Drag Me To Hell

The most striking thing about watching Sam Raimi's last film, the third Spiderman, is how lifeless the whole thing is. Raimi's movies, with the odd exception, tend to be thrill rides, the type of stuff that justifies the whole notion of cinema experience as rollercoster ride. Yet here it just feels somewhat uninspired, like he's going through the motions. Watching it would suggest a director who needs a break, and by that meaning he needs to make something else. Drag Me To Hell is that break, and a return for Raimi to the genre that he started in, horror. Look at it as Raimi being like a band who have become massive, and have been churning out bloated, emotionless albums for ages suddenly deciding to make an album that "goes back to their roots" so to speak. On other words make a cheap, quick effort that looks to capture the energy of those earlier works before the fame and mass expectations set in.

Realistically Raimi has only actually made one horror film, Evil Dead. The sequels are really comedies and The Gift isn't a scary film. Of course that one sojourn is a schlocky mess but rises above the rest of the genre thanks to its energy and Raimi's creative approach to camera work, editing and sound design. To realise how lacking Spiderman 3 is just watch it back to back with either of the first two Evil Deads. Raimi's approach to the horror genre is helped by his background in comedy, and in particular slapstick. Of course there are many similarities to the two genres and Raimi gets this, using his expert sense of comic timing to engineer tension before the release, in this case through a fright, although there are a few laughs too. It is this same approach that he brings for Drag Me To Hell.

To say that you should treat this movie with a pinch of salt is an understatement. In fact not doing so will probably seriously affect your overall opinion of it. This isn't arty Euro horror like Let The Right One In, but neither is it the sort of depraved, joyless effort that is represented by endless Saw sequels and remakes of already brutal and tasteless nasties from Evil Dead's era that makes up America's horror release schedule. This is dumb fun, but with an intelligence that only a highly creative mind can bring. So you get flying eyeballs, phlegm, bugs, a cake with an eye, a corpse that has a thing for hair, a possessed hankie, and a crappy CGI goat that's just hilarious, but kind of for the wrong reasons. To attempt to analyse Drag Me To Hell on any sort of social level the way you could, say, Romero's films would actually be doing it a disservice as you would only reveal how shallow it is. It's here to entertain and make you jump, and that is all. Of course there is the point that Capitalism, and more so individualism, is bad, but we all know that anyway. Instead just enjoy the ride.

Drag Me To Hell isn't by any stretch of the imagination a masterwork, neither is it some revolutionary horror here to shake up the genre's very foundations. Rather it's a decided old fashioned little horror film with scares, laughs and enough "ewww" moments to keep you entertained for its running time. It's safe to say that with this Sam Raimi has rediscovered his mojo and proves, as he did with Evil Dead, to be a master of the horror artform. Indeed it is to that genre's loss that he hasn't made more scary films. It's probably wrong to say it, but let's hope he burns out again soon.