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Ash Vs. Evil Dead Review 3.3 – “Apparently Dead”
Loading...Ash vs. Evil Dead Review: 3.3: “Apparently Dead”
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the review of the third episode of season 3 of the hit Starz series Ash vs. Evil Dead. I’m Bryan Kristopowitz.
I just finished Bruce Campbell’s latest book, Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, and it’s awesome. It isn’t as free-wheeling and goofy as Campbell’s first book, If Chins Could Kill, but you can hear Campbell’s voice in the writing, and you learn quite a bit about what he’s been doing since the end of the first book. There isn’t as much about Bubba Ho-tep as I was hoping for, but the sections on Alien Apocalypse and The Man with the Screaming Brain could probably be expanded to be its own book.
As for the Ash vs. Evil Dead stuff that Campbell talks about, he doesn’t get into too much detail about the show’s production, outside of some stuff about how Evil Dead creator and pilot episode director Sam Raimi was allowed way, way, way more time than any of the season one directors to do his episode. I always figured that he had to have had more time, in general, than any of the other first season directors since the pilot is the longest episode of the series (so far), but I had no idea that it was substantially longer. I guess you get to do those things when you’re Sam goddamn Raimi.
If you’re a Bruce Campbell nerd, Hail to the Chin is an absolute must have and an absolute must read. Great stuff throughout. And here’s to hoping that the next book will be a more focused telling of the genesis and production of Ash vs. Evil Dead. I would love to hear more about how hard it was to make the first season.
And now, the third episode of season three of Ash vs. Evil Dead.
Episode 3: Apparently Dead
Directed by: Andres Meza-Valdes and Diego Meza-Valdes
Written by: Ivan Raimi
(Book cover image from Amazon. All other images courtesy of Starz)
Apparently Dead starts with Candace Barr’s funeral. Ash shows up wearing a wacky as hell suit (he’s got a yellow tie, a striped blue suit jacket, and he’s wearing those garish white shoes that Clark Griswold wore when he met Christie Brinkley in National Lampoon’s Vacation. Ash also looks to be wearing his usual blue deadite fighting shirt under his suit jacket). Ash’s daughter Brandy is there and trying to hold herself together, and Ash is trying his damnedest to be on his best behavior. He wants to be there for his newly revealed daughter. But then he is Ash and this is Ash vs. Evil Dead, so you know some messed up stuff is likely to occur soon. And it does. Ash hears from the funeral director that Candace, “Candy,” who was decapitated in the first episode of the season, had her head sewn back on. As soon as he hears this Ash freaks out. Candy was killed by a deadite, with the Evil Dead all around. There’s a good chance that she would have become a deadite if she hadn’t been decapitated. And now, with the Evil Dead still around them, and with Candy’s head reattached, she could be a deadite now.
Sonofabitch that can’t be good. Ash checks out Candy’s coffin. Everything seems to be okay. Candy is still dead, at least that’s what it looks like. Ash goes in for a closer look. And then Ash gets pulled into the coffin by a Candy deadite. Once inside the coffin, Ash tries to figure out what the hell is going on. How can two people fit inside a coffin made for one person? And how the hell is he going to get out of it? Before he can create a viable plan, the deadite Candy appears and attacks. After some potentially sexually explicit nastiness, some of it involving the framed memorial photograph on top of the coffin, Ash manages to beat back Candy, decapitating her with pieces of the picture frame (it’s a weird as hell fight scene). He should be able to get out of the coffin at this point. Should be. He doesn’t, though. Our hero gets stuck in there, knocked out in the aftermath of Candy’s decapitation.
Some time passes, and the actual funeral begins. Brandy is upset that Ash is nowhere to be found. She tries to delay the start of the funeral for him, but the funeral director tells her that the ceremony needs to begin. Brandy goes to the front of the room, stands next to the casket, and starts giving the eulogy. Right in the middle of speaking, Ash emerges from the coffin, cussing up a storm and holding Candy’s severed head in his hand. Doing this in front of everyone actually makes Ash feel a tad embarrassed, so he puts Candy’s head back in the coffin and sits down so Brandy can finish her eulogy. At that moment, it was the least he could do.
Once the funeral ends, Ash finds out that Ruby is at the funeral service, too, and that she’s friendly with Brandy (Brandy knows Ruby as her high school guidance counselor Ms. Previtt). Ash tries to explain to Brandy who Ruby really is and what she’s likely up to, but Brandy doesn’t want to hear any of it. Brandy wants Ash out of her life, and she’s going to go live with Ruby since Ruby, in Brandy’s mind, is the only person she knows in the world and can trust now that her mother is dead and gone. So Brandy leaves with Ruby, and Ash is pissed. Ruby again?
It’s at this point that Ash convenes with his fellow Ghostbeaters Pablo, Kelly, and “new guy” Dalton. They’re going to have to find the Kandarian Dagger, the only known weapon that can actually kill someone like Ruby. There’s probably still one in the woods, buried in the ground after the events of the end of season two. Ash tasks Pablo, Kelly, and Dalton with finding the dagger. Ash would go with them, but he has to find a way to keep Brandy safe. Ash can’t allow Ruby to gain more of a hold on his daughter
So Pablo (who has another weird ass naked lady wearing a mask hallucination in the church), Kelly, and Dalton head to the woods to find the dagger and Ash heads back to his house to intercept Brandy and keep her the hell away from Ruby. Ruby, meanwhile, is in the town cemetery with the Necronomicon in hand. What the hell is Ruby doing in a cemetery with the Book of the Dead? Ruby performs a ritual involving her own blood and a flying bug of some kind, and then something comes out of the ground. And that something is a very, very dead body. But who is the dead body?
Ash arrives home and immediately senses something bad. He doesn’t quite know what the bad is, though. Ruby? Some other demon deadite?
It’s Brock Williams, Ash’s father. He’s in the living room, on the couch, conversing with Brandy. They seem to be having a good time. But how the hell is that possible? Brock Williams is very dead. His head was crushed in season two.
Shit. Brock Williams is a deadite now.
Meanwhile, Pablo, Kelly, and Dalton are digging for the dagger. There doesn’t seem to be much hope of finding the weapon, but then Pablo comes across it and picks it out of the dirt. The Ghostbeaters can now defeat Ruby. If they ever get out of the woods, that is. There’s Evil still lurking in the woods, and it’s looking for fresh victims.
Apparently Dead is a blast from start to finish. It’s rude, it’s crude, it’s messed up as all hell (the whole funeral section of the episode is so brilliantly wrong that I’m amazed it works as well as it does. It’s goddamn hilarious). The return of Lee Majors as Ash’s father Brock is a hoot, especially with how the episode reveals that the dead body Ruby resurrects is Brock. You kind of figure it’s going to be him, but then when you see the body come out of the ground you’re not sure. The dead and rotting body doesn’t look like Brock at all. But then he goes to his old house, now Ash’s house, and takes a shower. Who else but the previous owner of the home would do that?
Star Bruce Campbell does a great job shifting from the goofy Ash to the super serious Ash when he realizes that Ruby is in town and manipulating Brandy. His “papa bear” remark would sound ridiculous coming out of any other actor’s mouth. Campbell sells it and makes you believe that he’s pissed. There’s real electricity between Campbell and Ruby’s Lucy Lawless. There’s also major adversarial electricity between Campbell and Majors when Ash finds his dead father is not as dead as he used to be. When they fight and Ash breaks out the chainsaw you know the crap is on big time.
Pay close attention to the song that plays over the end credits. Would you pay money to hear Campbell and Lawless sing show tunes, or at least songs that sound like show tunes? And is it possible that Campbell has out William Shatnered William Shatner with that song?
The search for the Kandarian Dagger is shocking mostly for the way it ends. Is Dalton really a deadite now or is what happens to him just a trick? Ash vs. Evil Dead has no problem killing off seemingly important and major characters at any point, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve seen the last of Dalton. I don’t think we have, though. I think the deadite Dalton that attacks Kelly is a trick, some kind of illusion. Dalton’s story can’t be done yet (isn’t that more of an episode eight kind of thing?).
Pablo keeps seeing the naked woman wearing the mask. Something big is going to happen to him/with him at some point this season. I don’t know what the heck is going on with Kelly at the moment.
And kudos to Katrina Hobbs, Candace Barr, who sure knows how to be a nasty deadite. The bit where she sticks her tongue through a framed picture is disturbing as hell.
Apparently Dead is Ash vs. Evil Dead back in top form. Bring on episode four!
