Drag Me To Hell
Oh, Sam Raimi. You know you’ve made it when the unique flavor of your early low budget films still describes your core style even when you have a huge crazy budget (for another example of this see the films of Kevin Smith). With Drag Me To Hell, Raimi makes a “classic” Sam Raimi movie, for better and for worse. Mostly worse. Drag Me is old-fashioned in interesting and unexpected ways, from the score to star Alison Lohman’s appliances to boyfriend Justin Long’s entire character, and including a general lack of commitment to any kind of modern sensibility of fun or scariness. Plenty of things exist just to serve the film, in obviously silly ways. Who else but a Raimi lead would have an anvil, much less store it hanging from a chain? Especially a twenty-something girlie-girl mortgage banker girl. Except for all the trademark gross-out silliness, this movie could have been released in 1960. But then again, we DO have the trademark gross-out silliness: expectorating terrible things, shooting body parts at people and stuff at body parts, and icky embraces, with the camera at a 25 degree angle, is familiar to the point of near-impatience. Don’t forget the mucus, very important.
As the heavy, we have a very spooky gypsy, played with ferocious sincerity by TV veteran Lorna Raver. Raver seems to be trying so hard to legitimize her first major role in a motion picture, and by extension the rest of the movie, I feel bad about how little I enjoyed the film as a whole. She herself is pretty enjoyable, until she’s forced to go along with Raimi’s particular fetishes. Lohman does all she can, which is act pretty, determined, surprised, nervous, brave, helpless, etc. as called for by the hokey, dorky story. At one point she’s desperate enough to break a cardinal rule of Good Guys, the next she can barely summon the brain power to operate a motor vehicle. There’s nothing wrong with hokey or dorky as long as either the story is interesting (see: Fido) or the dorkiness serves a purpose (see: Showtime’s musical Reefer Madness). What Drag Me To Hell fails to accomplish is an unselfconsciousness that would let the movie be fun rather than look like it’s trying to be serious while also trying to capture the campy fun spirit of a shoestring production (see: Evil Dead 2 for a Raimi counterexample). By the time you have Justin Long trying to generate all the gravitas for what is ostensibly something very life-threatening and profoundly scary – “I don’t know what I believe in any more” – you’ve ventured beyond any possibility of self-parody into just lazy. And no Bruce Campbell cameo? Come on, you’re not even trying, Sam!
Drag Me To Hell is mildly scary at parts, slightly grosser than that in other party, occasionally novel (see aforementioned old-fashioned touches), often poky, and finally pays off with a terrible, frowny goat puppet. I really can’t recommend it. Despite the fact that I support the idea of comedy horror, I do generally ask that it contain at the very least either comedy or horror, both preferred.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 5/22/09
Time in minutes 99
Director Sam Raimi
Studio Universal Pictures
