'Drag Me To Hell' (2009)

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2012)

'Drag Me To Hell' invokes a ton of mixed feelings, like a lot of Sam Raimi's work does, for me at least. The opening scene starts off strong, the prologue is always creepier and more authentic when filmed in a language other than English (lol?), but quickly diminishes into the type of movie that the lame ADD-ridden junior high school crowd will think is totally awesome, but completely fails on any level of maturity. I'm probably being overly harsh, but it could definitely have been better, and a lot of what killed it was the fact that Sam Raimi seems to favor ridiculously cheesy special effects. And we are talking like extreme levels of cheese, here. I didn't like the effects in 'Spider-Man', either. They too, were packing on extreme layers of cheesiness. Which is fine every now and again, but not when you're working on something like 'Drag Me To Hell' which had a lot more potential to it than some ridiculous looking FX.
It pains me to say that 'Drag Me To Hell' was a slight disappointment, especially when I loved Raimi's 'A Simple Plan' so much, but he had a very strong story and extremely well-written book by Scott Smith to go by on that one.
On the other hand, 'Drag Me To Hell' definitely does have some genuine scares to be had. Alison Lohman does a fantastic job, and Dileep Rao adds a nice touch, but Justin Long is what helped attract me here because this dude rocked the sh*t out of 'Jeepers Creepers' hard and I wanted to see him do it again, but he does his best job at being a "grown-up" with a "career" and he has such "nice" parents, and his whole character is another one of those potential wastes.
All in all, I enjoyed it, but I don't know how many more times I am going to wanna see it again.
DRAG ME TO HELL -----6/10