Sinners and Evil Dead: Army of Darkness are similar in ways that I think might be interesting enough to talk about, and I kind of want to see if I can find the same kind of deep social commentary that Sinners packs into its story in Army of Darkness. (If I can’t, that’s fine. Both movies are great.)
I watched Sinners recently, and I wanted to try to compare it to another horror movie that I’ve also seen and decided on Army of Darkness.
First, I want to do a relatively quick recap of both movies, just to give my readers an idea of what I’m going to be talking about.
Sinners is a movie about a community of mostly Black people facing racism in 1930s (or was it 1920s?) America, but with a twist. Turns out regular non-magical diseases and racism weren’t the only thing that White people brought with them from Europe. They also brought curses (which I like to think of as magical diseases) like vampirism.
The supernatural colonizers try to crash a party, but they get defeated by the age old vampire hunting technique known as “not dying because you have garlic, Holy Water, and wooden stakes, and waiting for the sun to rise and kill the vampires because it’s a deadly laser to them and they don’t have a blanket”
After that, one of the surviving humans, a man named Smoke, performs one last act of service to his community and kills some Klansmen who were pestering them before the party started, dying in the most American way possible: on a battlefield, weapon in hand, dead and soon-to-be-dead bigoted losers in front of him, and the spirits of his loved ones watching on while the gods argue over whether he should be in Heaven, Valhalla, or the home that the gods and spirits of his ancestors have been maintaining since time immemorial.
Meanwhile, another survivor grows old and meets a friend who was turned into a vampire at the party, and they reminisce about old times together before they each go their separate ways.
Army of Darkness is the third movie in the Evil Dead trilogy (though I don’t remember being aware of Evil Dead II until I read the Wikipedia entry for Army of Darkness to refresh my memory on what happened in that movie) and it follows Ash Williams getting trapped in the Middle Ages after the events of Evil Dead II and ripping and tearing his way through the Zombi- er, I mean Deadites of this era with a chainsaw hand, a shotgun, (or, as he likes to call it, a Boomstick) and a really good Charisma score that comes with being played by Bruce Campbell.
Ash starts the movie fighting some Deadites and impressing the ancient British army that has captured him with his skill in battle. He joins them, finds a girlfriend, and learns about a Variant of the Necronomicon that can bring him back to the present day.
On his journey, he encounters a magical windmill that clones him a few times. He kills all of the clones except for a human sized one that he left for dead, and continues on his journey, taking the Necronomicon and heading back to the castle that his new friends are living in while Evil Ash gets back up and forms his Army of Darkness.
Ash’s plans to leave the Middle Ages are interrupted by Evil Ash’s Army invading his castle and infecting his girlfriend, (Zombification- sorry, I mean Deadite-ification is, like so many other curses that grant undeath, essentially just the magical equivalent of a virus, and I find that interesting) so he destroys them with a modified car and some other weapons, cures his girlfriend, and leaves the Middle Ages behind.
Of these two movies, Sinners is the one that has the most to say, being a commentary on colonialism, racism, and how communities can come together to make positive change despite how much damage it can do. The movie’s commentary on colonialism can be seen plainly in the presence of Vampires in America where they normally wouldn’t be as an unfortunate example of Europeans bringing their diseases and curses into the New World. It can also be seen in the way the White people ignore the warnings of their local Indigenous communities despite the fact that their knowledge of the land and its inhabitants grants them the ability to be consistently right about everything to do with environmental and spiritual matters.
Sinners also gives us that scene where Smoke kills off an army of Klan members, (to anyone offended by that scene, I have a message for you: “Cry harder. Your tears are tasty.”) and the scene where spirits from the past and future visit the party. Both scenes are beautiful depictions of how to survive in the face of oppression, and I love them.
Army of Darkness, on the other hand, doesn’t really have anything particularly profound to say. It’s just a fun horror movie that messes around with time travel and a main character who says funny stuff and rips and tears his way through hordes of undead monsters like he’s Doomguy in the DOOM games (although Army of Darkness predates DOOM 1 by a year, so it would technically be more accurate to say that Doomguy has been ripping and tearing his way through Hell like he’s Ash Williams in the Evil Dead movies for several eons)
TLDR: Both movies are great, but one of them definitely has a lot more to say about social issues.
Author’s Note: Sorry I couldn’t go into as much detail as what you’re probably used to. I just had a lot of stuff going on and I kinda forgot about some of the assignment instructions.
Provide Feedback