Sam Raimi gets back to basics with Drag Me to Hell, serving up the type of comic-horror mayhem that defined his career-making Evil Dead trilogy, and which is here infused with a shrewd, gleeful strain of current-events topicality. Though equipped with the PG-13 rating that inevitably makes horror fans wary, Raimi’s film pulls few punches in the nastiness department, its action coated in spurting bodily fluids emanating from nasty orifices, and dressed up with plenty of rotten skin, fetid corpses, and demonic insanity to satisfy genre purists. It’s not the quantity of ickiness that makes Drag Me to Hell a madcap, go-for-broke entertainment, however, but the energy Raimi brings to his material, the director orchestrating his over-the-top gruesomeness with such joy that it proves infectious, each subsequent jolt-scare (replete with accompanying turned-to-eleven sound effect) and gross-out maneuver perfectly pitched to be both frightening and hilarious. That balance is considerably tricky to achieve, and unlike in his leaden, overstuffed Spider-Man 3, Raimi effortlessly pulls it off, with his swift pacing, whip-smart edits, and hyper-goofy cinematographic zooms, pans and twirls transforming the proceedings into a delirious haunted house carnival ride.
Without a second wasted, Drag Me to Hell establishes both its premise and its social commentary. Christine (Alison Lohman, alternately sweet, flustered and frightened) is a considerate loan officer at a California bank where she hopes to be promoted to assistant manager, a position that her boss (David Paymer) says requires a person who can “make the tough decisions.” When Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), an elderly gypsy woman with scraggly fingernails, sharp teeth and one milky white eye, shows up asking for an extension on her mortgage payment, Christine reluctantly makes her boss proud by denying the request. This rejection quickly leads to public humiliation for Mrs. Ganush, who in turn attacks Christine in a dark parking lot, a gonzo car-set skirmish involving staplers, cinder blocks and one hilariously disgusting mouth-chin bite that concludes with the gypsy hag uttering ominous incantations. The next day, Christine has the promotion wrapped up (much to her co-worker competitor’s chagrin), but she’s soon beset by strange voices and visions, leading her – despite the protestations of loyal psychology professor boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) – to seek out the advice of a psychic (Dileep Rao), who breaks the bad news: she’s cursed, and in three days time, will take a one-way trip to the netherworld courtesy of a malevolent goat-demon.
The ensuing madness is of a feverish sort, with Raimi assuredly barreling from one creepy-amusing scenario to the next, whether it be animal-lover Christine’s attempts to ward off her unholy pursuer with a live-feline sacrifice (right after we spy a poster of a hanging kitty with the tagline “Baby, Hang On!”), a dinner-gone-awry with Clay’s rich, snooty parents, or Christine’s face serving as the recurring target for projectile vomiting. Raimi draws his characters in sharp, confident lines – notably with regards to his heroine’s past weight-related issues – while unwaveringly maintaining the focus on horror thrills. Drag Me to Hell has a swiftness that keeps anxiety and anticipation high. And by pivoting the story around mortgage loans, fiscal solvency, and the greed and selfishness that drives the financial industry, he jolts the film with a measure of hot-button relevance that complicates sympathy for his protagonist, who’s at once a nice, generous girl damned by a misguided decision, as well as a stand-in for the profit-over-all-else cretins who helped nearly tank the global economy. Raimi may take the easy way out with his conclusion, preferring a traditional gotcha finale to a more twisted, greed-run-amok available alternative, but as far as smart, scintillating genre efforts go, his Hades-bound trip is well-worth taking.