MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Army of Darkness’ Thriller Marches to Its Own Drum : Sam Raimi’s fantasy fest mixes goofball riffs with cheesy horror effects. It’s great fun--until the special effects take over.

Ash (Bruce Campbell) is a straight-arrow, square-jawed department store employee--housewares division--who gets hurtled back into the Dark Ages in “Army of Darkness,” the new Sam Raimi fantasy fest. It’s the kind of concoction we’ve come to expect from Raimi (“Evil Dead,” “Darkman”): Goofball riffs crossed with cheesy/sophisticated horror effects. He’s a gifted knockabout movie maniac who works on his own pop comic wavelength.

The time-traveler scenario, by Raimi and his brother Ivan, has a built-in gag: Ash is as fatuously, pompously handsome as Gaston in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” (He barely registers his maidenly lady-in-waiting, played by Embeth Davidtz). He also has a jumbo-sized attitude, 20th-Century style, which perplexes his 13th-Century attackers. Even more, he totes a 12-gauge shotgun and has a chain saw where his right hand used to be.

Ash might have stepped out of the pages of one of the wilder and weirder “dark” comic books but he’s so stalwart he’s lunky--he’s a parody of heroism even as he performs such amazingly heroic feats as staving off an army of galloping skeletons or battling a gloppy fanged creature at the bottom of a well. Ash’s dialogue keeps the movie (citywide) just goofy enough that even audiences that don’t go in for schlock-horror phantasmagorias will be tickled.

Or at least they will be until the special effects get too frenetic and take over the picture. Raimi wants to kid the genre but he also wants to demonstrate that he’s able to do it straight. The film (rated R for violence and horror) loses its prickly, nervy humor toward the end, when the skeletons launch a full-scale attack on a castle under Ash’s protection and wave upon wave of creatures clamber over the parapets. Even here, Raimi’s imagery, which is processed through a high-tech matte system called Introvision, is a cut above the norm: It’s like a riper, darker version of what Ray Harryhausen did in films like “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” But the film doesn’t surprise us in ways that make us laugh anymore. It doesn’t turn serious, exactly, but it loses its parodistic edge.

Raimi, when he’s really cooking, knows how to make the techniques of fantasy-horror seem funny all by themselves. When Ash shoots an arrow we get to follow the arrow all the way into its target. When this was done in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” it was just a piece of whiz-bang derring-do but here it’s kind of kicky too. Raimi builds our awareness of movie technique into our response; he makes us laugh at our connoisseurship because, after all, it’s really a connoisseurship of schlock . Campbell, who also starred in the two “Evil Dead” movies, is the perfect actor for Raimi because he’s both joke and in-joke. He toys with his stalwartness.

“Army of Darkness” 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.

‘Army of Darkness’

Bruce Campbell: Ash/Evil Ash

Embeth Davidtz: Sheila/Evil Sheila

Marcus Gilbert: Arthur

Ian Abercrombie: Wiseman

A Dino De Laurentiis Communications presentation of a Renaissance Pictures production, released by Universal Studios. Director Sam Raimi. Producer Robert Tapert. Screenplay by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi. Cinematographer Bill Pope. Editor Bob Murawski and R.O.C. Sandstorm. Costumes Ida Gearon. Music Joseph LoDuca. Production design Tony Tremblay. Set decorator Michele Poulik. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

MPAA-rated R.