Seriously fun horror-comedy or comedy of horrors?

Rating: 8/10 (4 June 2009)

This is a rare hybrid that manages to be both scary and/or funny depending on the moment. At first I thought it might be a standard scare fest as it starts that way, with perhaps a few comedic moments thrown in throughout to release the tension, but as it went on the madcap antics and gross-out humor took over. It's not a bad thing in itself but viewers should be warned. It felt like a b-movie with a-movie production quality in a big budget "Evil Dead" vein. It's not at all in the ridiculous "Scary movie" category of horror comedy. The script is too smart for that and the actors play it mostly seriously. The director Sam Raimi basically toys with your emotions making you laugh or jump, sometimes one right after the other. Raimi is very good at exploiting shadows, camera work and sound effects to create frights. He manages to scare you with seemingly inoffensive objects. He makes funny things that shouldn't be funny. Those are not easy things to do and I applaud the clever ways he does so.
There's a lot of fun to be had watching "Drag me to hell" and it contains its share of joyous moments provided you have a somewhat dark twisted sense of humor. There are some gory or disgusting moments but nothing particularly extreme. I wish the balance between horror and comedy had stayed more even until the end but a fine line was walked nevertheless. My enjoyment was somewhat diminished by a neighboring girl in the theater spoiling a big twist long beforehand by shouting it to her friend but I shouldn't blame her too much since she seemed so enthusiastic. However, it means I don't really know if that twist is predictable or not but honestly I would think it is.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10