Drag Me to Hell
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 12:41PM 
I am not the biggest horror film fan in the world. Frankly, I barely tolerate the genre in any serious discussion regarding the cinema and rarely consider it anything more than a discomforting oddity of entertainment.
Which is why the films of Sam Raimi have always enticed me.
His approach is more to the sheer lunacy and fun that vehicles of the supernatural and spooky should aspire to.
This is not to say I don't enjoy a good creep out. Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Blair Witch Project, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, Alien, Wolf Creek, The Exorcist, the original The Haunting, etc. have been the films which raise my neck hairs. My taste for horror leans more toward the understated terror of the human condition - the psychology of fear - than otherworldly monsters, slashers, Jasons, Freddys or the recent spate of Eli Roth/James Wan induced sadistic torture porn.
Raimi gets the genre about right. It's nice to see him back indulging in the sort of good natured guignol that he abandoned for the lucrative world of the Spiderman franchise.
The gore is palatable if you can present it in such an over-the-top manner that you chuckle (non-psychopathically) at the absurdity while keeping a tongue-in-cheek appreciation for the eeriness of it all.
Drag Me to Hell is that kind of flick. Certainly not as enjoyable as any entry in his Evil Dead trilogy, it occasionally strikes the right chords in providing 99 minutes of shocking, goofy fun.
These horror people all seem to have a peculiar quirk however.
The Hellraiser milieu was a dermatological S&M struggle between those with skin and the skinless. The Hannibal Lecter movies became an erudite gentleman's search for a protein to match his tasteful wine selection. Jason Voorhees simply wanted to kill teenagers who fucked too much due to a very active Oedipal complex. Freddy Krueger was vengeful because he was a burn victim in a passé rugby shirt. And the guys from Scream were Columbine era costume hags.
But Raimi seems hell-bent on providing us with the projectile issuance of particular substances - be they viscous fluids, barf, insects, eyeballs, blood or saliva - from one individual into the mouth of another. So obsessed is he with these oral transferences that one wonders not if he was denied breast feeding as an infant, but whether his mother simply regurgitated her food into his awaiting cakehole.
I haven't seen this many things go into a broad's mouth since I unsubscribed from the German porn site Sturm und Drang.
It makes for some hilarious and grimacing moments.
The rest of Drag Me to Hell is rather forgettable. It shouldn't have been.
The main problem rests in the terrible performance of Alison Lohman. She is onscreen for all but a few minutes of the entire film. And while it is generally agreed that when playing high camp one should sell it with a straightforward appeal, her earnestness is a crashing, tragic bore.
The supernatural maelstrom begins with a contemporarily relevant theme when our heroine, an upwardly mobile loan officer at a bank, denies an old gypsy woman an extension on her home loan payments. The aged lady has run into some health problems of late (are you listening, Republicans?!) and is unable to keep her house of thirty years without assistance. In a career gambit for promotion, Lohman denies the extension. The gypsy curses her.
Sociologically interesting, I think it speaks volumes to our collective guilt as moneyed, white people that our fear of curses always come from those peoples who have been systematically disenfranchised or eradicated through our perceived destiny by abuse, genocide or eugenics.
Oh, the burden, eh?
The old woman's curse manifests in a three day promise of eternal damnation for Lohman unless she can find a reversal to the commination.
She indulges in all sorts of atonement - begging forgiveness, animal sacrifice, exhumation, seeking advice from psychics - but nothing can stop the torment.
It doesn't help that Justin Long - that smug, Apple-happy jerkoff from the Mac commercials (I'm an adamant PC man) - is her ineffectual boyfriend.
Amidst all this silliness is Raimi's inimitable style. The roving, careening, dipping, soaring camera, the ear piercing screaming, the campy lines, the whipping winds, the blood, fluids and body parts flying and the ever present nod and wink to the audience.
Drag Me to Hell is an enjoyable frolic, damaged by the limited talents of the leads, that will at least put a smile on your face and cause sudden bursts of gut laughter.
Even for those who take horror much too seriously.
Reader Comments (7)
It's funny, last weekend as I began to cherry pick the deliciously creepy fare I'd be settling into for All Hallow's Eve, a quick Rotten Tomatoes drive-by actually convinced me to take a pass on this laughable title. But since it's you and I'd trust you to sponge bathe my great grandmother without getting an erection, I'm going to illegally download, er, rent this dog tonight. Hell, I didn't even know it was Raimi. That's enough for me. I still remember tripping my azure nuts off on poorly cooked meth, years ago, the evening you first introduced us to 'Evil Dead 2' (the insane camera shots roaring through the cabin, Ash's girlfriend ballet dancing with head in hand, the gloriously shitty acting ).
BTW, my Halloween queue wound up containing 'The Innocents', 'The Orphanage (El Orfanato)' and 'The Descent'. I'm very interested to know your take on this last film because I remember dismissing this title when it first came out...chicks go spelunking, cavern caves-in, oops we're not prepared, here come creepy cave-dwelling mutants...typical formulaic horror hilarity ensues. But I actually watched 'The Descent' with much the same creeped out smirk on my face that you allude to above. Though this film was rife with that over the top incredulity, (pick-axing and roundhousing these slithering cave crawlers Laura Croft-slash-Jackie Chan-like) goddamn if I didn't walk away from it saying, 'not fucking bad'. N'est pas?
Don't be too trusting with me on the Granny bath. I have some severe GILF issues.
Also, don't be too excited about Drag Me to Hell. It had moments. Overall, somewhat disappointing.
I like your All Hallow's Eve lineup. I'm hoping it's the 1961 The Innocents you watched. Great, great movie. The Orphanage was top notch as well. Along the same lines, check out The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labrynth (also by del Toro) if you haven't already.
I ashamedly picked up The Descent at my local library a few years back and made it about an hour through. It was kind of creepy. The scene where the chick has to crawl through that tiny tunnel between the rocks was claustrophobically chilling and the mole people were nasty enough but the avid careerist/outdoor enthusiast (the alpha female) started to grate real early. It was certainly above the standard "spelunking/albino mole people" fare (a rich cinematic tradition) but I was never hooked.
The Haunting(1963) The Innocents are two of my all time favorites. I agree that while Raimi did not match the fun and mania of his first two Evil Dead flicks, I really enjoyed Drag Me To Hell. It was one of, if not my fav film of 2009. Granted, I did not see many films in 2009. I think you short change Scream I though. I thought they were fairly clever in humorously mocking the formula while using it rather effectively.
Thee who poseth as Lars,
Are you by any chance a rabid DePalma fan?
Nay Goode Moores, to speak the name of but three by DePalma I needs must Googleth it.
I'm still stumped then.
I liked this movie myself. Don't ever piss off a creepy Gypsy! JM