Drag Me To Hell
From FilmFile
Taglines:
- Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days, she's going to hell.
- Even nice people can go to hell.
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Synopsis
After denying a woman the extension she needs to keep her home, loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) sees her once-promising life take a startling turn for the worse. Christine is convinced she's been cursed by a Gypsy, but her boyfriend (Justin Long) is skeptical. Now, her only hope seems to lie in a psychic (Dileep Rao) who claims he can help her lift the curse and keep her soul from being dragged straight to hell.
Review
Sam Raimi, once well known for his comic-horror touches in films such as the Evil Dead series, has spent the better part of the last decade devoted to a certain web-slingling comic book hero. During this time he has lent his name to various horrors (mainly remakes) in executive producer capacity, but not ventured back to the medium he earned his spurs with. So, when he announced that he was taking a rest from huge-budgeted superheroics to deliver a good-old-fashioned horror film, there was excitement from the fans, but also worry that the master of the genre has been away too long, and may have lost his edge.
Well, despite the relatively low rating (a PG13 in the US and a 15 in the UK), this film delivers everything you would love a Raimi film to deliver, only with less blood than his earlier days!
The film starts with a bit of backstory, showing the results of a gypsy curse which plagues the victim to be tormented for three days before being literally dragged off to hell. Cut to around 30 years later, and we meet Christine (Alison Lohman), a hard working loan broker for a financial institution. Trying to impress her boss in order to win promotion, she finds herself offending an aging gypsy woman who place a curse on her, the curse of Lamia. From that point on the tormenting begins, disrupting her life with her boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long), and work. An encounter with a psychic, Rhaam Jas (Dileep Rao) may provide answers, and help her shed the curse...but will it be too late?
The plot is ripped right from the text-book of 80s horror, using the much cliched gypsy curse as a plot device, but the film suceeds in delivering shock, tension, frights, scares, and laughs. Yes, as any fans of Raimi will know, he likes to break tension not with a wry joke, but with slapstick hilarity. A huge fan of The Three Stooges (elements of which are blatantly evident in the Evil Dead series), when it comes to fights and attacks by strange beasties, there is something about Raimi's wacky approach that makes it so hilarious, whilst also unsettling. His play with camera angles to create unease as events start to unfold works here to marvellous effect, and the lack of blood doesn't mean there are no gross-out moments as Raimi just replaces it with something else to squirm at.
All in all, Drag Me To Hell does exactly what you want a Raimi horror to do. A welcome return to the genre before he steps back into the webbed pond once more.
Trivia
- Ellen Page dropped out due to scheduling problems.
- The script was written after Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi completed Army of Darkness (1992), but Sam pursued other projects before returning to this.
- Sam Raimi's friend, Bruce Campbell, turned down a role because he was busy with his TV show "Burn Notice" (2007).
- The name of the medium in the film, Ram Jas, is similar to Ram Dass, the name adopted by Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert when he became a New Age spiritual guru.
- The movie begins with the old Universal logo, the one used in the 1980s when director Sam Raimi got started in the horror genre with the first two Evil Dead movies. After the credits, there is also the title card saying to take a tour of Universal Studios. This was also used in the 80s, in other Universal movies, such as An American Werewolf in London (1981).
- Director Trademark: Oldsmobile Delta 88 - The 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, also known as The Classic, appears in the movie as Mrs. Ganush's car.
Cameos and allusions to other films
- Cameo: [Ted Raimi] Sam's brother makes an off-screen cameo as a doctor.
- The running time of the film is 99 minutes, much like the amount of time Peyton Westlake could go outside before his masks would melt in Darkman (1990).
- Cameo: [Sam Raimi] The director makes a cameo as a spirit during the exorcism scene.
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