Army of Darkness with Eva Anderson

[00:00:00] Blank Check with Griffin and David, Blank Check with Griffin and David, don't know what to say or to expect. All you need to know is that the neighbors are shy with Blank Check.

[00:00:22] Clot 2, burrata, peanut, popcorn, puddle, god it's a p word, it's definitely a p word, clot 2, burrata, okay then, that's it! That was very good, Griffin. I didn't say it! You see what was funny is the bit is not saying the one word I'm supposed to say.

[00:00:57] I would do that though too. Do you know what I mean? I'd forget. Oh, you identify with him in that moment.

[00:01:06] I'd forget the word. I know immediately I would. I wouldn't write it down and then the moment when I have to say the fucking phrase, I'd fuck it up. What I relate to the most is the confidence of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah, of course.

[00:01:20] I got it. Three words, I got it. David, do you think you would have remembered?

[00:01:25] I would have remembered it because it's clot 2, burrata, nico. That's the only... Have I ever told you my The Day the Earth Stood Still story? It's not a really exciting story which is probably why I've never told you.

[00:01:35] No, is this a story about what you were doing on the day the earth stood still? No, luckily that day hasn't happened yet. My mom is not a genre film fan in particular, right?

[00:01:46] She has only seen one Star Wars movie in her life and it was on Weekly... Two! I'm sorry. She's seen two. She's seen Revenge of the Sith when we did a commentary live and she saw Force Awakens. At the Ziegfeld?

[00:02:00] Yeah, well, I can't remember. She was like, I got to see that just because it's... Everyone's talking about it. And so we saw the Force Awakens. But no, not a genre film person. Okay, okay.

[00:02:11] You know, if she's showing me a classic movie when I'm a kid, she's showing me comedies. She's showing me other stuff.

[00:02:17] But then she would always be like, God, there's this one movie I love that I saw when I was a kid and like, you know, and then one day the NFT in Britain was doing... Don't you do the bet... was doing The Day the Earth Stood Still.

[00:02:29] NFT? I'm too distracted by that to go for the musical. I know, it's called the BFI now. It used to be called the NFT, the National Film Theater. Beyond fungible items?

[00:02:40] Right, right, right, right. And she's like, that's the movie. That's the movie. Let's go see it. You know, this is like the sci-fi movie I love.

[00:02:47] So we went and saw it. Saw it. I think I liked it a lot. We walked down. She was like, well, that's not the movie I was thinking of. That was pretty good. But that wasn't it.

[00:02:57] And then later we finally figured out that she actually meant the movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which is another British sci-fi movie that is also great.

[00:03:07] That is also, you know, it's the reason she liked it. It's actually a newspaper movie. Like it's about people working at a London newspaper when the earth, you know, what the sun does something insane or what? You know, I can't remember what it is.

[00:03:20] Daily Express movie. Yeah, no, I my day there still is one of the only sci-fi movies I remember my mother speaking highly of when I was a child. She's like it was a classy horror movie. I mean, sci-fi movie. Sorry.

[00:03:32] She liked that and she liked all the versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But I but I think the original one as well. Like those are the two concepts that caught on.

[00:03:42] It is funny that it's like a famous phrase from that movie, right? Then the Evil Dead franchise riffs on it substantially. And then Star Wars does as well.

[00:03:53] There were like the three Skiff aliens when they're on the skiff and Han is like fighting off Boba Fett. I think the three aliens are named Klaatu, Burrata and Nikto.

[00:04:04] Or at least that's their species names. Yeah, well, it's sort of a movie and a series of words that made an impression on a lot of people who watched it when they were young and then went on to make films of their own.

[00:04:15] Right. It's it's the movie we all came out of or whatever. Yes, you are correct. Anyway, our guests can talk anytime, by the way.

[00:04:23] Anytime. And it's totally if you want to burst right in. That's totally fine. I've never seen it. Never seen the day the earth stood still.

[00:04:31] No, I know what it is, but I just never seen it. Gort, you're not a Gort fan. Gort? Guess not. Gort's the big robot. Gort. And then in the remake, Gort's like a nano thing, right?

[00:04:45] He's like nanotechnology. Every fucking 2000s remake. That was what they came up with. Can it be a cloud or can be a lot of little things? I'm going to name my son Gort. Sure, do it. Gort Hosley.

[00:04:58] You've already said that you want to name your son Droopy McCool. That was, I think, the first time on the podcast that you've invoked a future name for your child. You're in a very serious relationship. Have you discussed at any point in time? Like, you know, I know it's a big conversation to have, but like, I just want you to know if we're ever going to have children. Their names are going to be Droopy McCool Hosley and Gort Hosley.

[00:05:21] I'm waiting for the right moment. I haven't sprung it on her yet, but I'm sure it'll go over great. Did you see the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves? Did you see it? No, I've never seen any of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Is it the remake anything?

[00:05:48] The remake is not much. I mean, it's OK. It feels like it should be a little better than it is. Right? Yeah. Keanu is well cast in that Klaatau, who he's playing, is sort of supposed to be kind of, you know, kind of robotic and weird. Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm and Jaden Smith. It was early Hamm in movies. You know, it was like we're on like season two of Mad Men. And it was like, why isn't this guy in every movie?

[00:06:14] You know, and so when he showed up, you're like, hey, it's Hamm. I've heard of Hamm on Rye, but Hamm in movies? OK. No, I just I've heard of one and I hadn't heard of the other. I'm just I'm not trying to make a joke. I just genuinely heard of one.

[00:06:28] It is great. And truly, you look it's like you're it's like this cartoon kind of animated living room. It's like almost like squints, squinch Bob Squarepants is like living room. It's got that vibe. It's the Evil Dead cabin, Ben. Oh, OK.

[00:07:16] And he was like, Larry Middleman from Arrested Development, where it's like he's just wearing a camera and you're sort of like living vicariously through him. Yeah. Yeah. Go back to the lock. Yeah. Try this. OK. That's fun.

[00:07:46] That does sound fun. It also sounds it sounds like trying to play a video game with five people, though, right? Where you're all shouting different instructions or something. I don't know. It might frustrate me.

[00:07:57] I did it exactly one time and then I was like, well, I've done that activity the way it shouldn't be done. And should we go back to the fact that saying the words SpongeBob SquarePants seemed to give Ben a nervous breakdown or should we just pass that?

[00:08:11] I don't know what happened to me. It like I couldn't speak. I'm really sorry about that. Yeah, it hit a spot that I think in my brain is maybe like there's just like it registered SpongeBob SquarePants and then somewhere that like that chain got broken.

[00:08:27] And it just yeah, it really I like it's just spun out. Wow. I don't want to force your hand, but maybe your third son should be named Squongebob. Then was it like when you're like about to say someone's name to their face that you've known for years and then your brain's like that's not their name short circuit or whatever.

[00:08:45] And it is their name, though. But then you then you like swallow their name because you're about to just say you just panic because I have. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's just the nature of the name being kind of words just jammed together and it just didn't sound like I was like, am I saying gibberish right now? But then we got there. We got there and we're exploring it. And I love that.

[00:09:06] Ben, you're showing your ignorance. SpongeBob SquarePants is a traditional Nordic name. It is not just words smushed together. OK, check your ignorance. This is an educational podcast in which we check our privilege and our ignorance is called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. And it's about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers. They're given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want. And sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce baby.

[00:09:36] And this is a miniseries on the films of Sam Raimi. It's called Podcast Me to Hell. Today we are talking about Army of Darkness, the third film in his Evil Dead trilogy and his the second film in his early 90s, Universal Dark in the title duology.

[00:09:58] I guess it is funny that he makes like Evil Dead, Evil Dead to Darkman, Army of Darkness.

[00:10:05] I do think it's bizarre that this movie is not called Medieval Dead, right? Like, oh, so good. I know that was the original idea way back when they wanted Evil Dead 2 to be set in the past. And then I guess they dropped it. And Army of Darkness was some title they came up with that they then dropped and added Dead by Dawn to Evil Dead 2 instead.

[00:10:26] But like, why isn't this called Medieval Dead? Don't you think this would have made 10 more million dollars if it was called Medieval Dead?

[00:10:34] Yeah. My memory of it was that because it was like new rights holders, Universal making this one, then they didn't make the previous films. They were like, we want this to stand on its own. We want this to be an entry point. We don't want people to feel like they're jumping into the third movie. But it's a better title.

[00:10:51] Yeah, it's a better title. But yeah, we're here to talk Army of Darkness, a movie that I feel like I don't know about you guys. I didn't watch for years because I as a teenager thought this movie's reputation was straight up bad.

[00:11:07] I think I watched Evil Dead 1 and 2, and I had somehow absorbed like, Army of Darkness, not worth it. It's a Godfather 3 situation. Don't even bother. They messed it up. I must have read something somewhere that said this at some point. So it took me years to see Army of Darkness.

[00:11:31] David, I had the exact same thing, but for Evil Dead 1. Oh, where it was like, they hadn't figured it out yet. The second one's so much better. Yeah.

[00:11:41] It's not fun. It's just gross. It's just scary. But I watched Army of Darkness like hundreds of times as a teenager. Well then. Well, that's why you're here. That's really nice. It's very, very, very, very kind of you to say that. I am overwhelmed.

[00:11:59] You are a classic. Anytime Eva Anderson is in my, you know, like the episode pops up, some new show and it's with Eva Anderson. I'm like, okay, well appointment where we're stopping the current episode of whatever I'm listening to to listen to this. That's the Eva Anderson touch. It's true.

[00:12:16] Sorry, I didn't mean to yell. And the bias here might be that David and I both love podcasts that are hosted by people you're good friends with that have you on alert.

[00:12:26] But I do think there is a consistency to any time you're a guest in terms of your passion, but also the preparation you put into everything. You go very deep on whatever subject you're talking about.

[00:12:36] And I mean, I'll say two things. One, I was at a hotel a couple years ago, I guess, and they sort of had their like selection of books like in the lobby that are mostly, I guess, just sort of like interior design.

[00:12:53] But ostensibly you could read if you just are trying to chill out in the lobby of a hotel. And they had a volume of the Fantagraphics Dick Tracy collection.

[00:13:03] And I got so amped for a moment that it was the one volume which you've talked about on podcast, The Ride being out of print and costing thousands of dollars, which features the Moon Maid arc.

[00:13:15] And I had to explain to the person I was dating at the time the arc of me going, holy shit, holy shit, is that is that and then taking this Dick Tracy book off a wall in a hotel lobby and like flipping through it frantically and then being crestfallen.

[00:13:28] And she was like, what just happened internally? And the whole time in my head I was running. If this is it, do I take it? Yeah.

[00:14:05] So he emailed the guy. So I ended up the guy ended up sending it again. So now I have two copies of the missing Dick Tracy. Wow. Dick Tracy, I still read Dick Tracy, the daily three panel comic. Of course you do. Of course you do.

[00:14:26] I love that. Cup of coffee and your dick in the morning. Griff, it's funny you say that. It just introduced a new villain called Coffee Head, whose head looks like a cup of coffee. His head looks like a mug, I guess is the better way to put it.

[00:14:43] But is there coffee inside of it? No, he's just, you know, that's the whole thing with Dick Tracy. They don't think that hard. It's just like a guy's head will look like a screw and they're like his name is Screwhead.

[00:14:54] Shouldn't it be Mughead? How do you know what's called? He says they call me Coffee Head. Now it's coffee with a Y. I don't know. Maybe to just kind of let me see if I can. Does he have two? Does he have one big ear?

[00:15:08] I'm looking at pictures here. It looks like both ears are handle. You know, he's in profile. It should be one tiny ear. Sure. I guess he's mostly they're playing the angles on it. So he's like a sippy cup. He should be called Sippy Cup Head.

[00:15:21] He looks like a fucking sippy cup. They should give him the little like tintin flip at the front of his hair. So it looks like the little nozzle of the sippy cup.

[00:15:29] I'm putting it in the chat. I'm putting it in the chat. There it is. You can click on it. They call me Coffee Head. Wow. And the idea of this villain is that he used to own a coffee shop, I guess.

[00:15:44] So he's a coffee. He's sort of like, you know, in Mulholland Drive when Bada Lamenti, the composer, he plays like the mobster who drinks the coffee and spits it out. Right? The mobster who cares that much about a good espresso. He's attractive. You're into Coffee Head?

[00:16:03] He's one of the more handsome Dick Tracy villains. Yeah, he's way hotter than I thought he would be. Is it because, Eva, do you like a square jaw? Because this guy's got like a set square jaw. He does, but he also has kind of tortured dreamy eyes.

[00:16:17] Mm hmm. He's got a frown. Like full kissable lips. I was going to say the lips are really, yeah. Because every other Dick Tracy villain looks, I mean, really unfortunate. Am I allowed to say this? Yeah. That's not a hate crime to say Dick Tracy villains are ugly.

[00:16:37] Am I kink shaming by saying that Dick Tracy villains are by and large very ugly?

[00:16:42] They're not the handsomest bunch. I mean, it's sort of a, you know, I suppose it's a retrograde problem with Dick Tracy where you can judge a book by its cover in Dick Tracy. Right? That's pretty much the idea. Training children to hate the ugly. Right. Exactly.

[00:17:00] Is Karen Hong going to send me a bunch of angry texts telling me that she has a crush on the influence? On flat top. I mean, you're right. It's not just, it's double whammy.

[00:17:10] It's children should not trust unattractive people and they should focus on whatever their weird facial flaw is and say that's their name or whatever. Right? That's a defining characteristic. It usurps every other aspect of their personality.

[00:17:27] You know, I love the film Dick Tracy. I love the Beatty movie. I think it's so cool. To be clear, not the movie we're talking about today. A movie we will inevitably come out and share. But like, you know, that movie came out in 1990. Right? This is 92.

[00:17:42] Ramy's probably too small for it, but like you can imagine a Ramy Dick Tracy around. Like Darkman's got a lot of Dick Tracy going on. Like he would have made, you know, the man was sort of making living cartoons at the time. Right?

[00:17:56] Like he could have made a Dick Tracy. Well, yes. And the weird arc of this movie is, of course, like they want to do this premise for Evil Dead 2.

[00:18:05] They're like, that sounds too nerdy. He makes, he really wants to direct the shadow, which we talked about in the previous episode, I assume. He really wants to make the shadow. He doesn't get the job.

[00:18:17] He makes Darkman as sort of his angry, like not breakup movie, but his rejection movie of like, I want to show you what I could have done with this sort of pulpy noir film, which was that whole post Batman trend of everyone going.

[00:18:32] They don't want more superheroes. They want more like two-fisted comic strip heroes. Right. They want 30s radio drama energy right now. The Phantom was around then too, right? With Billy Zane.

[00:18:41] Yes. Yeah. And like, weirdly, Darkman is one of the more successful of that wave by being spiritually in line with that, but not literally being an adaptation of anything and also being present day rather than like full pastiche.

[00:18:57] The Phantom movie, of course. Right? That's the famous situation where they were like, we played it straight. And the guy who wrote it was like, wait, what? I wrote that as a comedy. What are you guys talking about?

[00:19:08] It was Joe Dante. Joe Dante was going to make it as a comedy. And then they fired him, took his same script and played it straight. Everyone except Treat Williams, who if you've seen that movie, knows exactly what's going on.

[00:19:21] Xander Drax is a funny villain, but Billy Zane is not. Poor Billy Zane. Because it, yeah, you feel bad for Billy Zane in that movie. But Treat Williams, if you guys don't know, one of the best tweet Twitter accounts out there. Really? Oh my God.

[00:19:36] Oh man, I gotta check it out. The most sincere dad tweets of all. Like just like absolutely straight faced.

[00:19:44] I mean, you might have to turn off retweets because it's a lot of like sincere retweeting as well. But my brother just sends me great Treat content all the time. We used to both be big Everwood fans. So we've always loved Treat. He's awesome.

[00:19:58] That makes a tremendous amount of sense. It is funny, though, that yeah, like Dick Tracy was supposed to be like the new Batman, right? And then you have Rocketeer, you have Shadow, you have Phantom.

[00:20:12] I guess Phantom's like kind of the last in that run. That's 96. By the time this movie comes out, pretty much that trend had like largely petered out.

[00:20:22] But there's a scenario which I imagine the Sam Raimi Dick Tracy would have been more successful than the Beatty Dick Tracy because Raimi probably just would have leaned fully into the goofiness.

[00:20:34] Whereas at the time, I think people were very confused by the tone of the Beatty Dick Tracy and the weird mashup of like the cartooniness and his weird prestige serious minded sensibilities. Yeah, it's it's almost like in retrospect and saying how serious Dick Tracy takes itself.

[00:20:53] So serious with that visual aesthetic. And it's exactly what makes the movie fascinating. Right. It's why it's why it's interesting. Right. If it was art, it would probably be less interesting.

[00:21:06] But I think you're right that like Sam Raimi could have made that same movie with that cast and that script, and it probably would have been more popular with children. But imagine Bruce Campbell is Dick Tracy for a second. He'd be good. He'd be so good.

[00:21:24] He'd be so fucking good. Not that Warren doesn't crush it in that yellow suit. I mean, he looks great. Like he's a hot guy. But Bruce Campbell looks like he was drawn with ink. You know, that's his whole thing. He has the actual chin of Dick Tracy.

[00:21:40] Yes, yes, he actually has. The profile. And Beatty was old at that time.

[00:21:45] But yes, weirdly, Darkman being successful lets Raimi do kind of his first like check cash in, which is you're going to let me go back and do the third movie in a trilogy that you don't own the previous two films to.

[00:21:59] And my buddy is going to be the star because that's the other thing is that Darkman had been written for Campbell. And then Campbell was like, I'm going to step aside because my buddy Sam's about to torpedo his career.

[00:22:10] Right. He has to stop insisting on me as the lead of all this movie. Right. It's like it's a kind of a sweet story where Campbell is just like, I knew I was going to be OK, but I knew Sam had a bigger career in front of him.

[00:22:23] And if he insisted that I always had to be his leading man, it was going to get hamstrung. So then this is sort of this weird like cashing in the Darkman check.

[00:22:31] Darkman, which does well theatrically but does like way better on video kind of explodes immediately once it hits video leads to the direct to video sequels. He's able to go back and go, you're going to let me make this movie with my buddy.

[00:22:44] Now picture Bruce Campbell as Oscar Schindler because that's another thing we could have ended up with. Right. It's another thing we could have ended up with. I could have done more. I wish I could do Bruce Campbell. I also could only think of one Oscar Schindler quote.

[00:22:58] You know, he would have been good as early Oscar Schindler in the first hour of Schindler's List when he's a party animal, when he's just going to bars, he's smoking, he's hanging out with ladies, you know, fun Oscar Schindler.

[00:23:13] Do you think that Ed, Beth Davids and Liam Neeson talked about Sam Raimi on the set of Schindler's List when they had their like, they must have. Oh, you too. Like you also.

[00:23:24] It's just such a funny thing to think about. Right. Because this was this ended up coming out after Schindler but was shot first. Is that correct? No, it came out. Yeah, it came up before Schindler's List. It comes this come out.

[00:23:39] Jeez. This came out in February of 1993 and Schindler's List came out in December of 93. Okay. I just know it was shot a lot earlier. This was weirdly delayed.

[00:23:51] Yeah. And Beth Davids. Yeah, it's a, you know, she Army of Darkness is her first screen credit, I think. And Schindler's List is her second. It was kind of out of the gate for her. Well, she had done South African movies.

[00:24:04] Yeah, I guess you're right. It's her first Hollywood screen credit. There's a couple of South African movies. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I love M. Beth Davids. I always love to see her. She's always good. She always shows up. She's always good. Absolutely.

[00:24:17] When she showed up in Old, I was so happy. Same. Same. And I even had that excitement of going like, oh, fuck, is that M. Beth Davids? Yeah. Like it was like a final surprise under the Christmas tree.

[00:24:28] Oh, man. She was locking down like a very awkward storyline on the Apple Morning Show. She was Steve Carell's unfortunate ex-wife. I need to watch the morning show. Every time anyone describes it to me, it just sounds bananas. It is!

[00:24:45] Yeah, like something they're getting away with over there and putting it out. They're like, OK, yeah, for you know, it's weird. It's crazy. It's interesting, though, because like she doesn't work a tremendous amount. It feels like she's somewhat selective in what she chooses to do.

[00:24:59] And then I was looking at her Wikipedia and there were like four or five performances in big movies where I'm like, I forgot she was in that. And she's great in that. Like I forgot that she's Lane Price's wife on Mad Men.

[00:25:12] Yeah, she is. She's good in that. I forgot how good she is in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She's really good in that. Did you remember that she is Peter Parker's mother in the Amazing Spider-Man films? The mystery of his parents.

[00:25:26] I wasn't going to mention that. That's not her fault. It's not her fault at all. Miss Honey. She's Miss Honey. She is. I'm not going to, I don't want to go too crazy over here, but she is such a babe. And Matilda is crazy.

[00:25:40] That feels like maybe the ultimate David formative crush. It wasn't the ultimate one, but she is. She's a total babe. She's got those round glasses. Remember? Yeah. But also she's like amazing in Junebug. Oh, yeah.

[00:25:55] She's always good. And it is just so funny to have her 1993 be this and Schindler's List. And that's her entry into Hollywood. Literally Princess Sheila and then Schindler's List. A princess named Sheila. Yeah. And she spends half of this movie being like a dead-eye temptress.

[00:26:15] Or just getting manhandled by Ash. But, you know, it is funny that she's, you know, she's like you think of Miss Honey, you think of this. Like she's more of the sort of what's the word I'm looking for? Like she turned into the scary type A English lady.

[00:26:33] Like not that that's always what she does, but I feel like that's what she's typecast as. Like more sort of icy. And in these early movies, she's not that at all.

[00:26:40] She's like sexy and fun and cool. Like, I don't know. I'm not sure why that is how that goes. Just because she's English maybe. I don't know. She's like a knafe or something. It's very odd how strongly her type changed, but she's good at both.

[00:26:55] I just, re-watching this movie every single minute, at least once a minute, I would think to myself, I can't believe they let them make this. Oh, yeah. This is just such an ultimate where you're like, they got studio money to make this?

[00:27:14] Like the whole movie feels like an in-joke in a bizarre way. And that the joke is, can you believe? Like you're watching someone get a big budget to do a student film. You know, it's like this is the movie we make in the backyard with our friends.

[00:27:29] And now we have like animatronics and Evil Dead 2 feels like the absolute height of the size you can imagine someone would get for that kind of goof. And then this just like blows that up.

[00:27:42] Yeah, there's lines Ash has that are so aggressively stupid on purpose that I was like just picturing Sam Raimi giggling writing them down. Like I was like, I felt like everyone just was like, ah, yeah, like Ash is dumb now and he's an asshole.

[00:28:03] That's what Ash has been gone for a while now. Ash sucks now and he's awesome. It's funny because like the through line of these movies is obviously Sam Raimi loves torturing Bruce Campbell, right?

[00:28:15] He loves making him look stupid and he loves making him do difficult, painful, embarrassing things on screen. And Campbell is like this goofy, amiable jock who's always down with the spirit of the thing.

[00:28:27] And then, right, you have this transformation at the end of Evil Dead 2 that you just think like there's no way they can pull this off, this guy becoming a badass.

[00:28:36] And then it's like now he's sort of become against all odds after the first like, you know, one and three quarters movies, a genuine kind of action star by the end of two.

[00:28:47] And then their choices. So we're going to take that and as you said, turn him into an asshole and an idiot. Like we're not, we cannot let him be conventionally cool. If he's now confident, then it has to be a problem.

[00:29:00] Yeah, I was thinking about it in relation to like, because it had been so long between Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. And like, I was thinking about it in terms of like Terminator 2, which was the year before.

[00:29:13] But this was like a type of action hero was really just around and you were being told. I felt like I was being told as like a teenage girl, like that I had to love Arnold, that I couldn't just like admire him as a strong bully.

[00:29:28] But also he had to be my friend too. And I was like, no, like, like I've seen Pumping Iron. This is a, this guy's a Nazi. He's bad.

[00:29:38] But and I feel like there's that's kind of and I feel like there was also like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. It's like a type of muscle man that you were supposed to be like, yeah.

[00:29:48] And there's something that's fun about like doing the full transformation of taking Ash from because the only way Ash's character logically makes sense in Army of Darkness is if you're like the events of the previous two movies have driven him insane.

[00:30:03] And he has like, right. He doesn't care anymore. He's just his personality has changed because he just all he's ever done is like have girlfriends and murder them.

[00:30:13] Like Ash doesn't even have a job until the third movie. Right. We never know that he has a job. He just has girlfriends.

[00:30:20] Right. We're unaware of any yet. His only backstory in one and two is he has a girlfriend and he has to kill her. That's that's really it. And in one he buys her a shitty necklace.

[00:30:31] And in one, he doesn't say groovy and in two they're like, but what if also he says groovy? Okay, well, that's our big that's our big addition to the Ash character.

[00:30:41] I mean, it's funny what you're saying, Eva. It's not just like you say that Arnie was big and strong and all that.

[00:30:48] In the 90s, there's the pivot to like we need to soften those guys. We need those guys to suddenly be family friendly in a way they weren't before. Like that that's it. That was that was sort of galling at the time.

[00:30:58] I sort of I was I was little when this movie came out, but still like. But also like peak of like the 90s were the peak of that sort of like muscle upon muscle, hyperviolent action movie that was like riddled with groany one liners. Right.

[00:31:17] And part of the appeal was like when Arnold says consider that a divorce, does he know that's funny at all? Right. Like when Stallone gets these lines or Van Damme, they deliver it in a way where it's just like, do they understand that's a joke?

[00:31:32] Is it winking at all? Are they taking that totally on face level? And then like they give Ash shittier blunter lines in this and he delivers them with this attitude of like, I know this is fucking awful.

[00:31:47] Right. And somehow he's able to thread this needle where it's like he's mocking almost the principle of having these guys turn like one degree away from the lens and say the fucking thing.

[00:32:01] But also the lines work like it is bizarre that all of his one liners in this movie have successfully achieved some sort of stickiness with fans as like badass quotable one liners, even though it almost feels like the point is, what's the most gross thing?

[00:32:17] What's the most groan inducing thing we can have Bruce Campbell say? And how hard can he like fucking oversell it? How much spit can he put on the ball?

[00:32:26] Yeah. And then also on top of that, Griffin, the movie is answering, adding one more layer on with like asshole mean Ash, like delivering these terrible one liners and acting like he's bragging about his weird job and like being suddenly completely self-aware.

[00:32:47] Having no self-awareness from like the sweet beta that he was in the first movie, but then just having like basically an every scene like an old lady punches him in the face 150 times.

[00:32:58] Right. But also like time enough time has passed that there is zero boyishness left in him. Right. He is like fully a man now. Oh yeah. Still hot though.

[00:33:10] So incredibly hot. So incredibly hot. But also like in two when he's just like gorgeous and in this you're like he's maybe crossed over into comically handsome.

[00:33:21] It's hard to take him on face level where he's in like Carrie Elwes territory where it's like, what do you do after Princess Pride? You have to do Robin Hood men in tights. Right. You cannot do the straight version of this.

[00:33:34] Right. I mean, but it's just every time I watch one of these, I put on Evil Dead one and I'm like, God, Bruce Campbell, such a cutie. And then every time I watch another one, I have the same reaction.

[00:33:44] I'm like, he just, he's, it's not like he's not a handsome guy now. He's very handsome. He's got the great jaw still. Like I love it. It's just, I think I just, you always think of him as funny and yet you forget just what a gorgeous specimen he is. That's all.

[00:34:03] I want to know Eva, what your history is with this movie? Because I sort of said mine, which is like I avoided it for a bit. And then when I got to it, I was like, this is so much fun. Like why? Why would this have a bad rep?

[00:34:15] Yeah. So I'm older than you guys. I was in high school in like the mid to late nineties. So solidly like a video store era. There were pre DVD basically. And it was very much like I had like a small group of friends and we wanted to be like movie people one day.

[00:34:39] And we would rent Sam Raimi movies and watch them together constantly. Like we were, we like him and Peter Jackson were like our people like that we felt like we had the secret knowledge of. And it was really interesting.

[00:34:57] Like both of them watching them sort of become like mainstream after high school was really interesting because they really did feel like, like a secret that like that only, only the cool people knew about Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. And I think at some point I did own, I just, I owned the, the Army of Darkness.

[00:35:18] I bought like a, the video store in our neighborhood was going out of business and I, oh, I bought Army of Darkness and I watched it. Like I said, like hundreds of times. I mean, like when, while watching it this time, when Ash comes out of the pit and he does the long monologue where he's like, you want some to all the, to all the guys, I knew every line in it. Just, I just, in my head, I just was like, you want some, huh? Like I knew, I knew when he turned, I knew when he was going to turn to the camera.

[00:35:48] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, I just, I just, I just love him so much. Like in retrospect to just being like, man, he could have been such a dick to us because we were arguably wasting his time and.

[00:37:28] Right. And it's this annoying weird project and like he doesn't need to make an effort or whatever. Right. Like, yeah. I've watched it. You sent me, I guess it's sort of a cut together of everything. Right. Like it's like a 47 minute video on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:44] Of all the, like all the wraparounds that he did. It really weird. But yeah, he was just like. Kind of great, but it is, it's bizarre. Yeah.

[00:37:51] Side note, just from what you were saying before, it was for AMC and at the time AMC was mostly just showing like bachelor party all the time. But like when, when we were producing the thing, like the head of AMC on one of the calls was like, oh yeah, we're doing our first like original show. It's about Madison Avenue.

[00:38:11] Right. It'll be out next year. And that was like, that puts it all in like in time or whatever. Yeah. Right. And then everything changes.

[00:38:23] It is so crazy because yeah, before then AMC was like, what if we were a worse A&E? Like they weren't even like, let's be a worse, what do you call it? You know, TMTCM. Let's like, like AMC, A&E is a little too classy. What if we showed shittier movies?

[00:38:39] And even like TBS and TNT had very clear identities in what kind of movies they showed. Yeah, they had like, you know, the occasional sitcom and like, you know, you'd watch like baseball on TBS or whatever. Right. Like AMC was just like, what is this?

[00:38:52] Right, but it's like I'll watch Major League Two or Shawshank. Right. And then as you said Eva, it's like bachelor party is the best they can get. Yeah.

[00:39:00] I just imagine like those old cable days where it's like Warner Brothers comes in, they're like, all right, here's our 1994 movie slate. And HBO is like, we'll take this and that, you know, like they're all bidding like crazy.

[00:39:12] And AMC is just sitting back in the chair like we can wait. We can wait for the dregs. Don't worry. I got two nickels here. The Phantom you say? Billy Zane you say?

[00:39:25] It is. I mean, the way you were just sort of describing him Eva and like how much he could have gotten away with being an asshole. Not that anyone should ever be an asshole. Right.

[00:39:38] But that like it is bizarre. It's notable how much of a nice guy he is and so much how much he appreciates his fans and is proud of his legacy and all that stuff.

[00:39:48] That is the thing that made him such like a cult icon. It's like I mean, when we were doing the Back to the Future movies and talking about how Bob Gale has like made his life about being the ambassador of Back to the Future. Right. For all things.

[00:40:01] And it's like what if the guy who was the Bob Gale of Evil Dead was also the star of Evil Dead and also still had a good career? Like it's one of those things where it's like it's not like he's only doing Evil Dead nostalgia stuff because there's no other options.

[00:40:15] About Bruce Campbell's career at all. Like so him being king of the convention or whatever like that's just what he's the best at. Yeah.

[00:40:23] But he's so happy to go around and talk about these movies and his legacy within them and how they were made and touch base with the fans and all that sort of stuff.

[00:40:32] All that sort of stuff. I mean, I'm remembering my first association with this movie was before I even knew what Evil Dead was. Right. Because I mean, I've talked about the other episodes, but it was one of those things where I was like, who's this guy who's like all over comic book stores?

[00:40:46] What is this weird franchise and this icon who doesn't seem to be part of larger popular culture? I'm not going to see him at like the mural at the pizza parlor, you know, or AMC or whatever.

[00:40:56] But like within comic book stores, this guy's iconography is like big. But years before that, it's some like 90s VHS. I must have rented some universal VHS where they had the trailers before the video.

[00:41:09] I remember seeing the trailer for this movie as like a young child and being like, what is this? Like the existence of this movie doesn't make sense to me.

[00:41:18] They're treating like this guy, like he's iconic. But this is not any movie star I know. This doesn't seem to be a movie star that my parents know of. It's not even I'm too young for this guy, you know, I'm like this guy isn't Nick Cage, but they're positioning him like he is.

[00:41:33] And then right, the weird like, is there a presumed familiarity I'm supposed to have with this character in this trailer? You know, they're treating him like he's this archetype. And what is the aesthetic of this movie that it has this level of like scale and monsters? How could anyone get this movie made?

[00:41:53] And then years later, when I watched Evil Dead one and two, I was like, wait a second. Army of Darkness is the third Evil Dead movie? Like it made sense to me that that's the only circumstance in which this movie could come into being but also have such a bizarre tone.

[00:42:08] Like it's the amount of fucking cartoon sound effects in this movie and like literal head spinning and like eyes bugging out faces getting stretched and shit.

[00:42:20] It's funny. This movie obviously was trying to be PG 13. You guys know that right? Like that was their hope and it got an R rating, which which hurt it at the box office. It feels PG 13 like it feels more teenage fun and light and its energy or whatever. And I guess it was probably just do you think it's just that it was too weird?

[00:42:42] I mean, violence isn't even horrifying, but it's just sort of bizarre. And that's why like or is it just because it was an Evil Dead movie and they were like, we're gonna just tend towards like this is for grownups.

[00:42:56] It must have been some combination of the two because nothing about this movie screams R and it's like there's a lot less viscera than there was in the last two because you're mostly dealing with like fleshless skeletons.

[00:43:07] Oh, I know. Before we started recording, I said this movie is chock full of Skellingtons. It sure is. You don't usually get skeleton bad guys. It's a rare skeleton monster. There is so much incredible bone work.

[00:43:25] And not only that, usually you're lucky if you get one or two. You know, this one has what I would refer to as an army of them. For sure. Yeah.

[00:43:34] They skeleton, they have little heads for their drums. They have a thigh for their they play a flute that's a bone.

[00:43:42] Yeah. Oh my God, man. Like all of the just different little ways to get them to move and do stuff throughout the movie. I was really I was pausing. I was taking notes. You were getting ideas from this? Yeah, I was writing. I really, really inspired me.

[00:43:59] Don't do it, Ben. Whatever you're planning. Don't do it. Don't don't raise any bone armies, Ben. We don't need that right now. The world's a little a little on edge. I don't think a skeleton army has emerged.

[00:44:10] Right. I just I knock a shovel or I move a shovel out of the way like off camera. So, you know, yeah. Are your hands covered in dirt? What's going on? All right. Let me give you some context, Griff.

[00:44:26] I was just going to say just quickly, just about skeleton. I just want to say before we move on the context, before we dig into the context, if you will.

[00:44:34] It is funny how much like the the Ray Harry has an influence on the the titular Army of Darkness is very apparent. But like in behavior, the skeletons are more like like the fucking Walt Disney's skeleton dance short, you know?

[00:44:50] Oh, yeah. Like they're just like what are funny visual gags you can do with skeletons to Eva's point? They're cute. Yeah, they're cute. Yeah. They're like they're kind of more animal, even though they're human skeletons, obviously. Right.

[00:45:04] They're not like the Harryhausen like where it's like this is a soldier. It just looks like a skeleton there. They're right. I don't know. Anyway, they're having fun no matter what they are having.

[00:45:17] So as we've mentioned, they make evil dead, then they make crime wave. That doesn't work. OK, we were going to we're in retreat. We're going to make evil dead, too. That's the thing we can sell. They make evil dead to initially wanted to call it medieval dead.

[00:45:30] And then they then they wanted to call it Army of Darkness. It's called Dead by Dawn, obviously. So they do that. De Laurentiis, I guess his his subcompany had folded.

[00:45:42] He did have sequel rights. Griffin after Darkman Universal is happy enough with Darkman that they decide to split the budget with De Laurentiis. So it's 50 50 from each whatever company, 12 million dollar budget.

[00:46:00] They send Ivan and Sam off to come up with the script. And they are very insistent together that they, I guess, do not want it to just be a part three.

[00:46:11] They wanted it to stand on its own. Right. Right. Like they like I want someone to be able to come in and enjoy the film without worrying about, you know, evil dead lore. Not that there is a ton of evil dead lore in those first two movies, really.

[00:46:24] But it's not a lot of. Yeah, but that is rules, I guess. Right. Like, sure, sure. Yeah.

[00:46:29] It is what's funny about this movie, though, because like as a kid seeing that trailer on a VHS, I was like, I understand what type of movie this is presenting itself as, which is fish out of water.

[00:46:40] Fish out of water. Modern guy lands in medieval times, right? Like a modern snarky action hero is now dropped into supernatural evil medieval epic.

[00:46:52] But Ash is so bizarre as a character. I think that was the thing that jumped out to me as a kid where it's just like if you're just starting the process of writing a movie from square one with that premise, this is not the guy you put at the center of it.

[00:47:07] Like it's just confusing that he starts out with a chainsaw for a hand. And even though the movie has to like front load this, like I bet you're wondering what happened to me.

[00:47:17] And then watching Bruce Campbell have to act out the same events for the third time now. Yeah, this is true.

[00:47:25] I did locate one. There is one rule of evil dead, which I did figure out. I didn't really click in until because I watched all three movies recently this weekend.

[00:47:37] It became very clear in Army of Darkness that the main rule is that the evil dead are horny because in this one they're very horny and and they're always kind of horny.

[00:47:49] But this one they're just like, they're just really horny. You're right. And zombies are never horny. You're very right. And I know the deadites are not exactly zombies, but they basically are like they're possessed peoples.

[00:48:03] I don't know. But you're right. They have they're horny and they do bits. And those are both unusual for fruit. They're having a blast.

[00:48:13] They're back from the dead. OK, and they're enjoying themselves. Oh, yeah. That that one old lady dead. I does that does the little trick in the first like in the first cast where she's got her eyes open.

[00:48:27] She's like, he. Well, they're all coming up to her. It's cute. I wouldn't say cute necessarily. But that's the other thing is they love fucking with this guy. Right. Like it's sort of the the arc of these movies is just Ash being cursed beyond repair.

[00:48:43] As you said, Eva, really just like his brain break. Right. Yeah. And just he cannot escape this fucking shit. He's doomed to be followed by these forces forever. And part of it is because these forces seem to find it funnier to fuck with him than anyone else. Like he just reacts to it worse.

[00:49:00] Right. I mean, he had to fight his hand for more than an hour. Like he had to cut his hand off and then his hand still flipped him off and still was fucking with them. Still handsy. Yes. Still. It's true. It is incredible. I mean, talk about like towing this line of like making the movie stand on its own, but also making it a third evil dead. You have this like, OK, here's this high concept set up. Right.

[00:49:24] And the final act of the movie is going to be big medieval battle. Knights versus skeletons. The middle act of the movie is, well, obviously we got to go back to the thing where he's just stuck in a small shed where he's in the woods and things fuck with him for 30 talking to himself. Weird shit happens. It's very low.

[00:49:39] It's on screen unless it's another version of the three stooges is the major visual inspiration. Yeah. And Universal is like, OK. And Dino De Laurentiis is like, I love you, Sammy. Good job. I give you a big kiss. I don't know what he sounded like. That's just how I imagined him.

[00:49:56] Yeah, no, he sounded like a little. You were underplaying it a little bit. They definitely both Sam and Ivan say like, no one gave us any notes on this one. I guess at this point it's just sort of like, well, they know what they're doing. So like, you know, like they were not really being messed with by the studio anymore. Dino was very much like, sounds good, which is fine, is good. And they earned it or whatever.

[00:50:20] But like, I wonder if now a studio would be medieval. I don't think so. Let's try something. Right. Like if the premise itself might turn off a studio just because medieval stuff doesn't really play. Right. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm crazy.

[00:50:39] Specifically this type of like insincere medieval stuff where all the costumes are dumb and they're in it. It's a castle in a desert. Right. Yes. Well, desert castle. That's up. Yes. So initially they wanted to go to Spain or England and find a castle. But apparently it's hard to get a castle. I guess it's hard to rent a castle and stage a giant medieval battle.

[00:51:05] Then they're like, fine, we'll just build, you know, we'll build a little castle. We'll fill the rest in post-production or whatever. They looked in Utah. I might take someone aside and be like, just FYI, nowhere in Europe looks like Utah. That's not going to read. But eventually they ended up in California. They shot it in the studios. Like, you know, Acton, California. I don't know if anyone knows where that is.

[00:51:35] I don't know if anyone knows Acton, California, but it looks like it's whatever. Like, you know, north of L.A., out in the desert there. Right. Like not far. It's like it's where they would shoot Westerns or whatever. Yeah. It's like the Manson Ranch. They shot this like that.

[00:51:49] Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's like they set it up. I mean, at the end of Evil Dead 2 when he lands and everyone's like hailing him. Right. In medieval times, it looks like this, but it would have been such a good opportunity to just abandon that. And much like Evil Dead is want to do, just change it to fit however you want it for this movie. But yes, they're stuck in weird, like tumbleweed medieval times.

[00:52:16] And I always felt like, well, it's a cool concept. Time traveling medieval times or whatever. And then Hodgman in our Evil Dead 2 episode, like explained it so perfectly. Where he's like, imagine these guys have made successful horror movies and they come in and pitch to you, we're going to do this, but at a Ren Faire. Like that is what the vibe of this is.

[00:52:33] Absolutely. Yes. It's not what I would have predicted. I know that's obviously how Evil Dead 2 ends. So I know they had called their shot there, but it's just not the energy I would have expected from Sam Raimi. And like, again, we've been reading about the guy, everything he talks about. He's like, I love the Three Stooges. Like he's not saying like, you know what I love? Excalibur. Like that was a movie that meant a lot to me or anything.

[00:53:03] I don't know where this is coming from, but whatever.

[00:53:34] And so like every Three Stooges short, it's like now they're firemen. Now they're knights. Now they're this or that. It does feel like that influence of it where it's like he's not interested in making Excalibur. He's interested in the idea of what can you dress Bruce Campbell up as? Like what's a different patina you can drop him into?

[00:53:56] So this is just the third beat, like the third beat of the Evil Dead Herald. Right, right, right. It's that improv thing where the joke becomes every third beat is like, are you in space? Are you in the future? Yeah. You're the president.

[00:54:11] Which this movie then sets up its alternate ending fourth beat is the future. It's like post apocalypse or whatever.

[00:54:17] Yeah. It's just such a funny combination of things. And to your point, David, there was like this window and I think it happened again sort of in the mid 2000s but in the early 90s were like video was just so lucrative where they could look at it and be like, it costs $12 million. Dino's putting up half of it. The star is some guy who's not really a movie star. But Darkman did well opening weekend. This thing will make its money back on video.

[00:54:44] We'll sell it to cable. Like there's almost no way for this movie to lose money. So why even give them notes? Because it doesn't even matter. 100%. Have you guys talked about the apartment they all lived in? With the Coens and Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter, the hottie apartment.

[00:55:01] The hottie apartment. 123 Hottie Street. Go on. Carry on. I just I just did they I feel like they I read that they wrote this in the apartment potentially or just like this. Some of this an early draft of this maybe was written in the. Army of Darkness.

[00:55:17] I thought so. You might be right here. Wait, let me see. Let me see. There's definitely some stuff in our research here.

[00:55:22] They had started this much earlier and then it was after Darkman that they got to go ahead and really wrote like the final script. But I think there were earlier drafts.

[00:55:29] Ivan Reitman must be stated was an acting acting physician at the time. Like he was working as a doctor in Young. Ivan Ramey, not Ivan Reitman.

[00:55:40] Ivan Ramey. I'm sorry. Not Ivan Reitman. Not a lot of Ivans out there. Was a physician. So he is a doctor. He's working as a doctor in Ohio.

[00:55:48] So I guess he just like would would moonlight on the side with Sam and cook up these scripts. So maybe he's coming out. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know.

[00:55:56] All I know is that this is a very cute quote from Ivan where he says, this is Ivan. Yes, we fight over commas. And when we get in a fight, we don't mind resorting to fisticuffs.

[00:56:09] Sam does improvise a lot because when you get on set, you realize certain things you need to improvise on. Sam says that Ivan has the easy job. I clean up your mess.

[00:56:18] But I just like Ivan being like, oh, well, there'll be fisticuffs between us when we're fighting over where to put an em dash or whatever.

[00:56:26] I have a question about the apartment that's been weighing on my mind and it's completely a conspiracy theory that I cooked up in my head that I know is not real. But can I just present it to you guys?

[00:56:37] Absolutely. The other person in that apartment was Kathy Bates. Yes, a young Kathy Bates. She never was in a Coen Brothers movie or a Sam Raimi movie after that bizarre because you could see her fit into both of those universes.

[00:56:53] Not only I was like, that can't be true. Surely she's in a Coen Brothers movie. She feels like a character in a Coen Brothers movie. Just regular Kathy Bates. Just nice lady Kathy Bates. That's so weird.

[00:57:09] So do you think that she didn't pick her hair out of the shower drain or whatever? That's my theory. Was she a bad roommate or were they all bad roommates and she was the good roommate?

[00:57:24] Because another thing, when I thought about it a little more, I was like, oh, she's also like 10 years older than them. Right. So maybe she was kind of the den mother and she got sick of picking up after them or whatever.

[00:57:35] But what happened in that apartment that she never ends up in any of the movies?

[00:57:40] Now I got to know because it's also funny. How did that come about? Why is that the crew? It's Campbell, Ethan and Joel, Holly and Francis, Kathy Bates. I think Scott Spiegel lived with them as well. Why are they all together?

[00:57:57] Is it like Kathy Bates winning an Oscar and now imagining Joel and Sam Raimi and everyone else sitting on the couch and they're like, yeah, well, she still didn't know how to use a vacuum cleaner.

[00:58:12] There's no reason for them not to work together after all of their fame. Everyone now knows we are talented. We didn't get our fucking security deposit back because of Bates.

[00:58:22] Maybe it's all like a pickle jar or a jar of pickles or something. You know what I mean? It's like a dispute over something that dumb even. It's a real world. She was the puck of the apartment with the peanut butter left open.

[00:58:37] Or she was walking around with curlers in, yelling at them for making a ruckus when they're giggling over lines they're going to write for Ash.

[00:58:46] But that sounds like a character that would appear in either a Sam Raimi or a Coen Brothers movie. Is Kathy Bates in curlers yelling? That sounds about right. I mean, I think Kathy Bates's first movie was taking off the Milos Forman pot comedy with Buck Henry.

[00:59:08] And she's in that as like a young folk singer auditioning. A big part of that movie is it's like two parents trying to find their daughter who ran off to audition for like some sort of music show.

[00:59:21] And you see all these auditions and one of them is Kathy Bates very earnestly singing a folk song that I believe she herself wrote. And that's like a decade before she would have been living in this apartment. Whereas everyone else is really starting out.

[00:59:38] I have a further wrinkle that I must introduce. OK, I'm so glad this theory has taken off. I don't. It's not going to give us any conclusive answers one or the other.

[00:59:49] And already this feels like the beginning of a long open ended podcast series that doesn't really answer any questions but just asks a lot. Is it going to raise more questions?

[00:59:58] One of those shows where like by episode 10 it's like, you know, I'm at the end of my journey and I still don't know why Kathy Bates and the Coen Brothers don't get along.

[01:00:05] You know, one of those series where you're like, wait a second, why didn't I listen to any of this? But anyway, as you may know, in 1997 after the success of Fargo, there was a pilot made for a TV series starring Edie Falco as Marge Gunderson.

[01:00:22] Kathy Bates directed it? Kathy Bates directed the pilot. What's up with that? I'm not going to throw the gun, but I just remembered that. But was this another like we don't approve of this? That's what I'm saying. Did she direct it as a fuck you to the Coens?

[01:00:38] They were like, well, we don't want there to be a cop show based on Fargo. And she's like, well, I'm directing it so you can go fuck yourself.

[01:00:46] Because it was a big deal that the FX Noah Hawley Fargo had like a vague stamp of approval from the Fargo Brothers. Where they were like, we know this exists and it's fine. Like they wouldn't even like, no, no, no.

[01:01:02] Frances McDormand scowls at the Emmys because she's nominated. Frances McDormand scowls a lot. But OK, carry on. I was Googling trying to answer the Bates question. I found an interview where Frances talks about Kathy moving into the house and says no more.

[01:01:20] But she also like slams the Fargo show in that same interview. Wow. OK, well, maybe look, I'm just saying I'd now because at that point in her life, Kathy Bates, obviously she's an Academy Award winner.

[01:01:35] But still, she had directed like one episode of Homicide Life on the Street and one episode of NYPD Blue. Like it's not like she was doing tons and tons of TV directing.

[01:01:45] So it feels like she's maybe either taking it as a fuck you to the Coens or with their blessing. But I'm leaning to the former. She also shows up at the house with like she had already been nominated for a Tony.

[01:01:58] She got nominated for Night Mother quite young. Like Holly and Frances were like friends. Yeah, they were like Yale Drama School friends. She was much deeper into her career than everyone else in addition to being older. Yeah, right. She's done a lot of Broadway.

[01:02:14] Chance McNeely had written a play for her like at that point in her career. I now also. OK, and we have to move on from this after this. But I have how big was this house?

[01:02:25] I now need a floor plan. I need to know where you're sleeping, where it's in Silver Lake. It's a former hunting lodge. Oh, wow. That sounds pretty cool. Wait, it's a 12 partner, guys. Let's move on. We just added two more.

[01:02:41] Yeah, no, we got to make this into a limited series. Oh, man. I mean, I feel like whenever Franny does interviews about her and Joel falling in love, the thing she says is that like he was really well read and we would like talk about books on set

[01:02:59] and then he like came over and would like read to me at night and we drink hot chocolate and like he'd read books aloud and we discuss them. Do you think Kathy Bates was the one who was just constantly like knocking on the door

[01:03:11] from the inside of her room going like, shut the fuck up. Stop reading Postman always rings twice to your fucking drama student girlfriend. Put the hot cocoa down and go to fucking sleep. It's such a charming story.

[01:03:29] And do you think she was just like, I have work in the morning. I'm not amused. Well, we will never know. Oh, man. Thank you for taking this journey. Maybe we will. We should say Kathy Bates is our guest on the For Love of You.

[01:03:44] I'm just imagining a world where I get to talk to Joel Cohen, say for like 15 minutes and it's like it's Joel Cohen. It's a director I admire. Like, you know, there's a lot I could ask him.

[01:03:56] And I'm just like, I got to look when you're like in your 20s. Like, you know, I just immediately like I just got to ask. Can you just shed some light on this for me? And he might literally be like plan.

[01:04:06] He might literally be like, which I feel like Joel Cohen's normal thing where he's like, I don't know. It was fine. It was normal. Like, you know, you're always just like, hey, why did you make this Macbeth movie? And he's like, I don't know, wanted to do Macbeth.

[01:04:19] I figured I'd do it this way. And that's what I did. It was available and these other people. I think he does that. He steps outside. He's like, well, nice meeting you. Gets on the phone. Call Sam Raimi. He's like, someone's asking about Kathy.

[01:04:31] We're going to get canceled. They're going to find out about Kathy. Anyway, Army of Darkness. Right. Some more. All right. So they're shooting in Acton, California. It sounds pretty annoying because this movie mostly takes place at night.

[01:04:45] And I don't know. I mean, Eva, you're out there on the West Coast. You can tell us apparently it gets very cold in the desert at night. Yeah, it's dust. Acton's like dusty. I think it's kind of like a like farmland.

[01:04:58] It's it's right over the grapevine, I think. It looks like. Right. Exactly. It's not it's not like physically far from LA, but it looks like. Yeah, it's flat and cattle ranchy and and yeah, very cold at night. Probably very hot during the day.

[01:05:15] I it's you know, just they have to wait for the sun go down. They don't have a lot of time and it's freezing cold. And because it's hot in the daytime, everyone has to immediately like shift into cold mode. Bill Pope Griffin, one of the greats, of course,

[01:05:30] one of the greats. He shot Darkman. So he but that was his first movie. I just said Bill Pope's 90s alone. I don't know if you know, like Griff. Let's go through them. Darkman. OK, then a movie called Closetland that I've never heard of.

[01:05:44] Whatever. Some Madeline Stone movie. Army of Darkness, Fire in the Sky, very underrated sci-fi abduction movie. Blank Check. Oh, the film Blank Check. Clueless. Bound, of course, the Wachowskis. Right. Gridlocked, a movie I taught constantly talk about Tim Roth and Tupac, black comedy, really good movie.

[01:06:06] Zero Effect, that sort of underrated Jake Kasdan comedy and the Matrix. Oh yeah. Like almost everything he made was interesting. And obviously in the 2000s, he does Spider-Man and the Matrix sequels and he did Team America and all that.

[01:06:20] I was not wrong. The other thing he does in 1999 is he's the DP on the pilot of Freaks and Geeks. There you go. That's right. Probably because he'd worked with Jake Kasdan. Right. Like that. Correct. But even still, that's a very influential show in terms of like there

[01:06:36] had not been a comedy that looked like that at that point in time. He's the best. And everyone talks about him like he's the best in all the research. Like he's the guy who's the best at making comedy.

[01:06:47] He's the guy who's getting you through these crazy shooting nights really by working really, really fast. Like he was really, really good at that. And another problem they had is they had a bunch of fucking horses. Sam Raimi even talks about in these interviews the classic Clint Eastwood

[01:07:05] thing where you can't say action because they know that word and then they start moving the second you say action. You guys are aware of this, right? I didn't know this. Clint Eastwood says like, all right. And what's the other thing, Griffin?

[01:07:19] I got to look it up now. Enough of that. Like a safe word. Yes. Right. And people apparently when they work with Eastwood, you know, like Tom Hanks tells some story about it. Yes. There's a great Graham Norton, Tom Hanks clip where he's talking

[01:07:37] about on Sully that you're waiting for him and then you look over and he's behind the monitor and he sort of just like waves his hand and he goes like, OK, go on. Right. And then when the scene's done, you wait for him to call cut.

[01:07:48] You look over and he goes like, OK, enough of that. But it is like it now reads as like mystique, this like bad ass old man. But then he asked about it and he was like, you just can't be loud with

[01:08:00] horses. You don't want to spook the horses as he's shooting like Sully or a horse. Let's film. Yes. But he just never got over. I mean, this movie just feels like such a nightmare to shoot. Not just in terms of. Yes, you're shooting in this like completely

[01:08:14] like like accurate environment, but also arid environment. But also like you're shooting almost exclusively at night. There's a middle third of the movie, at least a solid third where he is the only actual actor on set. And so many scenes where you have such complicated effects or like

[01:08:35] an army of animatronics that all need to be working in unison. Yes, it sounds annoying. They use this thing called intro vision, which they also use for Dark Man, which was sort of hard to explain. I think it's been driving our researcher JJ slightly insane reading so

[01:08:52] much about intro vision. So I feel a little bad and I want to at least shout it out. But the way he best describes it is it's like it's halfway between classic rear projection. Right. And what they that crazy shit they do now, like on The Mandalorian,

[01:09:05] what's it called? Stagecraft or whatever. Right. Where you're standing in front of a monitor that's like has perfect imagery behind it. Right. Well, and the big thing with that is that like if you adjust the camera, the angles and the perspective of the digital background

[01:09:20] adjust with the camera and the lighting is rigged to the digital image. So the lighting matches the environment. It's like the most intuitive way to do this kind of thing. Right. Intro vision, I think, is a. A more primitive version of that idea. Right.

[01:09:35] Half of this movie apparently is shot using intro vision. They saved a lot of money doing it. You can't really tell this movie looks pretty good, I would say. Like it's that rainy thing of like the special effects.

[01:09:48] Anytime they're junky or goofy, it gets away with it because that's the cartoony energy, I guess. But like I know, like throw the sound effect on there. Right. Right. I have the one liner that just like, well, the joke is that now

[01:10:00] this character is acting like Daffy Duck or whatever. But it basically combines pre-recorded like back projection with live action recording on set. I can't I look JJ, please forgive me. I can't describe this shit. He sent me a long video.

[01:10:18] I tried to watch it was very boring, but it's crucial to them using stop motion, basically. So I think that's the thing. Like it makes stop motion a lot easier to do because you could shoot the live action footage and then project it.

[01:10:30] The stop motion animation in the foreground. Oh, God, he's going to kill me. I'm sorry. I mean, it's the other thing with this whole trilogy is they're using every single pre CGI technique. Right. Right. Absolutely. In a way that's really impressive. And like, right.

[01:10:51] Sometimes the the deadites are stop motion. Yeah. Sometimes they're guys in suits. Sometimes they're animatronics. And there's I mean, I just feel like unlike a lot of movies like this, maybe where you're having like multiple techniques of like like here's a bad comparison point I'm thinking of right.

[01:11:11] Like in the child's play movies, it's mostly an animatronic. Sure. But then sometimes they will put a child or a little person inside a little Chucky costume or they will have a dummy Chucky doll that isn't rigged, that the actors just have to wrestle with.

[01:11:25] And your brain always clocks when the technique changes, when you're like Chucky's not moving the right way. Whereas I feel like this time in this movie, anytime the vernacular of the characters or the special effects change, it's like on purpose, like they're trying to make

[01:11:39] the most out of that specific weird movement. Here's here's the best way. And then when I'm going to say sounds so counterintuitive, but instead of Bruce Campbell, who fights an invisible energy and enemy, and you imagine you put the enemy in afterwards, right?

[01:11:56] They would have already done the stop motion photography for the enemy. And Bruce Campbell has to precisely match the movements to fight it. Does that make sense? Like he's acting against something that's already been animated so he can kind of see it, but it's he has

[01:12:12] to hit exact physical marks for it to look good. Does that... It's like reverse Roger Rabbit kind of. Yes. And so they were acting to like numbers being called out because they had this complicated number system to remember every physical movement that they had to do.

[01:12:29] Basically, Bruce Campbell found this incredibly torturous. It sounds it sounds so annoying, but I mean, it's cool. This is like the single biggest thing about this movie for me is I think I've talked about this before, but there

[01:12:42] was there was a thing on the tick where we had to essentially shoot something this way. Because there was a character, there was a mad scientist character who created a shrink ray and he accidentally shrunk himself down. So I had to have scenes with like

[01:12:55] a tiny man and they would shoot him in a big set and I would stand off camera and say the lines and we figure out the blocking of where I would be and I'd step in so they would get like the lighting reference.

[01:13:06] And then the next day I had to go into a complete green screen space that just had marks taped off and an earpiece where they played back not just his lines, but my line readings from the day before

[01:13:18] and I had to say them in unison and hit the marks at specific timing, both in terms of my movements and eye line. And then like if it was off by a centimeter, it'd be fucked and they'd cut and we'd

[01:13:28] go back to the beginning because they're like you walk through a table or whatever. And it was impossible and impossible to do on like a TV schedule and budget for one scene. It was so difficult that for the rest of that episode, they made him a puppet

[01:13:39] that I held in my arms with the head turned to the camera away from the camera so that no one could see. He just dubbed it later. And then they rewrote the character. They were like, I don't know what to do with this robot suit now. He doesn't

[01:13:50] have to be a little anymore. This movie is like all that, like almost every scene he's interacting with elements like that. And he also has to be funny, like he has to have his personality. He has to it has to be fucking charisma. It's not

[01:14:03] like it's like I don't know, perfunctory exposition scenes. And it does make you realize like not just a well, this movie is like a tribute to Bruce Campbell and his love of this guy and his friend who he so badly wanted to make into a leading man

[01:14:18] or whatever. But it's like you truly could not have done this movie with anyone else because I don't think anyone else would have put up with this. And I don't think anyone else would have busted their ass hard enough to figure out how

[01:14:29] to reckon with all these technical shit things and also put a funny performance on top of that. Like, not only is the fact that the guy at the center of this movie is Bruce Campbell rather than Bruce Willis means you're putting that money

[01:14:40] back into the budget for all of those effects. But also that you have a guy who's like, I'll work an 18 hour day. Just tell me where I need to stand and I'm going to solve. I'm lazy. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I would nightmare nightmare.

[01:14:52] Yeah, he kind of had already done it. Right? Because who else would you trust? Like he's already done this for you twice. It's the whole thing. It's like that's why they're good at this. But like if I'm finally my reaction to Universal being like you have

[01:15:06] twelve billion dollars to make the next one be like, great. I can rest easy. That's a lot of money. We'll make some. I get two million this time and you have a stunt double do all the shit. And instead Sam Raimi is like twelve million. Great.

[01:15:18] How much can we possibly do? Right. Like, you know, like what is everything that we could cram into this? And not only that, can we put more on Bruce? Let's have him play two full bodied characters that have to interact with each other. Also

[01:15:32] like five mini ashes. The second Bruce. Oh my God. Do you guys like the second Bruce has horrible makeup? Oh, I love them. I love the shot of him from their POV of him stepping on them. I love that shot. It's beautiful. Why is that so good?

[01:15:48] Because it doesn't make any fucking sense in the movie. No, it just sort of starts happening. But like, why? Why is that good, Griffin? And like fucking, you know, the stupid little marshmallows and Ghostbusters is lame. Like, what? Is it just because the technical prowess

[01:16:07] of it is so good? Is it because Bruce Campbell's performances are so good? Like they have such good little like little stinker energy. I think that's a huge part of it. I think he's the right actor to both play the little stinkers and play

[01:16:20] the person who's being tortured by the little stinkers. Them like, you know, holding the gun and shooting. I always love that. Like after they poke him with the pitchfork, then they're like, let's shoot him with a gun. Oh God. I love them coming out of the mirror. Obviously

[01:16:36] such a cool effect. Like practically like a Lynchian effect. Is their pitchfork just supposed to be a fork? It's a fork. They at their scale. It's just a regular fork. Do you know what I think it is? I mean, I spent the last week with the

[01:16:51] aforementioned Connor Ratliff on a cruise ship. So we of course spent a lot of time talking about old cartoons, the main language that Connor talks in. And we were he's such a like historian of all these things and watches, you know, like I'm going to watch every cartoon

[01:17:08] featuring Donald Duck in chronological order so I can chart the evolution of the cartoon. And the thing that we were sort of talking about a lot was like that was something like Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, right? There's not like

[01:17:20] a build to them. Like the new Wile E. Coyote Roadrunner cartoon is not acknowledging or continuing the chronology of the last one. Right. But they are aware of the fact that the audience has now seen like six of these or ten of these. And it's like there's

[01:17:37] a format you need to fit, but you also need to build on the bits. And sometimes it's heightening and sometimes it's moving laterally. But it's like what kind of gags fit into a Wile E. Coyote Roadrunner cartoon? And I think this movie, The Little Ass

[01:17:51] Shit, works along with everything else because they're just sort of in that zone where it's like, you know what the format is. He goes into a small contained space in the middle of the woods and things fuck with him. Right. We've now seen this three times. This

[01:18:05] is the third time it's happened. What other kinds of things could fuck with him and be fucked with? And because you're riffing on that sort of cartoon language, it's like what are the things that can happen? Someone can get big.

[01:18:16] You can have a bunch of a little thing. You know, I just think what happens in Ghostbusters Afterlife, it's so out of conversation with anything else that's happening in that movie, let alone the franchise at large. Whereas with this, you're just like, yeah, I don't know.

[01:18:30] You've made like three of these. What's gonna happen now? Is it funny if he's little? Is it funny if he's evil? Yeah. It's Chuck Jones timing also. It's like the Ghostbusters timing is just chaotic and cynical. Right. But like I was thinking about, I don't know if you

[01:18:45] guys talked about this in Evil Dead 2, but that incredible sequence, I laugh so hard when he goes, when he's, he puts the woman's head in the vice. He looks up, he sees the outline of the chainsaw on the wall and then the headless, the headless corpse runs in

[01:19:03] holding the chainsaw. Perfect timing, purely comic timing, not even like to scare you. And I feel like that's, that's what the whole cabin sequence is in this. It's like, yeah, this is just like a Tom and Jerry cartoon at this point. It's it's set up its rules

[01:19:20] like because this is now the third beat of this where it's like we're just here for invention. What? There's gonna be an eyeball on his shoulder? Just like throw shit at me. Really like the eyeball on his shoulder. Very, very good. Very nightmarish. We definitely

[01:19:33] in that episode, by the way, talk about the outline of the chainsaw. My favorite part. Right. Yes. I'm gonna do that whenever I have a shed. I'm going to draw outlines of every tool so I know where they go when I, when I replay.

[01:19:47] Right? That must, that's the only logic I can think of. Chainsaw goes here. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. And he goes, he still has to go, chainsaw. Yes. Should we discuss the plot of Army of Darkness? Ash has been captured by, you know, some, you

[01:20:07] know, King Arthur esque guy. Right. Well, I just I want to ask before we dig into this because it's relevant. Eva, as someone who's watched this movie like a hundred times, I assumed the VHS that you had was the theatrical cut. I guess

[01:20:23] so. Yeah. Must have been. Yeah. I think because there are four different versions of this movie. Okay. I watched the, the version I know is the one I just watched on HBO Max. And does that end? Which is the version on HBO Max. The S-mart

[01:20:40] ending? Ends at the supermarket. It's the classic ending. Yes. Hail to the King baby. Right. Hail to the King. Right. So it's, there's the 81 minute theatrical cut. Yes. Which was Dino De Laurentiis and Universal cutting it down after I think he originally got an NC-17. No. Crazy.

[01:20:58] And they were. I don't think so. I think it was NC-17 and then it went down to R. I think I read that too actually. Let me look at it. Because the others got NC-17. Apparently. Yeah. There was a decapitation scene that the NPAA didn't like. So they

[01:21:13] got rid of that. Right. That's when they took it away from him. And then he restored his director's cut, which had the Rip Van Winkle ending, which the studio hated because they thought it was too depressing. Too much of a bummer. They wanted to have a win at

[01:21:27] the end. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. It's it's I really like the mall ending. I like that Bridget Fonda is in it. She was a huge fan of Evil Dead and asked to be like, do you have a part for me? And they

[01:21:41] were like, well, we could throw you in this new ending. But yes. But obviously the original ending puts him in like futuristic London. Like it's like post nuclear apocalypse or whatever. I have seen it. I haven't seen it in a while. The other major

[01:21:55] cut is the international cut, which was what was released in theaters in Europe and other countries, other territories where I think the ratings were less strict, where it is essentially all the bonus material that is in the theater, the director's cut, but with a theatrical ending.

[01:22:15] Right. Right. So there's the short version with the S-Mart ending, the long version with the Rip Van Winkle, the version that's slightly between the two lengths with the S-Mart ending and then there's a TV cut that was one of those we just dumped all the

[01:22:29] extra footage in to fill out a longer programming block, which is the version I think no one defends other than just as a completist. It's interesting to see everything. Right. Yeah. They shot that final thing in Malibu. I mean, Ramey did

[01:22:43] not want it to be long. He handed in like a 90 minute cut and then they lopped off like 10 minutes from that. Yeah. I mean, I'll say I watched the director's cut with the Rip Van Winkle ending, which was what I remember in my mind as being

[01:22:57] like my version of Army of Darkness, even though I like the S-Mart ending a lot. And it is funny how at 96 minutes you're like this overstays its welcome a little bit. Like it feels a little laggy even for a short movie because the other ones are all

[01:23:11] like 81 minutes, no filler, so lean. I like that they're all under 90. Me too. Ramey says like he has a quote here like, I like really short films. I think 90 minutes is a great length for a picture. The kind of picture I make would work best as 60

[01:23:27] minutes. No brain, no story, no nothing. You just like walk out having been like kicked in the head a bunch. Like, you know, it's funny that he says that considering that like anyone, I do feel like he eventually has suffered from like bloat, right? Like yeah, Oz, The

[01:23:43] Great and Powerful is a classic like two hour, 10 minute, you know, sort of like, oh boy, this has got to drag me to hell though to its credit is a good clean like under 100 minutes. Like that's a fun lean horror. Like

[01:23:57] that was him. I feel like going back to basics. And I think that's a case where like the difference between the unrated theatrical cuts is like a minute, whereas this it's like 15 minutes. It is funny though that like the most self-indulgent kitchen sink

[01:24:12] cut of this movie is still 96 minutes long. So another thing that was going on during all of this, Universal and Dino De Laurentiis are fighting over the fact that De Laurentiis owns rights to Hannibal Lecter's in Man Hunter, right? Like he specifically owns

[01:24:29] Red Dragon. Universal owns the rest of the Lecter stuff. And when Ramey asked for more money for this movie to finish like reshoots and all that stuff, Universal held back financing and delayed the release date. That's maybe why Ambeth Davids, you know,

[01:24:47] shot this before Shenle, like why it got delayed. Delayed the release date until De Laurentiis allowed for like, you know, to basically relinquish like the rights to Hannibal Lecter, you know what I mean? Like, you know, he's like lets them greenlight sequels and

[01:25:02] stuff. So they could make like Hannibal? Exactly. Yeah. So they could eventually make Hannibal. Yes. Which nobody wanted. No, but was a stupid big hit and took another decade, eight years to get made. Am I, am I wrong in this, David? Because I know

[01:25:20] we talked about this in our two previous Lector episodes we've done. But wasn't it that like because he owned the Manhunter rights, he technically had first right refusal for sequels for anything to do with Hannibal Lecter, I guess. Right. Right. So it wasn't just that he owned that

[01:25:36] book, but he had like the default rights for the character, but he didn't hold onto them for silence. Like when they came to him, he was like Hannibal Lecter movies don't make money. Good luck with that. And then after silence was a hit, he

[01:25:50] still had some stake. They still had to fight him. Right. And you know, because the other three are all De Laurentiis productions. Right. Yeah, I guess. Let's see Hannibal. Yeah. He did produce Hannibal and Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising, of course. Right. In which Hannibal

[01:26:09] rose. Just the only one he didn't produce is the one that won best picture. Yeah. Well, you know what? Like leave Dino alone. He produced Army of Darkness. You like that? Yeah. No. Great choice. Great choice. But yes, this movie opens with I think that's another cut

[01:26:24] difference. But the the director's cut has the Bruce Campbell versus Army of Darkness title card. Does theatrical have that to you? I think so. Yeah. OK. I just I love that. Rather than saying like Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness, you're telling everyone your lead actor's

[01:26:43] relationship to the title of the movie. And then you start with him in Stockade. Yes, he's been captured. They think that he is a spy for Duke Henry. Right. The Duke. Who is played by Richard Grove, King Arthur, Lord Arthur, whatever they call him, is played by Mark.

[01:27:03] It's all these English actors. He's like, you know, job a day English actors in Abercrombie, obviously in Abercrombie. Yeah. A blast. I mean, we all know him best from Seinfeld, right? Yes. Princess Sheila gets told just kind of just randomly that her brother's dead. Yes. Yes.

[01:27:23] And with the first big sequence is the pit. Right. Like that's that's the beginning of the movie. Yeah. Well, you do you do the flashback before that. Right. He has his like, I bet you're wondering how I ended up here. It's just funny to drop you

[01:27:37] in to the deep end of this movie and be like, what is this modern guy doing in barracks? What is this happening here? We didn't see how he was apprehended. Then you flashback to reshooting these scenes for the third time. Now with Bridget Fonda abbreviated and

[01:27:52] then sort of just filling in a little bit like, right, he landed here in this time period and he's just fucking been been tortured since then. Everything's been going wrong. And this is his first big test. Yes. He's thrown into the pit. He's fighting a deadite.

[01:28:08] To two dead. Two deadites. Two pit witches. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ben, you're pro pit. Do you want a town pit to throw people in? No, I mean, that's quite extreme. I'm not of the opinion that we need to sacrifice humans for entertainment. You just sounded

[01:28:25] excited about the pit, Ben. That's all. I am excited, though, about not necessarily a killing pit, but I think having a town pit would be a great thing and a fun like, what did you do today? I was in a pit. David, that's a good question.

[01:28:39] I think that was quite extreme of you to suggest that producer Ben, a man who earlier talked about his desire to have his own skeleton army would want to pit. It's also like a trash compactor. What would make you jump to that conclusion? It's a spike trash

[01:28:55] compactor. That's true. It's a sarlacc pit and it's the trash compactor from the Death Star in one. Right. You have that first great bit where they throw the guy in and then the blood just like explodes out of it like it's a blood bath.

[01:29:11] And then he's up next. Yes, yes. Just just blood operating. However, blood needs to operate. But but it's it's a fun action sequel. It is funny for how much like the iconic image of Ash is him in the tattered shirt with the leather straps and the chainsaw.

[01:29:29] It is only the very end of Evil Dead 2 and the very beginning of Army of Darkness. Oh, yeah. He gets rid of the chainsaw right away. Yeah. Even though it changes into a chainsaw. He's out of gas. Right. You know, that's the tagline.

[01:29:42] Right. The most ripped like they had to give him Arnold body. The Frazetta poster you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. And there's the other one where it's like him like with his arms thrown up in the air like an agony

[01:29:56] where his his chest is even more extreme. He looks like Conan the Barbarian or something. I think that's actually a confusing poster for Army of Darkness. I do too. But I think Dino did the Conan movies, right? He must have just gone like, I know it sells.

[01:30:13] Well, especially if you look like the Barbarian. I mean, have you seen the international poster, which is that's the one I'm talking about. Exactly. Which it must be. That guy must be literally the guy who did those. Yeah. Right. He did Red Sonja and all

[01:30:27] that. Oh, yeah. Look at these. Yeah. Because on the international poster, you can't even see his face. No. It's just like he looks like a shotgun. It's a shotgun and chainsaw. The chainsaw and the boomstick. Right. And there's no shirt. It's just the straps on the chest.

[01:30:44] Yeah. With the sort of he's got like straps across them. So it's it looks very Conan. Yeah. Like a harness. Yes. He is celebrated as a hero because he blows up a deadite, right? Like, you know, this is the. Oh, yeah. This is where he meets

[01:31:02] Ian Abercrombie. Right. And he's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. But it's a good spiel. Everyone hates the Duke and Beth Davids thinks that he killed her brother and Arthur hates him. And they think that Ash is a spy working in cahoots with the Duke.

[01:31:21] It's like the Brits versus the Scots kind of deal. Right. Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was just gonna say what Ash proves his worth and defeats the Duke. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to say like, here are my

[01:31:35] terms. I'm in charge now. Let the Duke go. Treat me like a king and then help me get back to my time. Yeah. Yes. I want to read this wonderful quote from Ian Abercrombie, who seems like a real he I know he's

[01:31:49] dead now, but seems like one of those classic like guy who would have some good stories. Right. Like, you know, grew up in Britain, did all kinds of stuff before he becomes like a comic actor late in life. One of those guys who you could

[01:32:04] imagine being really ornery about the fact that he was never taken as seriously as like John Houseman or whatever. And instead is just like, no, I did like fun comedy and genre movies and whatever. Like has that kind of pedigree, but but doesn't seem self serious.

[01:32:19] And, you know, he he voices Palpatine in the Clone Wars cartoons. I do know that. And he played Alfred on the weird failed Birds of Prey TV show. Oh, man. He did a fairy tale theater. Yeah. His career is wild if you look at it. Yeah.

[01:32:38] You know, he was in the Wizards of Waverly Place a lot like late in life. Anyway, lovely, lovely quote from him about about Sam Raimi. He's grounded in his roots. That's why he's surrounded by his friends. That's why he has Bruce. Sam's success is because he's very

[01:32:53] grounded and he works really hard. He delegates authority. But when it comes to bottom line, he's at the helm. He listens. He has no power over his own. He listens. He has no patience for slackers and he's got this cherubic face like a choir boy gone wrong.

[01:33:06] That's my reference for him. I always say he reminds me of a choir boy who's done something naughty. That is Sam Raimi. He said Sam Raimi through the eyes of Ian Abercrombie. That's all. That's wild. He's so good in Seinfeld. I love him in Seinfeld. Yeah, he's great.

[01:33:24] Yeah. Anyway, and he's great in this. He's sort of the Merlin figure, I guess. Right. Is that kind of his vibe? Yeah, it's just so funny. It is just kind of impossible to imagine a major studio today, even if you have someone like De Laurentiis putting up half

[01:33:40] the budget greenlighting a movie like this where there are no stars, where you're just like you imagine they would get someone who was on 90210 to play Sheila or you imagine they would get someone who had been nominated for an Oscar to play the Ian Abercrombie part.

[01:33:55] And instead, it's sort of like all jobbing foreign actors and Bruce Campbell. Yes. So he tells him you got to go get the book, right? Go into the forest, find the Necronomicon. Say these special words. I want to shout out the building of the hand montage. Oh, yeah.

[01:34:14] Incredible. Those montages, it's just like the budgets get bigger, the equipment gets better. But man, that the third time around, it's so good. It's so they really draw it out. It's so long to that blacksmith character with the really long thing mustache is great.

[01:34:33] And that second scene, I mean, you talked about it. We talked about earlier, but like when he's sort of luxuriating with the grapes and the women and then the that dead transformation happens and he realizes, like, I got to just fucking get this thing in motion.

[01:34:50] Side note, the trilogy of Cisco and Ebert reviews of these three movies are very funny. They're all on YouTube, but it's just basically them constantly like not liking the movies and then pretending later like they liked them, but they don't like the new one.

[01:35:09] Oh, like for every sequel, they're like, we all loved Evil Dead One, of course. But OK, OK. It's my favorite kind of phenomenon. I feel like you see that with all like horror sci fi franchises from like respectable critics in the 80s where they're like, how I long

[01:35:24] for the halcyon days of Friday the 13th Part One. And then you read the review and they're like utter contemptible trash was kind of denominator fill. Oh, but Ebert just is really into the like that montage you're talking about, Ben. And he he is talking about in

[01:35:40] Evil Dead Two that he thinks it's an homage to a taxi driver. Oh, interesting that that that's what he's doing. And he really he really leans into like the the slapstick stuff. Siskel never Siskel is really grouchy about. He gets really bad.

[01:35:57] It's just funny that this movie like has totally abandoned horror from its DNA outside of it being a monster movie. Right. Like it's like it's slapstick adventure now with like a monster sort of covering. Yeah. Like when you finally meet the Army of Darkness in the last like 20

[01:36:18] minutes, they're not scary. They're the opposite of scary. No. And Evil Dead Two is straddling that line in a really interesting way. And in this one, they're never positioning anything as being scary. No, this film this film has. Yeah. Right. Consistently, the scares are down

[01:36:34] with everyone in this series. That's the haunted the haunted forest at this point in this movie is when you would like rub your hands together with glee with like, oh, great. Like a lot of people stuff is about to happen. They're playing Freebird. Yeah.

[01:36:50] And I mean, it might be it's probably my favorite part of the movie. All that. Like, you know, the little guys, all you know, all the all the ash stuff here. It is funny for how big the final like third of this movie gets

[01:37:03] that it doesn't get any better than him just fucking alone in a shed. Oh, yes. I know. Badass. You know, I'm not going to say I know. And bad ass like hanging off of them like in your background, David, evil ash. Oh, so you put aside how technically

[01:37:23] complicated it is to do this kind of acting. It's also just hard to do multiple weeks of responding to nothing. It probably helps you play crazy, though. Right. Helps if you're like, yeah, you know, if you're if you're doing the Bruce Campbell thing,

[01:37:37] if you're trying to act like you're going mad acting against there's a great quote that J.J. pulled up here from if shins could kill the book we discussed at length in the Evil Dead 2 episode. His quote was, he said, thirty four, thirty five, thirty six, thirty seven,

[01:37:55] thirty eight. Those numbers barked out via megaphone by an effects assistant, all correlated with specific movements of an animated skeleton that I had to interact with, in this case, during a cert fight at thirty four. I had to arrive at a critical mark on

[01:38:07] the floor at thirty five. I turned towards a specific spot on the rear screen since I couldn't actually see the skeleton at thirty six. I duck a swipe from the skeleton as I rose a live action puppet skeleton attacked me from behind.

[01:38:18] I have about two point five seconds to fend him off before number forty when I take a swing at the animated skeleton by forty two. The beast would be defeated and I'd be off to the next fight. So it really is like it's like fucking like musical choreography.

[01:38:32] But you add into that there's so many ways that the effects can go wrong, that the gags can go wrong even if he gets it right. And then when you get to a sequence like him with the mini ashes, what he's reacting to is like five other

[01:38:45] performances that he had to give that all needed to interact with each other. He's amazing. He's amazing. He is amazing. And it's it's it's it's it's like balletic what he's doing. Yes. It kind of makes sense to me that that

[01:39:00] this was kind of in a way his his intro or his audition for like television, like lower budget action like Briscoe County Junior and Hercules. You know, Hercules. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That you it's all this stuff. But I guess at this point he was such

[01:39:21] a pro that I bet he could just run in do literally anything and and would be no it would probably easier than what he had to do in this movie. So I'm saying it is so funny that those shows broke out so much bigger

[01:39:37] in the popular culture than any of his movies. And that's running concurrent with him sort of making this pivot to like more adult respectable films. And they like those shows become these huge money makers that have like taken his style and his sort of format and

[01:39:54] applied it to like a formula and a medium perhaps that was like more accessible to children and genre fans. And then right when it felt like the transformation had been complete where it's like one side of Sam Raimi's persona is like mogul and he's got this

[01:40:08] whole thing running and now he's become a respectable like movie star director for adult dramas and thrillers and stuff. Then like Spider-Man comes around and it's like you got your back in. Now we're putting everything back together again. Yeah, but the TV side is kind of where

[01:40:23] he gets to hide Bruce for a while. Yes, it's like his his terrarium for Bruce. Yeah, he's he recently he was in Lodge 49, right? People really praised his work on that show. So good. He's so good on that. And when he it's so perfect when he

[01:40:39] shows up, you're like, of course, it's Bruce Campbell. And then he's just incredible on it. It's so he's so funny. I mean, obviously, he did Ash vs. Evil Dead. I'm wondering, yeah, like what I need more Bruce lately. Like, give me more of that.

[01:40:53] You're forgetting one hundred and eleven episodes of Burn Notice. Oh, I'm not forgetting. I'm not forgetting. He was great on that show. I mean, that show was a while ago now. But yeah, he did a Burn Notice spinoff prequel, right? Did he? Oh, yes.

[01:41:08] Burn Notice, The Fall of Sam Axe. That was a TV movie. But yes. Yes. Yeah. And no, I look. Burn Notice is one of those shows that I never watch consistently at all. But I think I may have lived with someone who watched it at some point.

[01:41:23] So it was occasionally on. And every time I would be like, Campbell's eaten. Like if nothing else, Bruce Campbell knows exactly what he's doing on this thing. But yeah, you know, there was he was an old secret agent in I want to say Miami, right? Yeah.

[01:41:40] I remember a lot of Hawaiian shirts. Yeah, it was. Yes, it was Miami. It was that classic USA thing where they were like plot schmaltz. What beachside location will this be set in? Like he's he's a sports doctor. Fine. I don't care. Is it in the Hamptons?

[01:41:56] OK, good. Green light. Like, please continue like that's fine. He must have had the best fucking time working on that show. Like, can you think about just Bruce? You get to be elder statesman. You're the fucking cocky, confident, like know it all guy.

[01:42:12] Doesn't he feel like someone who walks into a hotel and has a whole like knows exactly how to be in a hotel because he's like the convention Miami. It's like Hotel City. The guy was probably having so much fun in the hotels of Miami.

[01:42:24] And he lives in the Rogue Valley. He lives like where my mom lives in Ashland, Oregon. He lives like outside Medford. So he basically like lives in like a weird part of Oregon where he can like cool. Yeah. Like he can ride horses, ride

[01:42:40] horses. He could probably whitewater raft around or whatever. And then he flies to Miami, stays in a cool hotel and does bird notice. Pretty nice. Campbell, Bruce Campbell, Campbell. I mean, I think I've said this, but every single convention that I've either worked at or gone

[01:42:56] to as a fan when he was there and low bar what I'm about to say, he's so far and away the best dressed person in the entire vicinity. Like he really he dresses up for each one of those things like it's the fucking prom.

[01:43:09] Oh, his wife's a costume designer. Really? This makes so much sense because he's got these suits that look like they're custom made. He's got like shiny, almost Elvis suits. That's cool. I didn't know his wife was and she he married her right around now,

[01:43:24] right around Army of Darkness time. They got married in 1991. Cool. Yeah. And she worked on this movie. In fact, she is. Yeah. OK. All right. So yeah, he goes to get that. But he does the he fucks up plateau Barata Nicko. Right. He can't.

[01:43:41] He doesn't say it right. Classic Ben moment. He he he he he didn't read the last. It's like when my entire class went to see the stage production of Nicholas Nickleby because we were reading the book and you know how like Nicholas Nickleby, the play is like

[01:43:55] seven hours long or like you have to see it all day. No, I don't know. But well, keep going at the end when the big twist was revealed, my entire class gasped like revealing that we'd no one had finished Nicholas Nickleby. Everyone actually was surprised. Oh, that's funny.

[01:44:14] That's right. You're all teachers were so bad. Right. Yes, that's what you were like. Inside. I don't actually want to spoil Nicholas Nickleby for anyone on this podcast, but it has a big twist at the end and we were all like, oh my God. Like I own the

[01:44:31] Roger Rees DVD of the play, but I have not watched it. Now I mean now I might. I will. I highly recommend it. It is very much a stage experience like it's done in this very cool way. But I bet you it's like, you know,

[01:44:44] the production is cool. And obviously that was like that was Roger Reese's. That was what made him right. It's the film to play like they filmed the stage version of it. The national or the artist. It's eight and a half hours long. That's how long it is. Jesus.

[01:44:58] Yeah, you had to like you went and you like had dinner in the middle. That was like how it was done. It's like Gats like Gats, which I also saw or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Three of the most important works of dramatic literature. Exactly.

[01:45:12] Three Tony winning things. I don't think that's what it's. I love that that show when it got announced, she was like, it has to be two parts. You don't understand. It has to be two separate shows. It's just there's no way to contain the story in one night.

[01:45:24] And then the thing shuts down for the pandemic for like fucking 15 months. And she's like, yeah, I came up with some cuts. It's now one 90 minute show. Look, I don't know. Well, in in in on Broadway, it is now one show.

[01:45:36] And in London, you can see it as two shows. I will say my brother, who is a Cursed Child mega fan says the the one the one show version of it is like completely awful. Like it only works as two shows. I like the merch.

[01:45:50] You need it for the merch. You need to do the merch change. No other spoilies, but there's a merch change that happens midway through. And if you don't get that, it's not cool. You've got to do a transition. You're talking about language now.

[01:46:03] Yeah. That show is a real it is almost like podcast the right material and how yeah. Anyway, different podcast. So it's in the fucking Spider-Man turn off the dark theater. Oh, yeah. Is it? They I mean, they yeah, that makes sense

[01:46:18] because they would have had to use the biggest. That was the whole point of turn off the dark, right? They needed the absolute biggest space possible. I forget what that theater is. It was the American Airlines Theater or whatever. They should call it the Spider-Man Theater.

[01:46:30] They should name it after Spider-Man like he was August Wilson or whatever. And they should have a statue of Spider-Man outside of it. I think they should. There should be an Al Hirschfeld of Spider-Man with a broken back. I have to fly. You have to fly things.

[01:46:44] If you have to fly things, you go to that theater. You could. So he you know, because he fucks up right. He raises the army of darkness. Right. That's it. The line in the last half hour is just the battle. Well, wait, come on. I love that.

[01:46:57] I'm not saying we're done. I'm just saying that that's the rest of the plot. Yada yada. I would do the same thing to you. Even if I did raise the dead, I would be like, yeah, everything was fine. You would not own up. Nothing really came up.

[01:47:12] Can you send me back to my time? Yeah. Nothing to report. Straightforward. It's the point you made, Eva. Like, it's incredible how much this movie leans into him being an asshole where the first two movies he was like a goof. Right. And especially with the fish out of

[01:47:29] water premise of this movie, there's a version of it where you're like, he's like a modern guy who's in over his head and he's panicking. Right. And the comedy comes from him trying to keep it under control. But he's like a nebbish or whatever.

[01:47:42] And in this, he just fucks up with such arrogance and then comes in as like, you know, I got this. I can I can talk my way through this. And then when things go wrong, he's like defensive that people are angry at him for fucking up and lying

[01:47:55] about it. Yeah. Oh, it's just like the entire way they justify it is like this guy works at like a Walmart and he thinks a stock. And he said and he's an asshole about that, too, that he brags to these medieval people about the Walmart he works at.

[01:48:11] But but I do think it's almost like, you know, like he's like this weird anti Ripley where like Ripley becomes sort of like more focused and sort of like primal and heroic the more she like survives all these alien attacks. And like you said, Astrid gets broken

[01:48:26] like it just becomes bravado in the place where she's like, oh, in the place of anything else, because all of his emotions have just been like stomped out. Yeah. The sweet beta ash from the first one who hid the little necklace and he's dead.

[01:48:42] He's gone. Such a debt. Who fits in the early movies? Right. He doesn't really have this energy in either. I mean, certainly not in the first one. Right. But in the second one of the sort of like, all right, I got this

[01:48:52] like he's not like that in Evil Dead 2 at all. Right. No, he's a little bit like of a dick when people show up at the cabin. Yeah, sure. At that point he's cut his hand off and he's like, shut up. No one's going anywhere.

[01:49:05] But this is a new Ash. Right. He's more badass there than he is like uncouth in this. You know? Yeah. Hello, Mr. Fancy Pants. Like what the fuck? That's the first thing he says to anybody. Right. He's got like asshole like gym coach energy in this.

[01:49:24] Yeah. He's a bully. Right. He's a bully who like never got over being the high school quarterback. He still wants a big time everyone. But with a slickness of a used car salesman. No, I'm sympathetic. I mean, I still love him. He's still good. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Ash.

[01:49:40] It's great. Final Ash form until the video games and TV shows. I mean, the last night of the movie is him saying hail to the king. And kissing a strange woman. Give me some sugar, baby. He's going to have to kill her.

[01:49:54] I'm just like looking at these lines. Yoshi bitch, let's go. Like they're just so blunt. Do you think that that is essential to Ash's character, Eva? Like no matter who he falls in love with, they will eventually turn into a monster. He has to decapitate or whatever.

[01:50:11] Yeah. That's his curse. That's like the cosmic that's the cosmic horror of Evil Dead. Right. Because it's like that's the Lovecraftian horror is like you you fall in love. You have to decapitate your girlfriend and then she makes fun of you. Right. With her head forever until

[01:50:26] you move to a new location. He's always going to be a badass hero, but he will always be right. Essentially like yelled at by his girlfriend corpse. That's interesting. He will always have to steer the helicopter car out of the way from chopping his

[01:50:40] girlfriend into a million parts. Yes. Well, but then why doesn't he bring you know, Sheila with him? I guess. Is my question. Well, he's just got something going on here. Yeah. But it's just pillow talk, baby. Like I think this new Ash can't be tied down.

[01:50:58] So maybe the new girl will survive because new now Ash just like he's a fuck boy. Right. But maybe he has to be. He's the one guy who actually is like, I have to be a fuck boy. If I if it gets serious with me,

[01:51:11] you're going to turn into a monster. You know, if I buy you jewelry. Right. You don't want to be a fuck boy. You don't want to know what the next thing, the next five things will happen to you. But you end up in hell.

[01:51:26] You end up in hell. But also it's kind of funny. It's kind of, you know, it's kind of got like a sort of slapstick vibe. Sort of cartoony and cool. But you will be horny. Right. Yeah. Horny. Great bits, but very dead. It is funny.

[01:51:41] Like, I mean, Ramy still oversaw the reshoots when they did the new ending and other stuff. It wasn't they just like different crew and or whatever. And that's like Russia. Yeah, but it but it wasn't something. I mean, it was he was told he

[01:51:54] had to come up with a new ending, but it was an ending that he designed. And he's always said when people ask like canonically, which is the definitive ending? Like, what for you do you think is the true fate of Ash and Ash versus Evil Dead makes it

[01:52:07] the smart ending. But up until that point, he was like, I just think it's kind of appropriate. This guy has like a very good kind of appropriate. This guy has like two alternate realities and one of them is just he suffers more.

[01:52:20] And the other one is like a parody of an action movie. Right. Yeah, he actually he gets a break, but it's almost like you can just see the seams of his world now. He just writes in a movie. Yeah, there's a there's a Twilight Zone ending.

[01:52:33] That's like the, you know, tragic irony. And then there's the other ending that is like the joke is that he gets his hero moment. But once again, he's a 40 year old rock boy. Like nothing about this is actually cool. And I think I like that the TV

[01:52:49] show does is it's like they could have had so much happen to Ash in the like 20 years in between. And they're like, no, he's still working at the store. He's not even like really risen through the ranks that much. He still has the same amount of

[01:53:02] arrogance. He tells everyone all these things he used to do. But it's just like, yeah, then why are you working at a fucking S-mark, dude? But he also like the other I mean, it is like him being tortured in the future or he's he's

[01:53:16] the king. He's a badass. He's getting to get laid. He killed that evil dead. But the evil dead are never going to stop coming for Ash. I think that's the the other implied thing is like he didn't just bring back one evil dead. He fucked up the

[01:53:29] thing and they're always going to come. They're always going to come for Ash. Yes. And also even in the realities where he's a hero and he's a badass. Never always more in his own mind than in the eyes of others. Like it becomes almost like a defensive posture.

[01:53:47] Yeah. To mask like the sadness of like, yes, right. Anyone he ever loves is going to lose him and then fuck with him. Especially. Yeah. Again, the diets have no rules when and how they pop up is, you know, kind of whatever

[01:54:01] how they spread or how they infect is never really clear. It doesn't matter. None of that matters. It's just it's like a bully picking on a kid because them crying is funniest. Right. It's just like it's something this kid's the dorkiest, but like he reacts the worst

[01:54:17] or it's like all the nerds got powerful and are picking on the bully. Like they got the bully trapped. They're fucking torturing him because they because they're like, you think you're so fucking handsome. Yes. And we're going to just punch you and punch you and punch you

[01:54:32] forever, which is also like the subtext of the whole franchise is like, obviously, Bruce Campbell's a mensch and their dear friend, but it does kind of like here all the like nerdy sweet boys who are like this fucking avuncular jock wants to play with us.

[01:54:49] Yeah. From high school. We're going to like our friend from high school. We're going to. Yeah. If he wants to get on our level, then he has to punch himself in that pretty face. Yeah. That moment when he what is it? I think it's like the moment

[01:55:02] when he what is it? I think it's the the mini ashes knock him down onto like the welding table, like the iron and his face is burning. And then he has to take like the little shovel and like pry his face off the table like it's a flapjack.

[01:55:20] I'm just I'm I'm just I'm doing what you were doing. Griff now I'm just looking at the quotes from IMDB. You got real ugly. Come get some. Give me some sugar, baby. Like all this stuff. I'm now I am now locking into axes

[01:55:36] more jockey energy with this one. Actually, just like a ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to leave the store. That might be my favorite. This is another one that's incredible because I can't even track the internal logic of it when he's being knocked around by

[01:55:51] the mini ashes. And he says, all right, I'll crush each and every last one of you. I'll squash you so hard you'll have to look down to look up. That's like a Daffy Duck thing to say. Yes. And he really is like Daffy Duck

[01:56:04] getting his beak blown around to this front of his head. All three of these movies are like duck him up like the ultimate part of the comedy is imagining Sam Raimi giggling behind the camera. Yeah. What he's going to do to Bruce

[01:56:15] and how much Bruce is going to hate shooting it. Yeah. Yeah. And as Ben mentioned, the fucking bringing in a Mad Max car to top everything off. Yeah. Well, he's he's got he's got a lot of money. Yeah. Well, he's he's got he's got

[01:56:29] his Delta 88, of course, the classic Sam Raimi car. Yeah. It's it's in all his movies. Right. Griff, that's his thing. It's his Hitchcock cameo thing. It's Uncle Ben's car. It's Spider-Man. Wait, one more I just remembered is when Sheila knits him knits him a gift. He goes, good.

[01:56:47] I could use a horse blanket. So me. Yeah. Yeah. He's a good. He ends up kissing her. Like a kind of against her will. His seduction of her is insane because in the director's cut, too, it's a full sex scene. Like it goes from that kiss

[01:57:05] to then just like a full like Cinemax, like not that's explicit, but that kind of like gauzy lighting them in silhouette by candle. I got to watch this director's cut now. It's good. I think I think I cut is just smoother. Right. And it's what you're used to.

[01:57:23] So the director's cut might feel lumpier because of that. Yeah, I guess. But it's fun to watch just like every additional idea and gag and shot and all that stuff. I wanted to say the the mask for the like leader of the deadites whatever that design you I'm

[01:57:41] talking about. Yeah, it's great. It's so good. Is that also ash? Is that the ash that he buried? So yes, that's also playing that. Correct. Playing. So when he has a day off from playing the hero of the movie, he then has to undergo

[01:57:59] like four hours of prosthetic makeup. Penguin level. It's incredible. And I love the weird puppet skeleton evil ash at the end as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we've we've lavished so much praise on him. But I guess this is us saying it's not like he's

[01:58:16] not going to pop up in other Rameys, but it's always small roles. Right. Like he never had a big role with Ramey after this. I'm just triple checking that. But yeah, right. Was this the biggest flop? Like, no, it wasn't a flop exactly, but it underperformed.

[01:58:35] We'll get to the box office game in a second. But like it made basically its budget back. And I think Universal wanted it more to do at least like 20 to 30 million, you know, a little more like a dark man. Yeah. The weird thing I remember reading

[01:58:49] either Campbell or Ramey talk about in an interview was like two or three years after this movie came out, maybe even a little bit later. Universal called them up and it was like the home video numbers on this movie are like bizarrely strong. Right. Like this thing has

[01:59:07] finally gone into profit many times over. Would you guys be interested in doing a direct to video Army of Darkness 2? And they were like Army of Darkness is Evil Dead 3. What do you mean Army of Darkness 2? And they didn't know like whoever that person was at

[01:59:26] Universal was just like we have this bizarre one off movie that performs really well on home video. We can't stop re-releasing it. Why haven't we done another one of these? But but that's sort of more the missed opportunity for me is like I don't understand why

[01:59:40] Bruce Campbell didn't get to make like three more movies like this. You know, even if it wasn't with Ramey, it's like there should have been guys who were sort of like Ramey acolytes directing like can you make an eight million dollar Bruce Campbell is like a goofball asshole

[01:59:59] fighting some genre element. Like a better trauma. There should have been just like a trauma for Bruce Campbell movies. Right. Full Moon. Like I was thinking about all these sorts of like studios like that that really made their money on home video and

[02:00:15] just doing it at like maybe not half of this budget, which would still be 20 times more than a toxic Avenger. But just make the movies with him as this guy, even if it's not Ash, like just kind of the movie star archetype that he's created for himself.

[02:00:31] I wish there was just more of these, you know? I'm also surprised that all those guys that wrote on Briscoe County like J.J. Abrams and stuff didn't didn't use him more. Yeah, like as they got big, like the Carlton Cues. Yeah, yeah,

[02:00:50] yeah. Yeah, it's a fair point. I mean it's the Bruce Campbell thing of people cheerfully taken for granted, I guess, of like, well, you're Bruce Campbell. You'll be fine. You're doing great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe that's true

[02:01:04] and maybe he is doing fine. He doesn't want, you know, and obviously he found TV in the 90s and he like is sort of a pioneer on that front in a weird way. But yeah, maybe Bruce Campbell's sitting there thinking like, why didn't I get to do XYZ?

[02:01:18] I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, Raimi obviously loves his friends. He puts Bruce Campbell in lots of other movies, but he never does this again with him. But I think I was wrong about J.J. Abrams. It was just Carlton.

[02:01:32] It was just Carlton Cues, but no, but there is someone else. I mean, like, well, obviously Carlton Cues is the big thing about that movie, but yeah, maybe that is it. I don't know. That's the funniest part, though, with Loss is like, didn't Damon Lindelof work on like

[02:01:50] Nash Bridges or whatever? Yeah. That was Carlton Cues' show too. Right. That was it. Right. That was how they knew each other. And like it's just funny that Abrams was such a big guy and he creates this show and he's like, yeah, let me get my

[02:02:04] friend from Nash Bridges and he's going to get his friend from Nash Bridges and they'll run like the most heady sci-fi work on TV in a generation that changes how people think about this stuff. I'm saying like, get Campbell on the island, you doofuses! I know.

[02:02:22] It feels like there is still so much untapped that the guy can do and it's one of those things where you can't be totally angry about it because he has had a robust career and he's done all sorts of different things, but you do watch something like this

[02:02:38] and you're like, no one ever lets him be a five-tool player to the same degree that Rami did. Just appreciating how, what a comic genius he is. Yes. Which I feel like he got the three movies to prove himself more and more each

[02:02:58] time. And then by this one it's purely just he is a physical comedy and he's, yeah, all types of comedy but like a master of comedy. JJ pulled this up in the dossier. Most of the reviews for this movie were bizarrely negative. Well it's what he was saying

[02:03:22] about the Eberts where they were mad again that it's not Evil Dead 2 even though they were probably not that nice about Evil Dead 2. Yeah, they weren't. Entertainment Weekly gave it a C+, and their line was the spoofy cast of thousands looks

[02:03:36] a little too much like a crew of bland Hollywood extras. By the time Army of Darkness turns into a retread of Jason and the Argonauts featuring an army of fighting skeletons the film has fallen into a ditch between parody and spectacle. And I'm like, you're saying this as

[02:03:52] a negative? Yeah. And also, yeah, that sounds like a cool ditch to be in. Right, do you not understand? Like that's the exact thing the movie's consciously doing But then, JJ pulled up this is one of the only fully positive reviews was

[02:04:08] Peter Rayner in the LA Times and he has this line that's just such a good explanation of the Campbell magic where he says he's the perfect actor for Raimi because he's both joke and in-joke. He toys with his stalwartness Army of Darkness

[02:04:24] is mostly a terrific piece of mindlessness that may not sound like such a great recommendation until you drop in on some of this season's high-minded clunkers. And that two point of just like, right, that's this line that Bruce toes that almost no one else has such control over

[02:04:38] and when you add in the technical challenges of the movie itself it becomes even more impressive. But also, like his exact point where it's like, you're fucking ragging on Army of Darkness. What are the like blockbusters that you're giving an easy pass to that same year?

[02:04:52] I think it's... Yeah, I don't know. Calling something a retread of Jason and the Argonauts in the 90s. It's like, what the fuck? I can smell, I can hear the opera glasses getting pushed up the nose. I know. You're fucking cynicism. That's called an homage.

[02:05:08] That's not a retread. If it's a movie from that long ago, you are like, you're honoring it. You're not just ripping it off. We're ripping off Jason and the Argonauts? This stupid movie doesn't know whether it's a parody or a spectacle. And I'm like,

[02:05:24] no, maybe it does. Maybe it's playing with that exact balance. Maybe you don't know. Yeah, maybe you should eat a turd. Critics of 1993. I think that that's just a particular... No, no, but Griff, it's like those early 90s, it's the dawn of like, you know,

[02:05:44] indie cinema, right? And all this intelligence stuff is suddenly flooding theaters and I think it's just like the height of hold your nose you know, criticism of like, you know, schlock and blockbusters and this kind of cartoony stuff, right? I don't want to paint with a broad

[02:06:02] brush. That's how I feel a lot of this critical establishment was feeling post 80s, right? Post guns and brawn and a lot of dumb blockbusters. I'm looking for a counterpoint here, right? I mean, I don't like the guy who wrote the EW review. I'm not going to say

[02:06:22] his name right now. We're not going to say it. He's not someone I like. So, whatever. I think if you're not paying attention... Vladimir Putin. I feel like if you're not paying attention and you're not in on the joke you could think Army of Darkness was

[02:06:36] like a Steven Seagal-esque shitty action movie. Or just bad action movies. It is wild to me that like, I was looking for a direct counterpoint but Cliffhanger comes out like three months after this, right? And is one of like the highest grossing movies of the year

[02:06:58] and the critical response was kind of like yeah, it's like a good version of that shitty stupid stuff. You know, like everyone kind of gave it this sort of like, it's dumb obviously but it's like, it's like rarefied dumb. It's the same story as even mentioned

[02:07:12] Peter Jackson. Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi have very similar trajectories where they are masters of trash for years Critics don't really like their movies when they come out and then when the next movie comes out critics are like, this guy

[02:07:24] used to be good. This one's not that great. You know, like that's the story over and over. And then in the early 2000s they reinvent mainstream cinema. Like, you know, the two of them basically. And that's what's coming up but obviously Raimi clearly feels

[02:07:40] burned by both this and Darkman. Maybe not quite... I mean Darkman did better than this but like just not quite going over as he would have hoped. And then Hutzucker Proxy after this being the sort of like, oh this is

[02:07:52] the bad Coen's movie even though that movie rules But I think that sticks to him that like his friends have gone legit and become so respected and they're finally doing their big collaboration and it's the first of their movies to like be greeted with a resounding

[02:08:06] thud. I feel like maybe I'm... the timeline isn't quite right but I feel like The Frighteners and Quick and the Dead were both completely rejected and they're both incredible movies. That's exactly right those are both the sort of mid-90s okay, here's a real budget, do something

[02:08:22] for me. And both are kind of just burned at the time and just in general everything Raimi does in between Army of Darkness and Spider-Man feels like him grasping at legitimacy and I think all of the movies we're about to discuss are varying levels of good but

[02:08:40] he's never quite getting clearly this sort of recognition he wants and then he's like fine I guess then he makes Spider-Man and then everything is very different after that. It was what you said it's that everything that was not taken seriously at the time was canonized

[02:08:56] and also had become so profitable over the course of a decade the cults for all these things have become so valuable that he became suddenly a choice of a guy to take over a major franchise for movies that were kind of disregarded when they came out

[02:09:12] I'm just, I'm looking at the Cliffhanger review that Ebert wrote right? So this same year this feels like such a good counterpoint of like that was the biggest dumb action movie of that year, right? You have things like In the Line of Fire

[02:09:26] and Fugitive that are more high-minded that same year, right? But like Cliffhanger everyone who likes it admits that it's junk, right? And Ebert's third paragraph he's talking about how Stallone's had a bad run and all the movies have flopped and everyone's like

[02:09:40] viewing this film with a sense of urgency of is this his final test and he says, my guess is that it won't flop because it delivers precisely what it promises. It's big budget extravaganza with a lot of stunts and special effects starring Stallone

[02:09:54] as professional da da da da da da da and then his next line is true. There's not a moment in the plot that I could believe that didn't bother me for an instant so he's saying like this thing is stupid. It's stupid and it makes

[02:10:08] no sense but it is delivering the exact thing audiences are asking for. It's delivering on the promise and I think the Army of Darkness thing He would have a yardstick for every different yardstick for every movie. Of course, which I appreciate about him. I enjoy that

[02:10:22] and I enjoy like him giving movies that sort of display of kindness but I do think part of this movie's the confusion it was greeted with is just like what is the tone of this thing? What is this? Versus something like Cliffhanger where it's like

[02:10:38] we know it's dumb and we're delivering exactly this kind of dumb movie you've seen before and critics are like thank you. 6 out of 10. It's stupid. Army of Darkness they're like what is this weird pastiche and I think back to the great Ed Solomon, incredible screenwriter

[02:10:54] was on the George Lucas talk show and he was talking about the process of working on Men in Black which was like a very torturous film that we David, you and I often talk about in terms of being a masterpiece especially for films of that size

[02:11:10] and they got Tommy Lee Jones on board. I think he signed on before they had Will Smith and he wanted to go out to dinner with Ed Solomon and maybe Sonnenfeld as well and they're like having their steak dinner. Tommy Lee

[02:11:24] Jones seemingly in the same sort of mood that he was when he told Jim Carrey that he wouldn't sanction his buffoonery and they're like this is like a celebratory dinner we roped a big Academy Award winning movie star and Tommy Lee Jones is just kind

[02:11:36] of like scowling and then he looks up at Ed Solomon at one point and he goes so what is it? And he goes what do you mean? And he goes well you have to rewrite the script. Is it a comedy or is it a sci-fi movie?

[02:11:50] And he goes it's both and he goes it can't be both. You have to pick one asshole. And it does feel like that's how critics kind of responded to this movie. Well, you have to pick one asshole. But they're also like giving credit

[02:12:08] to Sylvester Stallone that they would never give to Bruce Campbell. No! And it makes me mad. They're like Stallone knows what kind of movie star he is. After all those years I guess he'd earned that respect if you can call it that. I don't know. The benefit

[02:12:24] of the doubt. It's weird. Yes. He's been doing Rambos. I know. That's the reason I wish he had just gotten to make like three more of these. Not Ash movies but Bruce Campbell movie star films within the studio system at a lower budget so that at least

[02:12:40] like his persona could have solidified to a point where critics are like well we know what Bruce Campbell does. It's that kind of vibe. Let's play the box office game Griffin. Let's play the box office game. Okay. Eva if you know

[02:12:54] the format here we're going to talk about the box office for February 19th 1993 which is when Army of Darkness opened. David? Do you know what else happens on that day? On February 19th 1993 no. What happens? It's my birthday. Oh that's right of course. Well you

[02:13:12] would have been four years old in 1993? Is that right? Born in 89 right? Yes. I would have been four years old. Four years old. You probably did not see Army of Darkness in theaters but maybe you saw some of these other films. No I saw them in theaters.

[02:13:30] This film opened number six at the box office to four million dollars. It made eleven and a half total. A little underwhelming for Universal. And it's kind of a February dump after it was supposed to be a summer release that got

[02:13:46] delayed because of the Hannibal ship. It was set for July 92 and so it's coming out a lot later. Number six. So it's not in the top five. Number one however is a comedy in its second week of release. A classic. Genuinely you would say

[02:14:03] a classic? Yes. One of the greats. You're being sincere. Yes I am. Very sincere. I love this movie. It's very good. I'm sure you love it too. It stars one of your favorite actors. Is it a Steve Martin movie? Nope. Oh is it Groundhog Day? It's Groundhog Day.

[02:14:25] Pretty good movie. It had to be. February. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty great movie. Eva do you like Groundhog Day? Love Groundhog Day. Who doesn't like Groundhog Day? It's a Pearl Yates film. Yes. I do love that Ash kind of is stuck in a Groundhog Day thing of like

[02:14:41] the first act of every Evil Dead movie having to put him through the same events over and over again. Cosmic Man. Yeah. Yep. It is. Yeah. It is. It is staggering to think about the implications of Groundhog Day all the time. It's so good. Okay. Number two

[02:14:57] at the box office is a film that I'm pretty sure if I didn't see it in theaters I saw it pretty soon after. It's an adventure film. Comedy sort of. It's about animals. Is it Homeward Bound? Yes. Can you give me the subtitle? The Incredible Journey.

[02:15:21] Yes. The first Homeward Bound. Of course the second one they got lost in San Francisco is that correct? Correct. I definitely saw that in theaters. That's the one with the dog and the cat. Two dogs one cat. Sally Field, Donna Meche, Michael J. Fox. That's correct.

[02:15:39] Dude that shit's good. That shit rocks. Does it? I've been watching since I was a kid but I thought it was really cool when I was like fucking seven. Chance the Dog? I thought it was so cool when I was a kid.

[02:15:55] Do their mouths move? Do they do the full or is it just right? They do like Garfield style. It's like Milo and Otis. They just think they can telepathically speak to each other. Yes. It rules. Is it Homeward Bound 2 The Adventures of Yellow Dog? No.

[02:16:11] The Adventures of Yellow Dog is something else. What is that? Far From Home. Far From Home. Oh man so close. The Adventures of Yellow Dog but that was another one. There were so many of these kinds of movies because there's the Great Panda Adventure as well.

[02:16:27] There's Benji's. There's a ton of Benji's. Benji. Yeah. Bingo. Just so much I guess it must have been so annoying to make these fucking movies with these animals right? The bear. The bear. We've talked about Bart the Bear. But he's in Homeward Bound as well.

[02:16:47] Does he threaten them at some point? Does he get the and and Bart the Bear as bear? He certainly is in Homeward Bound yes. Homeward Bound is a remake of a 60s live action Disney movie called The Incredible Journey which is why it has that subtitle

[02:17:01] which was I think Disney's sort of response to Milo and Otis when that first wave of Benji, Milo and Otis, Incredible Journey, whatever. And then it felt like that was like they sort of let that lie for 30 years because they were like these things

[02:17:15] are a pain in the ass to make right? Maybe we don't need to do this and then the 90s roaring back to life. Snow Dogs. Like the final moment. Snow Dogs. Well that's when we start to tiptoe into like can we use CGI? Do we not have

[02:17:27] to put fucking real dogs in front of camera? But that's no that's the end of that run. That's like late 90s early 2000s is the end. Well so Homeward Bound is number two. It's on its way to a healthy 41 million dollars at the box office. Number three is

[02:17:43] a costume drama period film. It's set in America though not British. Okay. And it's an adaptation of a famous French story. Is it Dangerous Liaisons? Not Dangerous Liaisons. Oh wait. It's a French story. Hold on. It's a remake of a French film.

[02:18:11] It's a remake of a French film? It's not a good movie. It's not well regarded. It's not Diabolique is it? No. It's set after the Civil War. It's a remake of a French film. But it's set in the United States? Yep. It's set in Tennessee.

[02:18:35] I'll give you the basic premise if you want it. I'm just thinking also about a period drama that's released in February rather than an Oscar season. That's how you can smell the stink on this one. It's a soldier returns home from war.

[02:18:51] The wife begins to suspect that he is an imposter. It's a return of Martin Gere situation. Weird. And this movie's a stinker. Does it have big stars in it? Yeah, two big stars. Civil War, imposter, America, remake of French movie. What about the director? John Emil, of course.

[02:19:17] The man only makes hits. Copycat. Entrapment. The Corps. Fuck. The man in the middle, of course. I watched The Corps for the first time recently. That movie fucking rips. I was so disappointed with Moonfall that someone recommended The Corps to me. Right, right. You wanted something

[02:19:41] with that energy. The Corps, if it came out today, would win Best Picture. But I looked at fucking John Emil's filmography after watching The Corps. I've looked at the name of this fucking movie in the last two weeks.

[02:19:57] I'm going to give you the name because I feel like you're not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. The film is Summersbee. Richard Gere and Jodie Foster. Yeah, I was never going to get that. You've also got Bill Pullman and James Earl Jones.

[02:20:11] Arlie Ernie is in it. But yeah, it's classic shit. Is it the real guy or is it an imposter? Yeah. Did you guys know that James Earl Jones did the voice of Darth Vader? Get out of town. What are you fucking talking about?

[02:20:25] Ben, what are you talking about? I was watching the podcast and I just thought we should mention facts and trivia and stuff. This is why we hired researchers so we don't just make wanton comments like that. That's a script. We need to double check. I'm right.

[02:20:43] I don't think it's a good idea. Number four at the box office is a holdover from Oscar season. It's still hanging around. An indie hit that won an Academy Award and was nominated for many more. It won one. Can you tell me in what category? Best Original Screenplay.

[02:21:05] Best Original Screenplay. It's too early for Slingblade. It's far too early for Slingblade. I know. I'm just trying to think of movies that had that kind of Best Original Screenplay energy, indie crossovers. Kind of, I think, launched the career of Harvey Weinstein, basically, as an Oscar powerhouse.

[02:21:27] It was an early Miramax success. It's The Crying Game. That was a landmark one. Absolutely. And number five, another holdover from Christmas. It's an animated film. Is it Beauty and the Beast? Aladdin? Got my years wrong. I was getting confused about this movie being shot in 92, released in 93.

[02:21:59] That's right. Aladdin, number five, 15 weeks in. It's made $179 million. It rules society, of course. It was elected president of the United States. Pretty much. Eva, do you have any takes on Summer's Be, The Crying Game, or Aladdin? I'm not even asking. I don't like Aladdin. Wow. Anti-Aladdin.

[02:22:21] You don't like it at all, or you think it's overrated? Overrated, yeah. I like it less than most. Too much Robin Williams. Don't like it. I kind of am inclined to agree, but I also think he's maybe the best part of the movie. Oh, yeah.

[02:22:39] I think your episode about Aladdin was better than the movie Aladdin. Wow! I feel like my horny energy was off the charts on that episode. I can't remember, though. Number six of the box office's Army of Darkness. Number seven, Loaded Weapon One. Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson.

[02:22:59] Written, directed, and produced by producer Ben Hosley? Ben, have you seen or do you care about Loaded Weapon One? Fully financed? I haven't seen it. I'm not familiar with these movies at all. It was a national lampoon spoof of Lethal Weapon.

[02:23:15] Yeah, and they only ever made one, Ben. They just called the first one one. It's a joke about how they're always getting turned into sequels. Is it worth watching? I don't think so. Nobody liked it. No, nobody liked it. You should have put your money into it.

[02:23:33] Yeah, Hot Shots is the better version of that. Or Top Secret. Top Secret's a good one. When are they going to make Hot Shots part tre? You want to call up Charlie Sheen right now? I think he's ready to go. He's never been better.

[02:23:53] You've also got a couple more Oscar holdovers. Sense of a Woman, Howard's End. You've got Malcolm X. You've got The Waning Days of Muppet Christmas Carol. And Untamed Heart, the Christian Slater Marissa Tomei movie. But isn't that about him having an orangutan heart?

[02:24:13] Does he have an orangutan heart? Yes, a baboon's heart. Or at least he claims that he has one? I don't know. Is it a lie? It might be a lie. Apparently, I'm reading the Wikipedia summary. It's a lie that a nun told him in an orphanage.

[02:24:33] Who directed that? What's their series? Tony Bill is the director of this movie. Do you have time for a mini-series? A Tony Bill mini-series? Tony Bill produced The Sting. He won an Oscar. Then he was like, what I really want to do is direct.

[02:24:51] All the movies he directed are strange. The last movie he directed was Flyboys, which was the fighter pilot movie that was financed by the National Film Fund. It was a really good movie. It was a really good movie. It was financed by the Ellison's.

[02:25:09] The one Ellison wanted to be a movie star. He was good at flying planes. The one who now finances half the movies in Hollywood. King of Skydance. He also made Untamed Heart. He also made My Bodyguard. Crazy People, I feel like, is a fully hated movie.

[02:25:29] With Daryl Hannah and Dudley Moore. He's like the... He's in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. He was also a character actor. Yeah, he's Terry. He's the guy that cut... Who's like, I cut off the... He cut the mattress tag off. He's like that scary guy. Oh yeah, sure. Right, yeah.

[02:25:53] His career is so fucking strange. Yeah, that's... That's... Anyway, so that's Untamed Heart. So that's the weekend. It's a good weekend. I like it. It's a lot of weird stuff. I do too. I just want to shout out quickly because this is the first episode

[02:26:15] we've recorded since it happened. But one of our listeners has made a website called BoxOfficeGuh.me BoxOffice Game with the period of the NBA and ME. That's like a wordle style game where a new box office weekend goes up every night at midnight or 1am maybe Eastern Time.

[02:26:33] You have to guess what the top 5 movies are. And it's for a maximum 200 points per movie but much like David giving me hints you can sacrifice points to get the name of an actor, director, genre, whatever. It's very impressive and very addictive. It's very cool how it's made

[02:26:49] and Griff seems to be the best person in the world at it What a surprise. I played one round with no hints and I got just slaughtered. I didn't know you could get hints. I was like, I can never play this game. This game is impossible.

[02:27:03] But it's really impressive. Now I'm going to go back and do it with hints. I didn't start sharing my scores until the second day I played because the first day I did that and I fucking belly flopped and I got like 50 points.

[02:27:17] I'm a big fan of at least give me the tagline. I go for genre. I find that if I have genre and distributor and they give you distributor for free, I usually figure it out. That is how I usually start with you as well.

[02:27:27] I guess that makes sense. What's Wyrtle? Oh no. Come on Ben. Come on. You know about Wyrtle. Ben, you know about Wyrtle. Yeah, I do. Do you? I can't tell if you're bailing on a bit or you're pretending. You don't have to pretend that you love it

[02:27:50] but do you know what it is? No, it's really good. I always get a high score. Because I'm good at it. Guys, we're done. My daughter's about to come home from daycare. I got to wrap this up. I agree. I'm looking at Ben's top Wyrtle guesses. Dirty, ditch,

[02:28:14] hole, holes, pits, pits, pits, pukes, bones, armies. He's good at Wyrtle. Eva, thank you so much for being on the show. Guys, thank you so much for having me. I'm such a fan of this podcast. I've been so excited about this for so long.

[02:28:38] You got me to do a cool movie too. I'm so happy. You'll be back but I'm thrilled to learn that you listened to this podcast. I can't believe it. We truly, anytime you are on one of the podcasts we listen to,

[02:28:52] David and I always go, she's just the best. Her episodes always are standouts and the second we heard that you liked the show we were like, well, they're long overdue to get her on then. We just didn't want to ask because we were intimidated by you

[02:29:04] until you made it clear that you listened. I do! I just want to very quickly say, I give you credit for warping my brain in a bad way for being obsessed with trying to find the Moon Maid Dick Tracy book. But you said something on some pandemic episode

[02:29:18] of Doughboys that I truly, I'm not being hyperbolic here, is like the mantra I have kept in my head throughout these last two horrible years and one of the few things that kind of kept me sane where I think you were talking about baking and

[02:29:32] projects you had done when you were in lockdown and Mitch was like shitting on himself for like not taking on a pandemic hobby or whatever and you said the way, I'm going to paraphrase here, but you said something to the effect of

[02:29:46] the way you win the pandemic isn't by how well you use your time during the pandemic. The way you win the pandemic is making through it alive. And I was very similarly dealing with that like I'm a piece of shit and other people

[02:29:58] are becoming more functional during this to distract themselves and I have just like broken as a person and I it is a thing I repeated myself a lot of just like the only goal here is to stay alive and get through this fucking horrible unprecedented

[02:30:10] thing in terms of modern history. So thank you truly from the bottom of my heart for saying that because it's it gave me a lot of value. Thank you for saying that Griffin that really means a lot and and you guys

[02:30:22] got me through a lot of pandemic just by being fun friends in my ears. So I appreciate you a lot. I always like to hear that. That always makes me feel nice. Yeah. I also think it's just that our show is too long. I mean people give

[02:30:34] us more credit for helping them get through the pandemic just because it takes less blank check episodes per day than most shows. But you also there's the project you get to watch the movie you get to like make a little bit of it.

[02:30:46] It's so it's just really it feels communal and it's lovely so I appreciate you guys a lot very kind of you to say and I want to say thank you for your kind words and thank you to our listeners and please remember to rate review and subscribe

[02:31:02] thank you to Marie Barty for our social media Joe Bowen and Pat rounds for our artwork lame on covering the Great American novel for our theme song JJ Birch Nick Laureano for our research Alex Baron AJ McCann for our editing. You can go to

[02:31:18] blank check pod dot com with links to all the things connected to our podcast that I no longer have to call out individually over on blank checks special features the Patreon account patrons dot com slash blank check we're doing the Matrix. We went back to the Matrix

[02:31:36] That's right. That's a thing you can listen to if you yeah, we're almost done with it in fact, in fact, Matrix resurrection is coming up. It's coming up and that's a wild one. We won Riffey Yeah, they call me Griffin but David was riffing in that one

[02:31:54] God with fucking in this tune in next week for the quick and the dead Yes, very good. So I've never seen it. I'm very excited to watch it. Russell Crowe is so hot in that movie so you can say marry me credit

[02:32:10] He knows how to pick his hotties. Yeah female gaze but make it Sam Russell Crowe in the 90s just just my favorite biggest crush. David is fanning himself. He's got sloppy hair too sweaty He's covered in dirt. He's vulnerable He's vulnerable I love him. I love the man

[02:32:32] Bigger smaller crush than Miss Honey Honey is very specific. I think I think we go for us to grow Ship them together Yeah, why not? Why not fire and ice Yeah, whatever each other smooch smooch smooch kiss kiss Honey Kiss kiss kiss crow

[02:32:56] It's fire and ice. I think that's a good pitch. That's like a fucking foreign film market pitch if I've ever heard it and as always I just think there's no more respectful way to finish off our evil dead trilogy than by saying Groovy Groovy Groovy

[02:33:16] I don't want to call my shot in advance, but I'm proud of this one. I think this is a clever a new angle New angle. I'm not gonna talk it up. I may put this at the end of the episode because I think I think

[02:33:28] this is I think I finally found a new angle seven years in You're gonna fall into the episode Funny from the sky funny Maybe it's not that new of an angle, but I think it's it's different. It's different

[02:33:42] It's not gonna work every time it works for this one movie Okay, ready? Yeah