Drag Me to Hell - A Bit of a Drag

Rating: 4/10 (31 May 2009)

After all the hype surrounding this film, I was expecting a good old-fashioned reel of celluloid madness in the '80s horror tradition, and instead I got a contemporary cop-out. I remember when I first saw Sam Raimi's Evil Dead flicks. The trilogy is an exercise in camp, which is acceptable on the grounds that none of those pictures were intended to truly be horror movies. Bruce Campbell's comical turn as Ash Williams,a hapless defender against satanic zombies that somehow infest a backwoods cabin, is entertaining and even inspiring (plenty of E.D. knock-offs ensued) but far from horrifying, and minimally suspenseful. Back then, the aim was to cheese, and to cheese with a marked lack of substance so self-indulgent that eventually, two decades later, cinephiles would come around to the simple genius of Raimi's grime & slime vision.
It was on the foundation of Raimi's subsequent directorial works, combined with the slew of positive reviews surrounding Drag Me to Hell, that I walked into this flick expecting real scares. After all, Raimi is capable of fine craftsmanship - A Simple Plan was probably the most underrated film of the '90s, just ahead of Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight. But Drag Me to Hell pales in comparison to both those pictures. Somewhere along the way (I suspect while making Spiderman) someone convinced Raimi that CGI special effects were a suitable replacement for, well, actually filming something.
Drag Me To Hell suffers very early on from the sort of CGI baloney so commonly seen in PG-13 "horror" flicks these days. An opening scene where an unimportant character is quite literally dragged to hell losses all impact for one reason and one reason only: we're allowed to see it. This fatal error, based it seems on the cinematic canard that seeing is believing, carries itself through the entire film. Which is a shame, because this movie seemed to have potential for real, down-to-earth horror elements. Alison Lohman as the ordinary, petite blond Christine Brown turns down the disgusting Mrs. Ganush, played convincingly by Lorna Raver, and sends the hag away without a third extension on her mortgage payments. From there I hoped events would crescendo to real horror proportions. They didn't.
Instead Raimi somehow meshes visually unconvincing CGI with actual film footage (see the scene in the parking garage) and lets Mrs. Ganush reappear in those sporadic flashes we've all come to expect from movies that rely on the audience's jumpiness when there's a deficit of actual thrills. When all the "gotcha" moments pass, all that's left are a handful of painfully mediocre scenes between Lohman and her boyfriend Clay, played unimaginatively by Justin Long. Throw in an over-cooked seance, which is probably the only part of the movie that directly hearkens back to The Evil Dead - you'll see why - and all that's left is the promise of more poorly-conceived CGI effects, and Justin Long placating Lohman's redundantly terrified, two-dimensional character.
Drag Me to Hell is rated PG-13, and although there are times when that rating is stamped on an R movie for marketing purposes, this isn't one of them. Consider the rating a warning. Raimi might have been better served to study another film from the '80s, one that eschews the usual demon formula for an eerie old woman. It's called The Woman in Black. It doesn't have a single frame of CGI. And frankly, it's 100 times scarier than Drag Me to Hell.