Hilariously awful, not awfully hilarious.

Rating: 3/10 (15 April 2012)

Being introduced to Sam Raimi through Spider-Man, which was a defining (if not great) superhero film, and Spider-Man 2, which approached being great, Spider-Man 3's total and abject failure came as something of a shock to my system. If only I'd had Drag Me To Hell (or Raimi's 80s flicks) to prepare me.
DMTH is listed under and was marketed at as "horror." God knows the genre's boundaries are wide enough to let just about anything in, and DMTH certainly has its bases covered: animals jump out at inopportune moments, branches hit windows, the music builds up and up during intense scenes, just to reveal that there's nothing in the closet, after all, and so on. But it's not good horror. The startles are effective, but cheap and instantly forgettable, cut-and-pasted from a thousand other movies that have been made since the 1980s.
Here the film's defenders will chime in that, really, everybody ought to understand that this is a comedy. But it isn't. Comedy is Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight Rises, Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride. Comedy is, dare I say it, Bruce Campbell in the Spider-Man films. Those will make you laugh. DMTH is camp, and in trying to amuse you with its deliberate predictability, it will instead confuse you with its incoherence. After all, the film does not hate the horror genre that it is so loosely affiliated with. It loves it. It wants to make fun of it, but can't, because it believes wholeheartedly in everything that cheap, disposable horror stands for, and for every scene that is uproariously over-the-top, there is another that would belong beat-for-beat in a straight horror picture. Never mind the fact that it is just as ludicrous, and that the only reason we've come to accept it is through familiarity.
As for what humour there is to be found in scenes of projectile vomiting, and others such - I hold that it is not much at all - it deserves no more or less adoration than fart jokes in an Adam Sandler movie. That's the sort of cleverness on display here.
Raymond Chandler said of a run-of-the-mill detective novel, in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, that "...the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is not terribly different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious; but it is the same kind of book."
DMTH is that average detective novel. It's the average sci-fi Star Wars wannabe, the average fantasy Lord of the Rings knock-off, all of which you can find in excess quantities at your local chain bookstore, each one targeted at a specific audience but fulfilling, inescapably, precisely the same function. For all its surface vulgarity, Drag Me To Hell is as safe as safe could be.