Sunday, May 31, 2009

Raimi's Drag Me to Hell is Heavenly Bliss

Welcome back to the dark side Sammy!

BY EMIL TIEDEMANN

It's been 16 years since Sam Raimi touched base with the dark side of cinema, bestowing upon us the third--and so far, final--installment of The Evil Dead trilogy, with 1993's Army of Darkness. Since then Mr. Raimi has redirected his attention on an overlooked western (The Quick and the Dead), an Oscar calibre drama (A Simple Plan), a regrettable baseball feature (For Love of the Game), and an awkward supernatural thriller (The Gift). Oh yeah, and those Spider-Man movies, too! And now, after what seemed an eternity, the evil genius has relapsed, returning to what he does best...over-the-top loathing crossbred with insidious hilarity.

That latter sentence could easily pass as the tagline for Drag Me to Hell, which substantially lacks only in its own marketing campaign, one that ceased to capture my attention if not for Raimi's name being attached. Other than that this hellrasier delivered on all other levels, from the characters' beguiling psyches to the ideally-cast actors that depict them.

Set to a script penned by Raimi and his older brother Ivan, the 99-minute film starts us off in 1969 with a young Spanish boy riddled with a demonic curse that culminates in his inevitable path to the infernal underworld. We then skip ahead to present day and are introduced to Christine Brown (White Oleander's Alison Lohman), a conventional nobody who works as a loan officer at a bank. Gung-ho on landing a potential promotion, Brown makes an uncharacteristic decision that triggers an old, grisly woman (pictured left) to summon a curse upon her, one that layed dorment for the last 40 years.

Drag Me to Hell hinges on the unravelling of the unrelenting spell that delves Brown into a state of madness, subdued fleetingly by her psychologist boyfriend Clay (Pineapple Express' Justin Long). In the midst of her seemingly unavoidable fate, Brown sheds her vulnerable facade and exposes a buried defiance as she does all she feels necessary to rid herself of her hellish affliction. But is any of it enough?

Now don't go into this film expecting a mere extention of its unflattering trailer, but if you do, then you'll undoubtedly come out appeased, yearning for more. I just hope Mr. Raimi will have the sense to build on Drag Me to Hell and absorb us into another cult franchise of stylistic horror and gore, like he did all those years ago with Ash Williams and his trials & tribulations of The Evil Dead.

4/5 stars

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