Spidey be Damned!!

Raimi Returns to his Evil Deadly Roots.
By Morgan P Salvo

Drag Me to Hell has director Sam Raimi revisiting his old stomping grounds and proves he can still deliver the goods. Raimi, the master of schlock humor/drive-in horror who made the Evil Dead trilogy and then went on to some cleverly made flops (A Simple Plan, Quick and the Dead), ostracized himself from his main audience (including me) with his three bazillion dollar mega-hit Spiderman movies. Now he humbly returns to his evil deadly roots, bringing to the table a lot of familiar tricks. Drag Me to Hell is an old school curse movie complete with jolts, scares and gross-out laughs galore. Beginning with the old style universal logo, Raimi proves immediately his heart is in the right place. Gone are all the over-budget sets, high tech light shows and CGI antics—for the most part.

The plot is painstakingly simple. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer at a bank vying for the assistant manger position. She’s up against smarmy kiss-ass Stu (Reggie Lee) and her pansy indecisive boss (David Paymer). Enter one haggard old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) with a shattered blue eye and crumbling dentures. Christine refuses to extend her a third and final loan, thus evicting her from her home. The gypsy places an evil curse on her and all hell breaks loose. Desperate, Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) turn to a fortune teller (Dileep Rao) to try to save her soul, while evil forces work against her.We get a multitude of hell bent antics designed to make us jump, go “eeeww!” and crack up. The scenes, though sporadic in their timing, are memorable. Eyeballs play prominently in all kinds of forms (popping out of skulls, embedded in harvest cakes, receiving end of a stapler). Then there’s the bodily function department, with sufficient drooling accompanied by a smorgasbord of vomiting the likes of bugs, embalming fluid and entrails. Flies buzz up orifices and there’s a fair amount of required blood spewing. And for some reason there’s a lot of biting going on. There’s a great parking lot in-car fight scene, a scary cell phone face that’s priceless and a very humorous scene with rich parents involving bad-acid-like hallucinations. There’s a lavish chandelier séance room wherein a goat and a servant get possessed and spew demonic gothic horror movie gibberish. But the funeral/coffin scene had me laughing uncontrollably.

The acting is all functional, never intending to be more. Lohman is great at being frightened but does her best job struggling with her insecurities (she used to be a fat girl). Long’s character is just way too nice, though he does bring it to a believable level. Paymer’s laid back performance is creepy and weird.

Stamped all over DMTH are the invisible entity acrobatics (an Evil Dead trade-mark). But the sinister unseen force can only do so much—chuck people in the air, float them around, fling them across rooms smashing stuff, rattle pots pans, break windows—you get the picture. I like it when I can see the evil. It’s always better if it’s inbred hillbilly psychopaths at the core of the monstrosities’ than myth and legend. In this case it’s Lamia, a child murdering demon from Greek mythology.

Raimi pulls out all the stops, including extremely cool use of creepy shadows, but pauses too long in the obnoxiously sappy dialogue in between. We get small doses of what this director is capable of .There’s no ending 20 minute crescendo of gore, humor and evil flying around (as in his other films) – it only comes in spurts. Prepare for the twist ending as Raimi evokes all things sacred about black comedy, horror films and even 50’s style B-movies. Although it’s mostly formulaic, teasing towards a big finish, fear not…this flick contains all the essential stuff that grosses out and scares us senseless. You might want to drag someone kicking and screaming and see this one.

Drag Me to Hell
Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, Lorna Raver, Reggie Lee
Director: Sam Raimi
 3 stars