Judging from last night’s screening of Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to the horror genre gets the sort of reaction you’d imagine the director was after: screams of terror dissolving almost instantly into self-mocking laughter at having fallen for the director’s tricks yet again. This is a movie that goes bump in the night – if you want your date jumping into your lap, it’s the perfect choice for a night out. But let’s not get carried away equating its modest charms with the demented energy and deranged inventiveness of Raimi’s early work, most notably Evil Dead 2.
Actually, “charms” is not a great word choice, unless you find the prospect of a wizened Gypsy removing her rotting dentures in extreme close-up charming. (The Hungarian-American community is probably not going to be thrilled with the presentation of their culture on display here.) Said toothless crone is about to be thrown out of her house after missing several mortgage payments, unless she can convince loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) to extend her deadline. Normally, the kind-hearted Christine would do just that, but she happens to be up for a big promotion, and bank manager Mr. Jacks (David Paymer) would like to see her exhibit a little backbone.
So Christine turns the old woman down, and is rewarded for her fortitude with a Gypsy curse. She will be tormented by demons for three days, at the end of which she will be, yes, dragged into Hell, unless she can find some way of breaking the curse or passing it on to someone else. This makes for some rocky moments in her relationship with boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), particularly when she experiences a serious freak-out in the midst of dinner with his stodgy parents. Can the psychic Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) help her ward off the forces of evil..and win that big promotion at the bank?
Raimi relies heavily on (admittedly well-executed) shock effects; he’s not shy about slathering his jump-out-of-the-shadows moments with over-the-top musical stingers, all the better to get the whole theater hopping at once. He gets a lot of mileage out of bodily fluids and gooey innards, too, most notably when a Gypsy wake goes horribly awry. You can’t blame him for going to his bag of tricks so often if his only other choice was relying on Lohman’s acting chops to carry the movie. You’ll wait in vain for any sparks between her and Long, who reprises his usual lightweight “I’m a Mac” persona. No, Drag Me to Hell isn’t a compelling character study, but it’s entertaining enough in its squishy-squirmy way, and the payoff (which had me slapping my forehead wondering why I didn’t see it coming) delivers a little jolt of that old time Raimi magic.
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