Meanwhile, unknown to Ash, his ruse has failed and his body's copy rises from the dead, uniting other Deadites into the Army of Darkness.

Using a passage from the Necronomicon, the Wise Man tells him how to return to the present by giving him a potion after reciting the same phrase as earlier.

As he talks to a female co-worker who is interested in his story, a surviving Deadite, present because Ash once again forgot the last word, attacks the customers.

For the film's original ending, using a passage from the Necronomicon, the Wise Man tells Ash to swallow six drops of the potion to return to the present; unfortunately, due to a distraction by falling rocks, Ash miscalculates the amount of potion needed to be able to correctly return to his own time, swallowing seven instead of six.

Universal Pictures objected to this climax, feeling that it was too negative and depressing in tone; as such, a more positive and optimistic ending was filmed and ultimately incorporated into the theatrical cut.

[11] Director and script writer Sam Raimi drew from a variety of sources, including literature with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Three Stooges, and Conan the Barbarian.

Evil Dead II, according to Bruce Campbell, "was originally designed to go back into the past to 1300, but we couldn't muster it at the time, so we decided to make an interim version, not knowing if the 1300 story would ever get made".

[15] Initially, Raimi invited Scott Spiegel to co-write Army of Darkness because he had done a good job on Evil Dead II, but he was busy on rewrites for the Clint Eastwood film The Rookie.

[12] Campbell and Tapert would read the script drafts, give Raimi their notes and he would decide which suggestions to keep and which ones to discard.

[11] Visual effects supervisor William Mesa showed Raimi storyboards he had from Victor Fleming's film Joan of Arc that depicted huge battle scenes and he picked out 25 shots to use in Army of Darkness.

[20] Traci Lords was among the actresses auditioning for the film, saying in 2001, "I didn't get the part but I clicked with Bruce [Campbell]," with whom she would later work as a guest star in the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

[23] It was a mid-summer shoot and while on location on a huge castle set that was built near Acton, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, the cast and crew endured very hot conditions during the day and very cold temperatures at night.

[25] Money problems forced cinematographer Bill Pope to shoot only for certain hours Monday through Friday because he could not be paid his standard fee.

[26] It was a difficult shoot for Campbell who had to learn elaborate choreography for the battle scenes, which involved him remembering a number system because the actor was often fighting opponents that were not really there.

[27] During the filming of a scene in which Campbell flipped a stuntman down a set of stairs, the lower part of his face contacted with a piece of armor, which resulted in him bleeding.

[29] Campbell was initially supposed to jump from a ladder onto the ground, and the Oldsmobile dropped from its suspension on an aircraft cable attached to a crane on a nearby access road.

"[30] While Dino De Laurentiis gave Raimi and his crew freedom to shoot the film the way they wanted, Universal took over during post-production.

[8] Universal was not happy with Raimi's cut, specifically its ending in which Ash wakes up in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic wasteland, as they felt it was too negative.

)[31] Two months after principal filming was finished, a round of re-shoots began in Santa Monica and involved Ash in the windmill and the scenes with Bridget Fonda.

For the film's poster, Universal brought Campbell in to take several reference head shots and asked him to strike a sly look on his face.

[33] Raimi ran into further troubles when the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an NC-17 rating for a shot of a female Deadite being killed early on in the film.

The site's critics consensus reads, "Some of the evil magic is gone as this trilogy capper dispenses with most of the scares, but Bruce Campbell's hammy charm and Sam Raimi's homage to classic visual effects make for a fun enough adventure.

[39] Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, "The movie isn't as funny or entertaining as Evil Dead II, however, maybe because the comic approach seems recycled.

"[40] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that "Mr. Campbell's manly, mock-heroic posturing is perfectly in keeping with the director's droll outlook.

"[41] Desson Howe, in his review for The Washington Post praised the film's style: "Bill Pope's cinematography is gymnastic and appropriately frenetic.

"[42] However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C+" rating and wrote, "This spoofy cast of thousands looks a little too much like a crew of bland Hollywood extras.

The ten-episode season of Ash vs Evil Dead[52][53] premiered on Starz on October 31, 2015, with the pilot co-written and directed by Sam Raimi.