Drag Me to Hell
In Drag Me to Hell, a lovely and somewhat shy loan officer named Chris (Alison Lohman) is having problems. She wants to impress her boyfriend’s blueblood parents, and she wants the promotion to assistant manager at her bank. Things take a definite turn for the worse one day when Chris decides to refuse a home loan to a scary gypsy crone who asks for her help. The woman puts a curse on Chris, and soon she is terrorized by a horrific demon determined to drag her to hell.
She (and her skeptical boyfriend, played by Justin Long) visit a psychic, who claims that he can help her remove the curse—for a fee, of course—and suggests that an animal sacrifice is in order. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but that doesn’t end up working.
Drag Me to Hell has elements that will be familiar to most horror fans, including a curse put on the main character, a search through arcane books and sources for ways to remove the curse, scary demonic attacks, and so on. Though the plot is fairly rote, what makes this film better than most is its execution. It is done with style and humor, with more than a few winks and a tongue firmly planted in cheek.
The film is directed by Sam Raimi, who is best known to most American audiences for having helmed the Spider-Man films. Yet long before Spider-Man, Raimi cut his teeth on low-budget horror films (most of which are now considered classics of the genre), including Evil Dead and its sequels, Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. If the title didn’t clue you in, Drag Me to Hell is this type of film.
Drag Me to Hell is a Grade-A Grade-B horror film, easily moving from humor to camp to Grand Guignol gore and back again. It’s not for everyone—there’s plenty of bodily fluids spewing around, more than a few cheap scares and gross-out moments—but it’s nice to see a master of the genre return to his roots, and Drag Me to Hell finds Raimi in fine form.
