Dead
I was first introduced to the work of Sam Raimi by The Evil Dead series (why the fuck haven’t I reviewed that?) and all three of those movies still sit high in my movie hierarchy. Then Raimi went on to do the Spider-Man movies and I thought that the days of demon possessed people dancing around like marionette dolls was over. But then this little gem came along and I was walking on the reanimated corpses of gypsy grandmas.
Drag Me To Hell is, of course, Sam Raimi’s triumphant return to horror after his work with everyone’s favorite web-head. The movie follows Christine Brown, a bank loan officer who is cursed when she refuses to give an elderly gypsy woman a bank loan. This curse’s final hoo-rah is opening a flaming hole in the ground and literally dragging the person to lowest depths of the inferno. Now, this is the first thing about this movie that I absolutely loved. How many movies released recently are about a gypsy curses? This is the kind of story you would only really see in like an old ’80’s horror movie. You know, because everyone nowadays is politically correct and having a gypsy curse put on someone might be taken as a little racist. But this movie tells political correctness to go fuck itself and does it anyway.
The special effects in modern horror movies seem to be kind of the linchpin. How gory and real looking can we make this severed head look? But again, this movie says fuck that and makes things look pretty shitty. There are many, many, many instances in the movie where you look at something and can immediately tell that it is a rubber mannequin or a really shitty prop. One example of this is when Christine tries to break the curse. (MAYBE SPOILER (not really sure)) She is told that to break the curse she would need to kill her cat. So she grabs the nearest kitchen and goes to work making some fine Korean cuisine. But when she stops stabbing and pulls the knife back up covered in her beloved poody-tat’s innards, you can clearly see that the blade is bent on a 45 degree angle. Also, the bodily fluid spray puts Quentin Tarantino to shame, with a nose bleed spraying about as much blood as the stump of a suited ninja from Kill Bill. Now all this may sound like a total rip on the film, like “Oh, the effects are fucking awful!” but this is praise. All the shittiness of the special effects kind of makes it better and pretty funny, too. If you are familiar with the works of Raimi you know that he is really good at making really scary but at the same time really funny as well.
If you have seen any of The Evil Dead movies, you know what you are in store for with Drag Me To Hell. A ridiculously stupid story with some pretty terrible special effects that both make everything better if you can believe it. Top it all off with some pretty good acting from the whole cast and what you get is one of the scariest and funniest horror movies to come out in recent years. Now that Mr. Samuel Marshall Raimi is no longer doing the Spider-Man stuff, I really hope to see more of these types of movies from him at any point in the future.
Final Score: 4.5/5
– DeadMan
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