Sam Raimi, finally away from a Spiderman movie

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2009)

Wow. I can't believe it's been 9 years since the last time Sam Raimi's name was up on the marquees on anything non-Spiderman related. I can't believe his distinctive camera style once again seems so refreshing and potent when applied to other genres other than the naturally bombastic superhero stories.
Drag Me to Hell has a storyline which could have easily been taken from an EC Horror comic from the '50s. In keeping with the nostalgic material, the movie even has the old '80s Universal logo. Allison Lohman portrays the damsel in distress, a loan officer who turns down and humiliates an old gypsy lady for fear of losing a job promotion. The gypsy, as gypsies tend to do, gives her an evil three-day curse. During these three days, the girl will see the old hag's face come out of nearly everything, from a cake to a cell phone screen. She will also be chased around by shadowy horned devils. When those three days are over, she WILL be dragged down to the depths of hell.
As good Horror movies always should, this one uses fantasy as a mask for a message, and that message is about capitalism, greed and what we'd be willing to put at stake for personal gain. Raimi mocks the protagonist viciously, showing her as a blank slate of a perfect, smiling, straight-out-of-high-school girl and then deconstructing that by showing us a nervous being who's desperate to escape her country roots and depressing family life. Although the movie is hardly big on character development, Raimi gives the audience enough hints about this to make it the film's major theme apart from itself. True, Catherine is not a bad person, and ultimately doesn't deserve everything that happens to her, but it's her selfishness what gets her into trouble. And that same absorbed behavior is what she needs to break free of the curse, a process which involves harming others who are no more guilty than herself.
Ultimately, though, Drag Me to Hell is all about the set pieces. It's a loud, shrieking movie from beginning to end and it features talking goats, swallowing embalming fluid and eye-stapling. Although definitively not as gory as any of the Evil Dead films (even less than Army of Darkness), there's a trend of extreme slapstick physical violence which is bound to get most movie audiences (that is, people not as desensitized as me) to cover their eyes and go "ewww" - which is what most were doing at my showing. Raimi's magic is how he can get a scene to be physically intense and morbid while at the same time showing the ridiculousness of the fictional movie strings that are holding it together. On that balance, the only one who can claim to challenge him is Tarantino. But QT loses because he never capped off a Horror scene by stealing a trick out of the Looney Tunes.