First scene that Sam writes for Ash, he’s putting on a man-girdle. That the beer-bellied Ash is so unlike most of pop culture’s hyper-competent heroes, Campbell says, is what keeps luring him back to Evil Dead. Ash is saving a lot of people, but he’s also got a lot of people killed, too.” “But if you’re the hero, you gotta step out and make decisions, and some of them are gonna be really bad. You can just sit in your trailer, drink beer, and watch softcore porn and your life is over,” he says, authoritatively. He’s on a hero’s journey, a bumpy road.”Ĭampbell, who’s known for assuming a kind of hybrid persona when talking Evil Dead-half-Bruce, half-Ash-starts channeling Ash’s half-baked wisdom: “’Cause if you’re a lazy bastard, you don’t have to go the hero route. This is all to say that Ash’s life, on paper, is desperately sad. Back then, we learn through an illuminating acid trip in Episode Four, Ash’s ambitions amounted to one lousy vacation to Jacksonville-a laughably attainable goal that he’s still somehow never achieved. Instead, Ash is like a walking time capsule, an aging body with a mind stuck in 1981-the year a twenty-something Ash spent the night in a cabin and watched his girlfriend and all his friends get murdered. It would feel disingenuous if he left the season having learned everything.” “The finale episodes, to me, show that this guy has grown maybe 2 percent, which is all you can hope for in a character like this,” DiGregorio says. He becomes vaguely attached to his two sidekicks, Pablo (Ray Santiago) and Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo), but their arcs end with them aghast at their friend, who just willingly traded the fate of the world for a chance to skip town with them in his Delta 88.Īsh may be too foolish to ever grow up, but for DiGregorio and many of Ash’s fans, that’s part of his appeal. He falls in sort-of-love with a cop, but the romance comes to an abrupt, bloody end. Ten episodes and untold barrels of blood later, not much about Ash has changed. The fan-proclaimed king of postmodern cool might have petered out the rest of his life in weed smoke-filled squalor had he not accidentally unleashed evil into the world (again) by reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the Book of the Dead, while high and trying to impress a girl. The man who saved the world, we learn, has spent his peaceful days in blissful mediocrity, living in trailer parks, picking up women, guzzling beer, and working at a local electronics store. Twenty-three years after Army of Darkness, the last in Sam Raimi’s beloved Evil Dead trilogy, Ash vs Evil Dead brought Campbell back to his most iconic role, picking up with the chainsaw-handed hero well into middle age. More buffoonery, more of his undeniable heroism, more smirking, brash badassery.

For more than two decades, of course, what the “people” really wanted was more Ash.

Ash vs the evil dead