lead them, to teach them, to…be king.” Ash’s cockiness is soon disrupted by the shocking appearance of a female customer-turned-Deadite. Despite her promises to swallow Ash’s soul, the Deadite is quickly defeated by our hero’s wily sarcasm and rapid-fire shotgun blasts.
Author: Alexander Svensson
There are four brief yet deeply unnerving dream sequences in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, each a disruptive and surreal slice of imagery that presents the audience with nearly identical visions of the same event. In each dream, a mysterious cloaked figure emerges out of a creepy abandoned church. This church is where a group of researchers and a priest discover and ultimately unleash an ancient, otherworldly, and demonic force into the world. Garbled narration in each dream reveals that they are actually a series of broadcasts from 1999 (the near future in relation to the film’s 1987 release). Frighteningly, they are mediated warnings of impending demonic doom sent directly to the minds of several key players across the film, most prominently lead researcher Professor Birack (Victor Wong) and young academics Walter (Dennis Dun), Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount), Lisa (Ann Yen), and Brian (Jameson Parker).
Dmitri Kalashnikov’s The Road Movie – a found footage compilation assembled entirely from recent Russian dash cam recordings – is frequently concerned with the display of carnivalesque spectacle. Wild car crashes and road rage incidents intermingle in an often-surreal dance with windshield-views of police chases, animals darting into traffic, and strange weather conditions. An emphasis on spectacle privileges the hyper visible and the image captured on video with unbelievable timing and clarity. Despite this, I couldn’t help but find myself more so drawn to moments throughout the film that instead complicated such notions of vision. Rather than simply presenting carnage and calamity front-and-center (like an outlandish mash-up of America’s Funniest Home Videos, Ridiculousness, and Faces of Death), Kalashnikov’s documentary collage is often comprised of images that are quite difficult to discern or contextualize – the once legible suddenly rendered obscured or distorted by thick darkness, blinding light, precipitation, dirt, shattered glass, digital glitch, and the very limits of the dash cam itself.