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Horror By Inclination, Expert Comedy By Deed
Drag Me To Hell, 99 Minutes, PG-13, Three Stars
By Jonathan L. Fischer, The Bulletin
Though he’s best known for directing the ultrasuccesful “Spider-Man” franchise, Sam Raimi has long been a hero of cult fascination. The installments of his “Evil Dead” trilogy from the 1980s and ’90s are by varying degrees earnest, and yet all three are among the funniest horror movies ever made. Twisted and shameless yet well-meaning, they rightly are considered classics. Beginning in the early ’90s, Mr. Raimi went on to mixed success in Hollywood before entering the A-list with “Spider-Man” (2002). He’ll direct its third sequel for release in 2011.
Thankfully, he has returned to his roots with “Drag Me To Hell,” a perfectly calibrated, fairly old-school horror that — quite intentionally — happens to be one of the funniest movies of the year. It plays with its genre’s tropes without resorting to grating kitsch, while choreographing its tensest moments as jokes with punchlines, not instruments of fright. And Mr. Raimi, who wrote the film with his brother Ivan, still manages to concoct the sort of inventive, gross-out mayhem (a shower of embalming fluid, a projectile nosebleed) that should make most serious horror directors jealous.
It’s also somewhat of a morality tale: A beautiful actress with a retro, almost cheesecake appeal, Alison Lohman (“Matchstick Men”) stars as Christine Brown, a country girl living in a big city on the West Coast. She’s a loan officer at a bank with ambitions for the assistant-manager position, who at the urging of her boss (David Paymer) has resolved to make the “hard calls.” When Mrs. Ganush, an elderly Eastern European woman with a dead eye and false teeth, begs for a third extension on her mortgage, Christine hardens her sympathetic visage and says no. Uh oh.
Pretty soon, Mrs. Ganush is escorted outside by security after lunging at Christine’s neck. The work day ends, and Christine heads to her car, carrying a box of office supplies. Mr. Raimi doesn’t bother to explain exactly why Christine brings her ruler and stapler home each night; we too stop wondering once we see what he does with them — in an inevitable roller coaster of a confrontation between Christine and the old woman she has “shamed.” I would be remiss to spoil more, save that this parking-garage brawl ends with Mrs. Ganush chanting in some unidentifiable tongue and placing a curse on well-meaning Christine.
We meet Christine’s skeptical boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), a fresh-faced professor in the Ross Geller mode, and a couple of seers (Dileep Rao and Adriana Barraza) who tell us with perfect seriousness that Christine will now be haunted by a ramlike spirit called the Lamia. This creature, appearing mostly in shadows, will torment Christine for three days, and will then drag her to ... well, you know.
From there, we get squalid hallucinations and poltergeisty disturbances, animal sacrifices and a perfect moment involving an anvil, an ice skate and a pair of flying eyeballs. Say what you will about the content, but you have to give Mr. Raimi points for invention.
Strange as it seems, he also earns good marks for restraint: Instead of overburdening his tale with allegory or subtext — other than his cautionary message about greed — Mr. Raimi aspires mostly to entertain. And he is very much abetted by Christopher Young’s trill, tense score, which owes a great deal to the eerie crescendos of Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” music.
Clearly, “Drag Me To Hell” will chiefly appeal to connoisseurs of horror, but it should yield fanatics for a slightly different genre: the comedy macabre. In 2004, the very talented English comedian Simon Pegg starred in one such romp, “Shaun Of The Dead.” The Rodriguez-Tarantino collaboration “Grindhouse” also falls into the category. But unlike those films, “Drag Me To Hell” balances gut-busting and gore-spilling without any conspicuous irony, and nearly triumphs for it. Scary has rarely been so funny.
Thankfully, he has returned to his roots with “Drag Me To Hell,” a perfectly calibrated, fairly old-school horror that — quite intentionally — happens to be one of the funniest movies of the year. It plays with its genre’s tropes without resorting to grating kitsch, while choreographing its tensest moments as jokes with punchlines, not instruments of fright. And Mr. Raimi, who wrote the film with his brother Ivan, still manages to concoct the sort of inventive, gross-out mayhem (a shower of embalming fluid, a projectile nosebleed) that should make most serious horror directors jealous.
It’s also somewhat of a morality tale: A beautiful actress with a retro, almost cheesecake appeal, Alison Lohman (“Matchstick Men”) stars as Christine Brown, a country girl living in a big city on the West Coast. She’s a loan officer at a bank with ambitions for the assistant-manager position, who at the urging of her boss (David Paymer) has resolved to make the “hard calls.” When Mrs. Ganush, an elderly Eastern European woman with a dead eye and false teeth, begs for a third extension on her mortgage, Christine hardens her sympathetic visage and says no. Uh oh.
Pretty soon, Mrs. Ganush is escorted outside by security after lunging at Christine’s neck. The work day ends, and Christine heads to her car, carrying a box of office supplies. Mr. Raimi doesn’t bother to explain exactly why Christine brings her ruler and stapler home each night; we too stop wondering once we see what he does with them — in an inevitable roller coaster of a confrontation between Christine and the old woman she has “shamed.” I would be remiss to spoil more, save that this parking-garage brawl ends with Mrs. Ganush chanting in some unidentifiable tongue and placing a curse on well-meaning Christine.
We meet Christine’s skeptical boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), a fresh-faced professor in the Ross Geller mode, and a couple of seers (Dileep Rao and Adriana Barraza) who tell us with perfect seriousness that Christine will now be haunted by a ramlike spirit called the Lamia. This creature, appearing mostly in shadows, will torment Christine for three days, and will then drag her to ... well, you know.
From there, we get squalid hallucinations and poltergeisty disturbances, animal sacrifices and a perfect moment involving an anvil, an ice skate and a pair of flying eyeballs. Say what you will about the content, but you have to give Mr. Raimi points for invention.
Strange as it seems, he also earns good marks for restraint: Instead of overburdening his tale with allegory or subtext — other than his cautionary message about greed — Mr. Raimi aspires mostly to entertain. And he is very much abetted by Christopher Young’s trill, tense score, which owes a great deal to the eerie crescendos of Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” music.
Clearly, “Drag Me To Hell” will chiefly appeal to connoisseurs of horror, but it should yield fanatics for a slightly different genre: the comedy macabre. In 2004, the very talented English comedian Simon Pegg starred in one such romp, “Shaun Of The Dead.” The Rodriguez-Tarantino collaboration “Grindhouse” also falls into the category. But unlike those films, “Drag Me To Hell” balances gut-busting and gore-spilling without any conspicuous irony, and nearly triumphs for it. Scary has rarely been so funny.
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