Drag Me To Hell
Directed by Sam Raimi
Reviewed by Rob Fatal
In my time as SIS film critic I’ve had to sit through several incarnations of legendary cult filmmakers trying to make a quick buck off of a watered down re-hash of their glory days. The most prominent example of this cult treason is George Lucas and his “revisions” of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series respectively. These films were so blatantly heartless and formulaic that it upset even the most venerable of fans to the core. As an obsessive fan of the Evil Dead series, I started to sweat bullets when I discovered that series creator/director Sam Raimi was putting his cult horror cred back on the critical chopping block with his latest flick, Drag Me To Hell. While the film is a definite departure from the Evil Dead series, it is a departure that adds to the conversation of his work, expanding his signature style of gore and humor to more than just one film series and solidifies his status as one of the most important and influential cult/horror film directors of our age.
The film centers on Christine (Alison Lohman), a loan officer with a heart of gold. She is kind, considerate and caring; traits that do not equal success in the banking business. When her boss tells her that the future of her career depends on her ability to exchange these traits for a more ruthless demeanor, Christine tests her new attitude on the worst person possible: a curse brandishing gypsy mystic facing eviction and looking for another mortgage on her home. Writers Sam and Ivan Raimi are genius if only for the fact that they’ve created a story that allows film critics across the land to use the words gypsy, curse, mystic and mortgage in the same sentence.
When Christine turns down the gypsy for a new mortgage, hell literally and figuratively breaks loose on screen. This film is almost akin to porn in its execution. Raimi knows that his fans want to see gore and humor and lots of it and as such sets the plot devices to render these results about five minutes into the film without ever easing up. A stalking shadowy daemon (ala Motorhead’s logo), séances in Spanish in a creepy Beverly Hills mansion, blood, vomit, drool and rotting corpses decorate the extravagant playground of horror created by Raimi. He accomplishes a few scares but overall entertains all with little special effects and a whole lot of good old-fashioned creature makeup, fake blood and fishing wire.
Raimi seems to reinvent and tighten up his style in this film and does so without pandering his past accomplishments to the audience. There are no Bruce Campbell cameos, no references to the book of the dead; all that is left when Drag Me To Hell is said and done is one of the most fun, scary, gruesome and entertaining films you will ever see.
|
