And a whole healthy bunch of Looney Tunes sight gags, but I should not want to end up starting a whole new thread of thought. Some music left on the cutting room floor when they were finishing The Exorcist, a mad old gypsy from the Universal monster movies, flesh-rotting ghosts straight out of J-horror, and maybe best of all, violent and assaultive sound design that recalls 1963's magnificent The Haunting. Far from it: if anything, the movie works at its best as a sort of compendium of various bits snatched here and there from other successful horror movies throughout the decades. The script, co-written by the director and his brother Ivan (they previously collaborated on Darkman, Army of Darkness and Spider-Man 3) leaves no cliché unturned, but it isn't really striving for staunch originality. Cue three days of torment, with Christine begging her skeptical boyfriend (Justin Long) and a friendly New Age spiritualist (Dileep Roa) to help her figure out any conceivable way to stay the curse before she has the full brunt of the movie's title brought down upon her head. The old woman, it turns out, is a gypsy witch of some sort, and she calls down a lamia on Christine a lamia being a goat-shaped spirit that torments its victim for three days, just for the sake of being mean, and than drags the victim's spirit down to the fires of hell. To prove that she has the cojones to be Serious Motherfucking Banker, she turns down an old woman (Lorna Raver), looking for a third extension on her mortgage. Let us all pause to thank our individual deities that Raimi never learned the rules, and toss in an extra thanks for his temporary withdrawal from the high-budget world of the Spider-Man movies, so he could all show us once again what Shakespeare looks like the way it's meant to be done.Īlison Lohman - who? you may ask, to which I reply, that's correct (she's not a nobody, but she's still waiting on that breakout role) - stars as Christine Brown, a Pasadena loan officer fighting with a co-worker for promotion to the prestigious Assistant Manager position. Comic relief is meant to be separate from horror - it is the "relief" from horror, down to it's very name. If it's not The Evil Dead from 1981, it's Raimi's masterpiece Evil Dead II that has forever marked him as one of the truly gifted horror directors, and it is or at any rate ought to be a crystal-clear sign of his new film's tremendous effectiveness that it has more in common with Evil Dead II than any of his other films, hitting the same exact perfect balance of absolutely terrifying moments and ridiculously silly moments and as in the former work, a whole lot of those moments occur at the exact same time, for Raimi has apparently not learned in the last 22 years that you aren't supposed to do that. This is part of the pleasure of giving yourself over to a rickety, old-fashioned scare picture made by a man who proved many years ago that he has nothing left to prove in the horror genre. That's exactly what Drag Me to Hell feels like: every single time you jump and scream at a perfectly stupid and predictable shock cut, you're all the more happier for recognising how stupid you're being. Here's what I do know: a big part of the fun of a roller coaster is the feeling you get that you're going altogether too fast and being whipped around too much, and you shall surely die any second now, except that during the ride you are quite aware of how silly a thing that is to think, so even while you have a vague feeling of existential terror, you also have a pleasantly shameful feeling about it, and it's almost as much fun to know that you're not in the slightest actual danger as it is to enjoy the adrenaline rush from your body believing that you are. You know how they sometimes compare a movie to a roller coaster ride? I've never completely understood what that meant. But I contend that "true horror" doesn't really lend itself to something as much damn fun as Drag Me to Hell, and by all means, it's one of the most effortlessly fun movies to come out all summer. At the same instant, nothing seems to shout "true horror" about the film whatsoever "true horror" indicates, you'd imagine, that it's truly horrifying, an almost unbearable level of unbearable scares presented for your pants-wetting edification. The film finds Sam Raimi in a very rare mood indeed, making a PG-13 ghost story that doesn't seem to understand the limitations that a PG-13 implies, going right ahead and presenting us with a faintly absurd but nonetheless aggressive non-stop cavalcade of jump scares made up of the finest unleaded nightmare fuel. "THE RETURN OF TRUE HORROR" shrieks the trailer for Drag Me to Hell, and I'm almost willing to agree without reservation.
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