Drag Me to Hell
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG-13, 99 m, 2009
Directed by Sam Raimi. Stars Alison Lohman, Justin long, Lorna Raver, et al. 

With Drag Me to Hell (what horror buff could resist a lurid title like that?), director Sam Raimi at long last returns to his roots. I admit it: I thought this day would never come, but given the guy’s unadventurous output over the last decade (For Love of the Game, the Spider-Man trilogy), I can hardly be faulted for assuming that he was no longer in touch with that curious place in his noodle that let loose such delightfully demented masterworks as Darkman and Army of Darkness. While Drag Me to Hell isn’t nearly as imaginative (or witty) as those films, it has a handful of sight gags that take us back to the cheeky pleasures of Evil Dead II. When Raimi is on, precious few of the so-called “masters of horror” can touch him (though he may need to keep an eye on up-and-comers like Robert Hall and Greg McLean). He’s not sadistic like Rob Zombie or quixotic like Dario Argento or affected like Eli Roth—he’s all about having a gory good time. Like Peter Jackson (at least before he sold out and started making overstuffed prestige pictures), Raimi approaches the macabre with tongue planted firmly in cheek—he recognizes the genre’s underlying absurdness. His actors play it straight, but Raimi—a devout expressionist—distorts their actions by using his camera not unlike a funhouse mirror; all those baroque angles and screwy dolly zooms are what make the action in his movies so amusing. And though that action has a distinct slapstick quality (there are several bits in Evil Dead II that evoke the rough-edged clowning of the Three Stooges), there’s always enough bloodletting to satisfy Vlad the Impaler. But the gory stuff won’t keep you up at night because it’s so ridiculously overstated, like the more sensational panels in a Tales from the Crypt comic book. Raimi’s horror shows are cartoonish in the same way that Joe Dante’s are (or used to be), and by that I don’t mean shallow or two-dimensional, but rather blown up and vivid and, well, fun. 

The title Drag Me to Hell sounds like it might be a directive from the movie’s heroine, but the last place Christine Brown (adorable Alison Lohman) should want to be kickin’ it is the lower world. She seems to have it all going on in this world: Her fellah, Clay (Justin Long), a college professor, treats her like the Queen of Sheba, and her future at the bank where she works as a loan officer is so bright that she’s gotta wear shades. Goodness knows she’d be a shoo-in for the management position that’s opening up if it weren’t for a brownnosing, two-faced co-worker (Reggie Lee) who’s trying every trick in the book to sabotage her performance. The bank’s director, Mr. Jacks (David Paymer), assures Christine that the candidate who proves capable of making “hard decisions” will be the one to receive the promotion, so when an aged gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) hobbles into the bank and begs for a third extension on her mortgage, Christine makes a “hard decision” and turns her down. This pleases Mr. Jacks, but certainly not the Hungarian hag, who attacks Christine outside of work one night and puts a curse on her. According to Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), a seer who Christine has engaged to shed some light on a recent string of weird happenings, the curse involves a demon that will make her life miserable for three days before it finally casts her into the eternal pit of boiling sewage. Why the evil spirit needs to spend time fucking with the poor girl’s head before making off with her soul is beyond me, but at least it buys our leading lady some time to find a way to undo the curse. Sacrificing her pussycat doesn’t work, so she tries a séance, but that goes terribly, terribly wrong. (I’m not going to disclose much, but a couple of the things you can look forward to are a snarling, foul-mouthed goat and a medium doing a mid-air happy dance.) The movie itself goes terribly, terribly wrong whenever it focuses on snot, phlegm, and other bodily secretions, most of which are offered up for your delectation by the butt-ugly witch. It’s all a little too barnyard for my taste; I thought Mr. Raimi would’ve grown out of that kind of humor by now. But there are a few gross-out moments that made me whoop it up, such as a flawlessly rendered CG fly that crawls in one of Christine’s nostrils and then out the other. Another big laugh comes when the “shamed” sorceress tries to bite off Christine’s chin: Having lost her dentures, all she can do is gum it. 

October 28, 2009 

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.