Review: Drag Me to Hell
Drag Me to Hell represents director Sam Raimi at his absolute Sam Raimi-est. If your tastes run anything similar to mine, that's always a good thing.
Sam Raimi is responsible for my favorite horror-comedy of all time. I wrote about Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn a few years ago in this space, and there is some sort of strange alchemy that makes it both very funny and very scary to me at the same time. I'm not sure how deliberate that balance was, however, versus Raimi and team just committing to film all of their most ridiculous and creative ideas and ending up with a masterpiece almost by accident. Drag Me to Hell, by contrast, is one of the most explicit attempts at blending horror with comedy that I've ever seen. There is a clear set up, and then a series of comedic/horrific set pieces that build and build into a punchline that hits in the film's final moments. It is quite fun, even if it doesn't live up to the pedigree of Raimi's greatest film.
Alison Lohman stars as a bank officer that is angling for a promotion against a less-qualified peer. Her ambition leads her to go against her instincts and deny a mortgage extension to a delinquent customer, and unfortunately for her, that customer turns out to be a Romani woman with access to ancient magics. She is cursed by the woman, leading to increasingly disturbing and disruptive visions that threaten to derail her life, ultimately in a permanent fashion. She is forced to enlist her fiancé (low-key horror icon, Justin Long) and a fortune teller to help her understand her situation and ultimately rid her of the curse. In the meantime, the now-homeless curse merchant passes away, which does not make her less antagonistic but does complicate the process of Lohman extracting herself from her predicament. Her journey is funny and spooky, and she makes an easy-to-root-for protagonist. There is probably some slight nod towards the ills of capitalism and the profit-over-people mentality of the financial sector, but it would not be a stretch to suggest that the punishment does not fit the crime in this scenario. You could argue that Lohman would be a pretty bad loan officer if she actually extended this customers' grace period for a third time. That sentiment, that the curse need not befall someone deserving of their fate, is helped by an opening sequence in which a child is eternally punished by the same curse for the petty crime of swiping, and subsequently returning, a necklace from a wagon. Yet, much of the perverse joy of the plot derives from the fact that she is not, in fact, an immoral character and the story would lose a lot of its juice if it were reduced to a mere morality play where a mustache-twirling villain were punished instead.
Raimi is unique in that he is equally known for horror, humor, and comic book adaptations. Such a diverse portfolio may suggest a versatile toolset, but the reality is that the director has a singular style that he applies to all of his offerings. He isn't quite as idiosyncratic and immediately identifiable as someone like Tim Burton, but it doesn't take long before his hallmark qualities shine through in any movie that he helms. I would argue that nuance is not among those qualities, as he relies heavily on slapstick and illogical amounts of goo, fluids, and assorted viscera to get a reaction from his audience. Obviously, that pays off huge in the Evil Dead franchise. Applied to something like Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a thousand entries deep into the MCU juggernaut, the approach is alternately refreshing and bracingly at odds with the material. Most seemed to enjoy this year's Send Help, which kind of plays around with some of the same themes as Drag Me to Hell, but it didn't really work for me. In this case, however, I found the tone to be pitch perfect and the story admirably suited to Raimi's style. The best sequence involves Lohman trying to return a cursed item to a corpse in a grave in the middle of a rainstorm, showing off the director's affinity for physical comedy punctuated by gross-out moments. It serves as the last wild escalation before the dénouement, and finally the aforementioned punchline. As with 99% of the successful horror comedies, Drag Me to Hell is 100 times more funny than it is scary, but that's not to suggest that Raimi isn't among the very best to ply his trade at this type of movie. If you like him as a director, this one's can't miss.
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