#action comedy

Army of Darkness

The universe really picked the worst possible timing.

It’s a full-scale disaster: Parademons swarming the sky, an alien invasion tearing through the city, Arkham villains running wild. Every hero available is already fighting at their limit. Comms are chaos. Backup isn’t coming. This is an all-hands, survive-the-night kind of battle.

And then the comm channel crackles.

“Uh… hi. Question. Is now a bad time to mention I think I just soul-swapped with someone?”

Silence.

Every hero listening feels the same stomach-dropping horror.

That voice isn’t familiar.

That is almost definitely a civilian.

Some random person is now standing in the middle of an active battlefield wearing a hero’s body — surrounded by monsters, explosions, and supervillains.

Command instantly shifts tone.

“Stay calm. Don’t engage. We’re coming to you now. Tell us what you see.”

Danny looks down.

“Oh. Cool. A sword. I kinda know how to use this.”

(Which is somehow worse.)

They brace for screaming. Panic. A rescue operation.

Instead, ten minutes later—

“Great news! Some of my powers are attached to my soul, so I can still use them in this body! Fun discovery!”

Energy readings spike. Lazarus radiation starts dropping wherever he moves.

Two minutes after that:

“…okay but who’s a big eldritch soul-eating puppy dog? You are! Yes you are, good boy!”

Meanwhile, Danny’s soulmate — currently trapped in Danny Fenton’s very human-looking body — is having a full existential crisis. No powers. No gear. No idea where their soulmate is except somewhere inside a war zone.

They finally track the energy signature.

They arrive expecting disaster.

Instead they see:

Danny, glowing faint green with borrowed Lazarus energy, riding an enormous ghost dog straight into battle, weapon raised, laughing like this is the most fun he’s had all week as enemies scatter in absolute terror.

Sam (over comms): yeah, that checks out.

Tucker: he adapts fast.

Danny’s soulmate: …………

Poster Signed by Roger Moore from The Man With the Golden Gun, 1974

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) is, by any rational measure, an absolutely preposterous film, and I say that with the deepest possible affection. Consider what it asks you to accept: Christopher Lee, possibly the most aristocratically sinister man ever to appear on a cinema screen, plays a world-class assassin whose defining characteristic, whose very calling card to the intelligence community, is a third nipple. Not a scar, not a tattoo, not some distinctive birthmark that could plausibly identify a person. A nipple. The screenplay apparently looked at the entire canon of human peculiarity and decided that a supernumerary teat was the detail most likely to strike terror into the hearts of audiences in 1974. And then, as if to make absolutely certain you understood what you were watching, the film opens by having two separate characters discuss it at length with the earnest gravity normally reserved for nuclear launch codes. There is also a dwarf butler called Nick Nack who lives on a private island in Thailand and whose primary job function appears to be arranging elaborate death traps for his employer’s amusement. This is presented without comment, as though it were a perfectly ordinary domestic arrangement.

What makes the film genuinely lovable, though, is that it has absolutely no idea it is being funny. Roger Moore, in only his second outing as Bond, raises an eyebrow and delivers every line with the serene confidence of a man who has just remembered where he parked his car. Britt Ekland is on hand as Mary Goodnight, an MI6 agent whose contribution to British intelligence includes accidentally triggering a solar energy superweapon with her bottom. The car chase through Bangkok features a policeman named Sheriff J.W. Pepper, imported wholesale from the previous film on no discernible logical basis, apparently because someone in the production office thought he was simply too good to leave in Louisiana. There is a corkscrew jump over a collapsed bridge that is, to this day, one of the most technically accomplished stunts ever filmed, accompanied on the soundtrack by a slide whistle. A slide whistle. Someone, presumably a grown adult employed in a professional capacity, heard that stunt, looked at the assembled might of British filmmaking, and said: what this really needs is a comedy sound effect. And somehow, inexplicably, magnificently, they were right.