DRAG ME TO HELL
***1/2
Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you - Drag Me to Hell heralds Sam Raimi’s successful (and long-overdue) return to horror, with revolting gore and hair-raising shocks intact. Loud, fast, scary, and surprisingly hilarious (Raimi’s a king at cartoonishly gory violence that tickles the ribs as it turns the stomach), Drag Me To Hell is easily his funnest, freshest film since Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, and worthy of the heaps of critical praise (uncharacteristic for horror) that it has been receiving.
Alison Lohman is pitch perfect as damsel in distress Christine Brown, a treacle-sweet farm-girl-in-the-big-city who’s struggling to get the big promotion at the bank where she works as a loan officer. Criticized by her boss for being too lax on mortgage defaulters, Christine opts - against her own conscience - to reject the pleas of Mrs. Ganush, an old woman who comes in requesting an extension on her foreclosure; when the woman falls to her knees and begs her to reconsider, Christine calls out for security and pulls away, dropping the poor woman onto the floor.
Turns out this isn’t the kind of woman you want to piss off - or worst off, shame - and Christine soon finds herself the victim of a violent parking lot attack (a real stunner of a sequence with enough scares alone to justify the ticket price), and soon thereafter, a horrific supernatural curse. The scares start piling on as the film evolves from a creepy-old-woman chiller to a full-blown demonic ghost story, and Christine finds herself haunted by increasingly aggressive supernatural attacks.
The elements are all there - creaky floors, eerie shadows, wise mediums who try to save the day - but under Raimi’s direction, and thanks in large part to Lohman’s knowing performance, there is enough freshness in the familiarity to make for a uniquely entertaining creepfest. It’d been a while since I had this much fun being scared.
- Logan Crow
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