'Drag Me to Hell' Raimi's return to comical horror with attitude
The aptly titled "Drag Me to Hell" celebrates Sam Raimi's triumphant return to frightful and cheesy horror films that elicit as many nervous laughs as cringing shudders.
We get all sorts of fun stuff for a first date at the movies: projectile eyeballs, spewing mucus, physically invasive insects, sacrificial goats, upchucked maggots, wild seances, regurgitated kitties, even bad dentures.
Considering that "Drag Me to Hell" possesses the same MPAA rating as Raimi's three Spider-man adventures, PG-13, it's a wonder the film can frighten a bunny rabbit.
But it does because Raimi axes the traditional gore and violence of mediocre horror tales and goes for shock cuts, insane sound effects, threatening shadows and Christopher Young's dissonant strings constantly urging our hackles to raise.
If you've seen the unfortunately too-detailed trailers for "Drag Me to Hell," you already know most of the plot.
A young, aspiring bank loan officer named Christine (Alison Lohman, reportedly a second choice after Ellen Page bailed) wants a promotion so much that she seizes an opportunity to show her boss (David Paymer) how she can be just as heartless as he when it comes to turning down poor people for extensions on their mortgages.
When Christine arbitrarily denies an extension to the elderly gypsy Mrs. Ganusch (the remarkably versatile Lorna Raver), she responds by cursing the poor girl to get a demon escort to eternal damnation. We know this is no idle threat, because the movie's spectacular opening sequence shows what happens to a cursed little boy who dares steal a necklace from a gypsy.
Christine's boyfriend, a psych professor named Clay Dalton (Justin Long, fresh from "He's Just Not That Into You"), humors her by treating her to a fortune teller, Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), who sees something so horrible, he refuses to accept payment.
He later explains that a demon spends three days scaring the patooties off its cursed victims, then, as the title states, drags them to hell.
With a key plot point and a shadowy demonic image lifted straight from Jacques Tourneur's 1957 supernatural classic "Night of the Demon," Raimi's "Drag Me" employs the most ridiculous genre conventions to create an unpretentious, no-subtext thriller that doesn't take itself all that seriously.
Raimi's masterwork continues to be "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn," a comically twisted and gruesomely demonic 1987 haunted house tale so over-the-top, it went to market unrated rather than accept the adults-only X rating awarded by the MPAA.
The original, less mirthful "Evil Dead" (1981) also took the unrated path. However, the comical third part of the trilogy, "Army of Darkness" (also called "Medieval Dead") went the studio route with a mandated R rating.
Now, as the MPAA rating board members continue to liberalize the content for the ratings, Raimi (along with brother Ivan Raimi as a co-writer) seizes the opportunity to push the boundaries of the PG-13 to imaginative effect.
The dialogue is sharp and fun, incorporating everything from anti-curse chanting ("I welcome the dead into my soul!") to edgy and revealing passing comments.
"You're eating ice cream?" Clay says as a stressed Christine wolfs down a dessert. "I thought you were lactose intolerant!"
A funny line for a movie that milks its material for every curdled chuckle it can muster.
<p class="factboxheadblack">'Drag Me to Hell'</p> <p class="News">Three and a half stars</p> <p class="News"><b>Starring:</b> Alison Lohman, Lorna Raver, Justin Long, David Paymer</p> <p class="News"><b>Directed by:</b> Sam Raimi</p> <p class="News"><b>Other:</b> A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 (language, violence). 99 minutes.</p> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="300" height="225" id="widget" align="middle"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" /> <param name="movie" value="http://www.dragmetohell.net/contents/widget.swf" /><param value="myVid=1" name="flashvars"><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /> <embed src="http://www.dragmetohell.net/contents/widget.swf" flashvars="myVid=1" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="300" height="225" name="widget" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /> </object>