From today's Oregonian....
Welcome back, Sam Raimi.
After disappointing fans (and, if interviews are any indication, himself) with the flabby, compromised "Spider-Man 3," Raimi apparently decided he needed to blow out the cinematic carbs. So he re-teamed with his brother Ivan (his co-writer on "Army of Darkness" and "Darkman") to make another micro-budgeted, creatively gory and hilariously sadistic horror comedy -- the sort that first made Raimi a cult sensation back in his "Evil Dead" heyday.
The result, "Drag Me to Hell," may be the ultimate commentary on the housing crisis: The trouble begins when a bank loan officer (Alison Lohman) forecloses on the home of a gypsy crone (Lorna Raver). The crone responds by putting an ancient curse on the loan officer: Lohman will be tormented by a goat-demon for three days, and then ... well, the title contains the curse's punchline.
The premise is classic "Evil Dead" Raimi, in that it exists largely to give the director an excuse to heap endless abuse on his lead. Lohman (an incredibly good sport) gets tossed hither and yon and ingests bugs, goop and, in one insane sequence, an entire zombie-gypsy forearm as she makes increasingly frantic/bloody attempts to shake the curse. You can practically hear Raimi cackling offscreen as he focuses the same, uh, oral fixation on Lohman that he used to unleash on Bruce Campbell. The low budget also brings out his gleeful old-school trickery -- the demon, for example, is realized almost entirely offscreen, with shadows, sound, music and wild camera movement creating a sense of comic dread better than CGI could ever manage.
It's too early to say if "Hell" stands alongside Raimi's raw splatter-comedy classics -- it is rated PG-13, after all, and when it isn't raising hell, it unfolds a bit more sedately than in the old days -- but Raimi as a filmmaker is clearly having more fun than he's had in years. So will his fans, I'm guessing.
_____
B-plus; 99 minutes; rated PG-13 for for sequences of horror violence, terror, disturbing images and language.
'Drag Me to Hell' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 22, 2009)
Comments