The Evil Dead rises again

Rating: 9/10 (5 June 2009)

After having made millions directing CGI movies, Sam Reimi returns to horror. And it's a success. Drag Me to Hell is a return to 80s style horror, from the title screen to the Universal pictures logo.
Things start off with an intro decades ago. Mexican parents bring a child to an old church to be treated by a healer. Things go very wrong.
In the present, Christine is a bank employee with self-esteem issues competing for a promotion to assistant manager. One day an old gypsy woman arrives and asks her bank not to kick her out of her home for lack of payment. Christine trying to exercise some assertiveness and to ingratiate herself with her boss refuses. The woman puts a curse on her in a hilarious fight sequence in an underground garage. There she rips a button off Christine's jacket, uses it for the curse and returns it to her.
Christine boyfriend, the guy from the Mac ads, who unless he learns how to act will always be that guy, tries to play a psychologist who just got tenure at a university. Christine now starts seeing and hearing things. She decides to see a palm reader. He sees the evil that haunts her but tries to avoid giving her more info.
As things get worse and worse for Christine the palm reader tells her about the spirit that haunts her and that in 3 days she'll go to hell unless she appeases the spirit. That appeasement involves animal sacrifices, something she as a vegetarian and animal activist opposes. But when the demon thrashes her around her own house, she's forced to act.
The animal sacrifice doesn't exactly appease the demon and the next step is to try to exorcise the demon and place it in a goat, which in turn has to be slaughtered. The palm reader arranges for this to take place in the old Christian orthodox church and invites some help from the healer who was in the intro scene, a guy with a machete, and a goat. I won't reveal how it all turns out, but there are some twists and turns, including Christine wrestling the old gypsy woman, who by now is well dead and buried.
This movie is very much in the style of The Evil Dead and would have been a more fitting third sequel than Army of Darkness. Many sights are reminiscent of the original: creepy trees that look like they're moving, Christine raising her arm out of a grave- that is the cover art image of The Evil Dead. Alison Lohman who plays Christine gets lot kudos for putting up with a lot of abuse, real and digital.
As I mentioned above, this movie has a feel of an 80s film, there are bits of silence, the music is not as loud and intrusive as in most film today. While not very gory it has lots of scares and gross out moments. This is a nice and honest ghost story that will have you jumping out of your seats often, that'll make you laugh at the astonishing things that happen to our character. It could have used some more gore perhaps, but it does the job and is very entertaining.