dir. Sam Raimi
writ. Ivan Raimi and Sam Raimi
feat. Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao, David Paymer
Sam Raimi's return to horror naturally arouses unfair expectations. This is the man behind two astonishingly inventive and frightening Evil Dead films, and a hilariously campy one. Granted, another spook-ride, The Gift, proved dissatisfying, showing a bit too much formula, a claim repeated by some for Raimi's Spider-Man movies. However, such blockbuster successes also seemed to promise an even deeper trove of resources for Drag Me to Hell.
On one hand, it's nice to have the old boy back, still committed to mechanical effects, both elaborate and simple, eager and able to evoke maximum squirms and subsequent laughs out of a propulsive bloody nose. He attends to detail and simple human problems amidst the hellfire and damnation with equal concern. And if those humans seem a bit shallow, Christine (if not Lohman) too much the dopey blonde and Clay (Long) too broadly drawn (the character telling us he's a geek doesn't pass as character development,) we're still in standard genre territory.
But that's where Drag disappoints the most. It all feels too easy, a mishmash of horror films we've seen before without that extra edge to top them. This is Raimi on autopilot, slapping together a topical setup (home loan foreclosure), a gypsy curse, a soul damned to Hell, disbelieving loved ones, and a couple experts to help chart the challenging, perhaps impossible, course back to safety. The gross-outs are appropriately timed and stomach-curdling, the scares reasonably seat-grabbing, and the laughs genuinely satisfying, but as a whole, the film only reaches middling. And while I'd like to write off this response to a touch of hero worship, it's not just a case of those expectations rearing their ugly, if well-made-up, heads.
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