Games based on popular or cult classic movies don’t always deliver the goods and often seem more like a cheap grab for cash than an actual attempt at creating a good game. However, there are sometimes exceptions. One of those exceptions is the new game Army of Darkness: Defense game from Backflip Studios and MGM Studios.

Army of Darkness: Defense is a mobile castle defense game designed as a homage to Sam Raimi’s 1992 classic film and takes place during the pivotal castle scene from the movie where Ash and his allies defend the powerful Necronomicon within Lord Arthur’s fortress from the onslaught of the Deadites.

In the game you take on the role of the chiseled chin, one-liner-spouting Ash while summoning familiar troops, spells and weapons from the movie to help in the defense. Gameplay features include over 150 direct lines of dialogue from Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, and beautifully animated graphics using the well-known “Granny 3D” engine.

Army of Darkness: Defense gives Ash the ability to call upon a wide variety of allies to help preserve the Necronomicon including swordsmen, armored knights, archers and more. In addition to the originally composed sound and music, the app also features many of the famous characters from the movie including Arthur, Henry, Sheila, the Wiseman, Evil Ash, and more.

Check out some screens from the game after the jump. Pick up your copy of Army of Darkness: Defense now in the iTunes App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad.

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This week’s pick goes behind the lines of World War II France with the 1967 release of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen. The film stars the legendary Lee Marvin as Major John Reisman, an American OSS (pre C.I.A.) operative chosen by Allied command to recruit, train, and drop twelve convicted American military prisoners into France before the Normandy invasion to wipe out a chateau full of German brass. Aldrich adapts E.M. Nathanson’s novel to bring one of the 1960s most successful war movies to the screen.

The cast is a who’s who of some of Hollywood’s best talent. Ernest Borgnine (Maj. Gen. Worden), Charles Bronson (Joseph Wladislaw), Jim Brown (Robert T. Jefferson), John Cassavetes (Victor R. Franko), Richard Jaeckel (Sgt. Clyde Bowren), George Kennedy (Maj. Max Armbruster), Ralph Meeker (Capt. Stuart Kinder), Robert Ryan (Col. Everett Dasher Breed), Telly Savalas (Archer J. Maggott), Donald Sutherland (Vernon L. Pinkley), Clint Walker (Samson Posey), and Robert Webber (Brig. Gen. Denton).

Major Reisman is selected for this mission due to his illustrious reputation for behind the lines action, but he is also well known for exceeding his orders and showing borderline insubordination for his superiors. Both General Worden and Denton tell Reisman that the twelve men have a temporary stay of their sentences for the mission.

Reisman knows fully well that it’s a suicide mission and asks the Generals to reconsider and that the only way for these men to go along with such a deal, is to pardon them for their crimes and that they be returned to active duty at their former ranks. It’s a tough sell, but Gen. Worden agrees and Reisman has just a few short months to train these convicts and turn them into an elite commando unit.

Most of the twelve men are serving long prison sentences, but five (Franko, Jefferson, Maggott, Posey and Wladislaw) are to be hung for murder. Reisman sells the promise of amnesty to these five, because they are the ones with the most to lose. Reisman tells them all that they are dependent of one another and that if any try to escape, fail to add up, or quit, they will all be sent back to prison.

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This week’s pick is the 1969 Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Force 10 From Navarone) directed classic Battle of Britain, which depicts the valiant struggle of Great Britain’s Royal Air Force against the onslaught of the numerically superior German Luftwaffe during the summer of 1940. The film opens as France falls in May 1940, and the British and their allies avoid capture with the massive evacuation at the coastal city of Dunkirk. With time to regroup and strengthen their home defenses, the British lie and wait for Hitler’s forces to eventually invade England.

The film is told through a collection of fighter squadron groups (English and German) who are veterans in the skies over France and the low countries during early 1940. Like many films of the mid to late 1960′s, Battle of Britain has its fare share of brilliant English and German actors. Screen legend Sir Laurence Olivier leads the cast as Chief Air Marshal H.C. Dowding who helped to coordinate British forces to total victory in the battle.

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Kelly’s Heroes is a war film that has all the great elements of an old fashion, rousing epic that keeps your attention all the way through. Set in the late summer of 1944 as the allies swept across occupied France, Kelly (played by the ever cool Clint Eastwood) and his squad of screwball infantry men find out that the Germans are holding over sixteen million dollars worth of gold bars in a bank thirty miles behind enemy lines.

Tired of the politics of infantry life and the gross inefficiency of their Captain, Kelly and the rest of the squad run by tough sergeant ‘Big Joe’ (Telly Savalas), cook up a scheme to go behind the lines with three M-4 Sherman tanks to rob the bank. As the movie poster states: “They set out to rob a bank and damn near won a war instead.”

With Kelly’s Heroes, Eastwood began his second collaboration with director Brian G. Hutton, who had directed him a year earlier in the highly successful Where Eagles Dare (1969) — a movie which solidified Eastwood’s status as a major box office star. What makes Kelly’s Heroes such an interesting film is the fact that it was made in 1970 as the U.S. was beginning to downsize its presence in Vietnam.

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With Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th getting remade and rebooted these days, it’s only inevitable to hear about a remake of arguably one of the scariest horror films of the 1980s in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist.

About two years ago, it was announced that MGM Studios was working on the remake, and then a year later they announced that House of Sand and Fog director Vadim Perelman would take the helm. Even later, MGM picked up  Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, the team behind 2005′s Boogeyman and this year’s Knowing, would be penning the script.

It has now been announced that the film will have a release date of November 24 of next year. Not a terrible draw, being Thanksgiving weekend, and also one week after the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. You can expect to see more November releases in the coming years after the success of the Twilight franchise and it’s positioning.

No word yet on casting, but it has to be asked whether or not the studio is worried about the legendary Poltergeist Curse, which allegedly took the lives of several cast and crew members over the years. With a release date only 14 months away, we are sure to hear more about casting and when shooting begins in the coming weeks.