Drag Me to Hell
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Universal; 2009
Sam Raimi’s resume over the last decade and a half is an interesting read. With a western, a romance about baseball and one of the culture’s most expensive, household-name trilogies taking the forefront, one might not even remember (or be able to comprehend) that Raimi directed the cult horror classics Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. But Raimi remembers where he came from, and he’s made incredibly sure you won’t either. After Spider-man 3, already infamous for an emo Peter Parker dancing his way into fanboy’s nightmares, Drag Me To Hell is a gleefully demented slap to the face of those who thought Raimi had lost his edge.
Alison Lohman plays Christine, a farm girl trying to start fresh in Los Angeles. Working at a bank and in line for a promotion, she decides to prove her ability to make tough decisions by denying elderly Mrs. Ganush a loan to stave off her foreclosure. Shamed and angered, Ganush waits for Christine in the parking lot to curse her and bless the audience with a wildly inventive and hilarious struggle. Christine then has three days of torment ahead of her while she figures out how to break the curse and avoid fulfilling the film’s title.
Reminder is a good word to encompass this film – even the Universal logo at the beginning is in the style of the past. Raimi reminds audiences why they loved him in the first place, with his familiar zooms, extremely jarring jump cuts and sound cues and lots of gross-out gags. While nowhere near as graphic as the Evil Dead films (it is, after all, rated PG-13), the film is still full of bodily fluids, bugs crawling where they shouldn’t, and various other viscera designed to make you squirm. Even the trusty Oldsmobile gets several minutes of screentime (sadly, The Chin does not).
But the other, and ultimately more important reminder is what horror films have been missing the last few years: the fun. Drag Me To Hell is, above all, a pure and unrelenting blast to watch; a film that elicits as many laughs as it does frights and waves of disgust. In fact, they often come simultaneously, a hybrid that Raimi is famous for. This decade’s fascination with churning out lame photocopies of Japanese horror, remakes that trade real scares for gore, and films accurately dubbed ‘torture porn’ has produced few films that audiences can truly enjoy. Can anyone really say they enjoyed watching Saw V or Rob Zombie’s Halloween? Conversely, it’s hard not to enjoy Drag Me To Hell, which often plays out like a Bugs Bunny cartoon come to life (this isn’t hyperbole – one scene literally has an anvil that drops on someone’s head).
Reminder also unfortunately refers to the film’s plot, which, once you get past the fun, relies heavily on genre stereotypes. Gypsy woman? Check. Curses? Check. Scene where cursed visits a palm reader who gets so scared they offer the cursed their money back? Check. Seances? Check. Possession? Check – for both human and…goat. (So maybe there is some originality – know of any other films with angry, obscenity-spewing goats?)
Raimi also often goes for the cheap scare, bouncing from utter silence to squealing violins and characters appearing exactly where one expect them to. But he plays with the timing and rhythm. Jumps occur either seconds too late or too early to when one expects them, which after 90 minutes leaves nerves shredded and parallels the unpleasant experiences Lohman endures on screen. As annoying and clichéd it is to compare a film to an amusement park ride, Drag Me To Hell mirrors that experience more than any other film in recent memory. Walking out, you feel exhausted and slightly disoriented. And you can’t wait to do it again.
