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Shemp #1: Zombie Boy's Take:

 

 

I know that the past ten years or so have forced us horror fans to prejudge films based solely on their ratings, but don’t let the PG-13 banner that waves over this movie dissuade you: it is about a demon trying to drag a woman into hell. The title is a literal (and wonderful) description of the events of the movie, and those events are not skimped on. The beast is a powerfully visible and frightening force, mainly because you only really see it as a shadow. Which is not to say that everything is heard and not seen. Fear not, for there is plenty of grossness in the film. More props to Lohman for letting actress Lorna Raver, playing the gypsy-curse-giver Mrs. Ganush, gum her chin during a fight scene. Raver had to endure lots of makeup applications, but Lohman gets a mouthful of slime at one point, and takes a faceful of earth and worms at another. There is even a smashed head, eyeball flying into someone else’s mouth scene. Just like in ED2.

*squeal!*

Lastly, let us not forget the quintessential Raimi camera moves, the kind of stuff that lesser filmmakers have been trying to copy for 20 years, often with little success. Even Shaun of the Dead, at whose altar I bow weekly, is really just a mishmash of Raimi’s whip-pans and crash zooms. A typical conversation on the set of a Raimi film must go like this:

“Okay, I want the camera to smash through that window, and wheel around onto the girl’s face.”

“How are we going to achieve that?”

“Easy: throw the camera through the window.”

And the end. Ah, the wonderful twist. Even if you see it coming, it doesn’t matter. It still delivers. There is a lot of subtext throughout the film, of the price one pays for the little sins, the everyday disregarding of how to live a good and just life, the little covetings and slothful behaviors. But you don’t need to worry about that. If you get it, more the better for you. If not, it is still a campy and sometimes unsettling, but most importantly overall fun little movie.

About getting dragged to hell :)

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Shemp #2: Angela Mac's Take:

For Love of the Game, Spiderman 2… I hang my head in shame that I was beginning to believe the era had passed. The days of wide-eyed glee when spotting newspaper listings of the precious few theatrical releases, the swell of pride over confirmation he’d landed the Spiderman gig – I feared the deliciously smart, “we’ll make it work ” Raimi had been replaced by a man who had simply grown up, and moved on. … but, twenty seconds in to Drag Me to Hell, when a hand slowly slips down through split woodwork behind superimposed fire, I could smell the smoke. “Just move your hand down reeeaaaallll slowly, okay?” I could picture him saying, in the very voice he used over two decades ago when convincing an actress Plaster of Paris was an excellent means of taking a face cast. The smoke gained body, and when that action cut, and the title sprang onto the screen – without any poncey lead-in – I wanted to ooze from the theatre seat, onto my knees and bow in repentance. The genius is still viable.

Repentance, too, went beyond the watching. Amid the squishy eyeballs and socket-wrenched close-ups, is a woman who has planted herself upon a mirrorless path. As our empathy for her begins to fray, it becomes apparent that Raimi never lost his faith in us. Most horror directors work in sledgehammers, while Raimi flicks the scalpel and moves on to the next, confident we’ll spot the incision. He lights up his sets, because there are no holes to secret. If an actor moves, there’s a reason for it, and the things that frighten us most aren’t patient enough to wait for dark. The storyline of Drag Me to Hell, itself, is as horrific as any of the worms or dentures hurled at us. A much more intricate tale than a young filmmaker’s Evil Dead dared tackle, heavy on character, but never on the horror.

There is so much sugar in this movie, but so little space to dissect it all. Being a horror film, the internal meter is set to register genuine creeps and stomach-knotting thrills, and no doubt they were there in spades; yet, the boy from Michigan cultivated genuine empathy (for more than one or two characters), viscera-knotting gore and a gas pedal mashing ride of retribution that inspires one to stand and howl. Raimi also provided a reason for the MTV Awards to exist, in that, somebody better hand that man a trophy for Best Fight Scene. Christine tussling with the pig-knuckled gypsy woman in a car was glorious, and then sprinkled with a little more glory for good measure. And that snazzy, but unsettling orchestration in the background? The unused theme from The Exorcist. Ah, no one finds a use for things as wonderfully as Mr. Raimi.

Alison Lohman turned out to be sound casting. She’s no Campbell, but no Streep, either, but she does what she should, and gave Raimi full license to do his thing all around her. The outright putrid scenes she endured garners my full respect. On the subject of gross, kudos to Lorna Raver for digging in, and portraying the gypsy unflinchingly so.

The ending twists around, arriving precisely where it should… though, I’m curious if the casting (and proceeding lack of meat) of Justin Long indicates an intention to sequel the film. Faith restored, yes – but it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten Spiderman 2…

I love that Raimi held tight to the sexy cards until the end. I loved his choice of Ice Cream Therapy over Tension-Easing-Sex. I love that his innate wit braids so seamlessly into horror. It’s why I fell in love with him in the first place, and it is better than Christmas that the warm spot has been reignited. Wherever you’ve been, Sam, it’s damn good to have you back. And really, if you and Ivan could use more reasons to hang out together to write scripts, by all means, allow us to take up a collection for some sort of Sam and Ivan Raimi’s BBQ and Bowling Fund.

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Shemp #3: Midnight Butterfly's Take:

He helps us as much as he can. As Raimi’s blonde heroine Christine, Alison Lohman is certainly delectable but she’s no Cate Blanchett. That’s just fine because a better actress wouldn’t have worked within Raimi’s particular spell. Lohman is everything she needs to be for the movie to succeed on its own terms. She doesn’t let us in. Raimi does all of that work for her. He’s the one whose side we’re on. We just want to see what terrible things he’s going to do to his hot little ingénue. Our job is to enjoy the ride completely guilt free. Raimi never has been and never will be a moralist. For him, morality has always been a flimsy lie manipulated by the cosmos for its own ends. Raimi assumes the same license and uses the surface convention of morality as the ultimate punchline. He doesn’t try and surprise us anymore than a roller coaster does. We already know the drill. Wait for the drop and then scream your damn head off. When you come out of the drop you’re laughing your ass off. If it’s up to Sam Raimi, you’ll leave the movie with no head and no ass and with a lot of explaining to do when you get to work the next day. He’s that kind of insane.

People have said that this movie is a return to the old Sam Raimi of yesteryear, the maverick maniac of The Evil Dead Trilogy. Perhaps. Certainly Drag Me to Hell is deeply informed by that sensibility. Still, there’s no doubt that the new movie is made by a master craftsman. There isn’t the same sense of young artist losing his fucking mind and pushing the envelope as far as he can go. Drag Me to Hell, despite its chaotic surface, is concerned with themes of guilt and penance, the nature of good and evil and even romance. This is the work of an artist who is used to exploring these classic themes on his own terms. If The Evil Dead and especially, The Evil Dead II felt like horror anarchy, there’s no question that Drag Me to Hell is much more restrained…except when it isn’t. There is a certain wistfulness to the shocking scenes. When the gypsy woman’s head explodes her eyes and blood into the face and mouth of Christine, you can almost here Raimi saying, “Ah, those were the good old days.” On the other hand there are plot points that happen in the story that are integral to a more complete experience, that wouldn’t have happened in Raimi’s youth. The more mature Raimi manages to nail his horror/chaos to a structure solid enough that the audience can hold on to it, and finally, be gleefully upended by it. There is a wit and deftness here that harkens back to classic storytelling that the younger Raimi either couldn’t have pulled off or simply wouldn’t have bothered. The newer, more mature Raimi seems to have discovered that he loves telling the story...and is good at it.

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In the hands of a master, however, the jump scare is the most potent weapon in the horror director's arsenal. No other filmatic technique can achieve such a physical reaction in an audience. In Drag Me To Hell, a horror-comedy that has the snap and crackle of a Tales from the Crypt episode at thrice the length, Sam Raimi redeems the jump scare. He is the most rhythmic of directors, using percussive cutting to move viewers along like a four-on-the-floor drumbeat. A trickster whose fluency in the language of cinema lets him manipulate audiences at will, Raimi has the ability to make your eye go exactly where he wants it to. He diverts your attention, setting you up for a sucker punch, then make you jump with a sudden reverse crash zoom from a menacing shape. The fact that it turns out to be something mundane like some rattling pots and pans reveals his mischievous sense of humor. Drag Me To Hell traffics in meta-scares; you recognize their absurdity, but you can't deny that he got you all the same.

Raimi's triumphant return to the genre proves that it's possible to make a satisfying PG-13 horror movie. The problem comes when studios water down a movie that has nothing going for it except the potential for bloody death, leaving you with a cocktease that promises something it can't deliver.DMTH doesn't have that problem, because its thrills are based on old-fashioned bumps in the night. The set-up (demon torments cherub-cheeked Allison Lohman) gives Raimi the chance to let loose with old-school gore-free scare tactics: creepy sounds, swooping cameras, deafening silences, and crashing shocks. For a man who’s been working with $200+ million budgets for the last decade, he can still do more with wind and shadows than any director alive. 

But it’s not just directorial flair that powers the film. DMtH was written before the current economic crisis, but its plot about a woman who's afraid of losing her job being cursed by a woman who’s afraid of losing her house couldn’t be more topical. Financial worries permeate the film, from the protagonist’s anxiety over meeting her boyfriend’s wealthy family to her office rival’s pathetic attempt to steal her promotion. Even minor characters have their mind on their money and their money on their mind, like the psychic who can't turn down $60 he didn’t earn and the medium who charges ten grand per exorcism. This undercurrent of economic despair ratchets up the tension considerably. It’s the best example of financial horror since the original Amityville, where the answer to why people don’t just move out of a haunted house is because they can’t afford to.

Amazingly, the movie manages to be really disgusting despite its rating. A horror film without a single murder, it uses PG-13-approved gross-outs like phlegm, bugs, drool, and old ladies' gums to show that imagination counts more than volume. Sure, dismembered body parts are gross, but getting a single drop of someone else's blood in your mouth is way grosser. Raimi walks a fine line here, taking the classy “less is more” approach to build tension, then releasing it with sudden gouts of gooey splatstick. It’s the rare horror movie that gives you just about everything the genre has to offer, from funhouse shocks to real-world anxiety to cathartic Grand Guignol.

Drag Me To Hell shows a director firing on all cylinders. While hacks hope to manufacture thrills with  shakycam twitches, color-corrected faux-grindhouse grit, and fix-it-in-post editorial sloppiness, Sam Raimi's elegant set-pieces recall vintage Hitchcock in their confidence and effect. He makes other directors of pop horror look like they’ve been sleeping since Evil Dead 2. Hail to the king, baby. 

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