Review: Drag Me to Hell (2009)

[Scott Mendelson]

Drag Me To Hell
2009
99 minutes
Rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

Drag Me to Hell is a throwback to a time, in the mid-1980s, when
horror films were fun first and scary second. Before the genre became
a battle of the franchise boogeymen, before the advent of English
adaptations of Asian fright fests, before the onslaught of gorier,
more drawn out violence (itself a theoretical callback to the 1970s),
there was a time when horror films were just plain fun. This new Sam
Raimi picture is not terribly frightening, as the nature of its
premise all but states that the would-be scares are without
consequence. But it does have energy, an eagerness to entertain, and
an old-school 80s fun house spirit, and it has all three in spades. As
a bonus, it's the rare theatrical horror movie that isn't a remake or
a random 'dumb kids get lost in the wood and get butchered' narrative.
It is a real movie, with a real plot and plausible characters at its
core. Drag Me To Hell may not be shiver-in-the-dark scary, but it is a
trashy B-movie blast.

A token amount of plot - Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, in a somewhat
overly on-point performance) is a young loan officer pining for a
promotion to assistant manager. Wanting to avoid appearing like a push
over in front of her boss (David Paymer), she declines an elderly
gypsy's request for a mortgage extension, dooming the woman to
foreclosure. As a result, the old woman (Lorna Raver) lashes out in
anger, cursing Christine and condemning her to an eternity in hell,
but only after three days of psychological and emotional torture (you
know, for fun).

The majority of the narrative concerns Christine's attempts to rid
herself of this damnation, all while trying to appear normal to her
boss, her boyfriend (Justin Long), and her boyfriend's theoretically
disapproving family. Needless to say, the gypsy curse gives director
Sam Raimi an excuse to throw whatever whacked-out effects work he
wants at the screen, all in the name of startling the audience into
nervous laughter. Since the premise dictates a certain lack of
onscreen physical violence or gore, Raimi uses his PG-13 instead to
show all kinds of old-fashioned gross-outs, jolting 'gotcha' moments,
and plenty of ick. It works more often than not, but the underlying
premise dictates that nothing will actually happen to our heroine
until the three days expire (assuming she can't break the curse, of
course). Save for the brutal and terrifying prologue, all of the
subsequent scares will simply be false alarms or intentional mind
games on the part of the various evil forces at work. It's popcorn-
flying fun, but it's not scary.

Whether this is an issue is up to you, but the picture works on other
levels to compensate for the lack of bone-chilling terror. The
characters are relatively fleshed out, which is a refreshing change of
pace in this genre. Justin Long is quite good here, giving Clay Dalton
a strong but plausible protective streak. Even Clay's would-be
villainous mother is given a scene of empathetic humanity. Rham Jas is
terrifically engaging as a believing psychic, especially as this is
his feature-film debut (next up, James Cameron's Avatar). And while
David Paymer flirts with cliche as the snarky bank manager, it is
awfully nice to see this underutilized actor in a high profile movie
again.

While this is being hailed as director Sam Raimi's return to the
horror genre that made him a legend, this is a very different kind of
picture than the Evil Dead series. While the visuals and the camera
work will remind even the casual fan of Bruce Campbell's various
horror pratfalls, this is, if anything, an attempt to put those kind
of cinematic tricks into a movie with an actual plot and actual
characters. By all objective standards, this is a genuinely better
film than any of the Evil Dead pictures. Amazingly, Bruce Campbell
does not make a cameo in this one, although that 1973 Oldsmobile Delta
Royale does. It is ironic that Sam Raimi, whose The Evil Dead was one
of the pioneering 'dumb kids go into the woods and get slaughtered'
pictures, would be the one to attempt to break the horror genre free
of that current rut.

The film will not leave you feeling icky or ill-at-ease. It's not that
kind of horror film. The film works splendidly as a comic homage to
1980s supernatural gross-out pictures, the kind that you barely
remember watching when your parents weren't looking (think The Gate).
Despite the lush 2.35:1 wide screen cinematography, I actually think
that the picture would work best when viewed on a basic cable station
at 2am in the morning. Drag Me to Hell is certainly a jump out of your
seat good time as a theatrical experience, but I'd only imagine that
it would have scared the hell out of me if I had seen it when I was
nine, on Channel 43 at 1am in the morning as I struggled to stay awake
to see what happened next.

Grade: B