‘Drag Me to Hell’: Raimi's return to horror doesn't work
“You handled that pretty well,” says the bank branch manager (David Paymer) to his ambitious loan officer in “Drag Me to Hell.”
The hell she did, you might say after seeing what she handled.
Movie Review
“Drag Me to Hell”
Two stars
Starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long and David Paymer. Directed by Sam Raimi. 99 minutes. Rated PG-13 for sequences of horror violence, terror, disturbing images and language.
What happened was this: An ancient gypsy woman with one eye and long filthy fingernails came to Christine, the loan officer (Alison Lohman), for another extension of her mortgage payment. The loan officer turned her down. That’s because she yearned to beat out the other bank candidate for assistant manager (an Asian-American named Rubin, and by all means enjoy your derisive smirk of contempt at the movie’s stereotyping).
Whereupon the gypsy woman fell to her knees, announced she’d never begged for anything in her life before and begged abjectly, even kissing the hem of Christine’s skirt.
Outside of Bank World, “handling it well” wouldn’t be calling security. It would be helping the old woman to her feet, speaking gently to her and accompanying her as tenderly as possible out the door to her conveyance home, whatever it is (car, bus, whatever).
So does that mean that Christine deserves the gypsy woman’s curse? Hard to say. But then I don’t think even the most gullible teen horror movie crowd deserves “Drag Me to Hell,” despite the two hearty belly laughs the movie gave me before it was over.
Obviously, I can’t tell you the circumstances, but the lines that produced them were “here, kitty kitty” and “why didn’t you tell me that before?”
’Nuff said.
It’s a rather terrible movie, frankly. I wish I could tell you that “Drag Me to Hell” is scary as hell, but it’s not — it’s just noisy as hell. And in cavernous, big sound movie theaters (the first showing I saw was almost empty except for a couple of critics dutifully attending to Sam Raimi’s oeuvre), all those supposedly Stygian noises at jet plane volume can jar you out of your seat when the movie’s “scares” don’t even come close to doing the trick.
The movie, then, is Christine’s attempt to survive the old gypsy’s curse and have a nice insipid life with her boyfriend (Justin Long), an academic who likes to get into Freud vs. Jung debates with fortunetellers.
The trouble with that is that if you’ve been on the old gypsy woman’s side from the get-go— despite the movie’s strenuous efforts to gross you out with false teeth, etc. — there isn’t much of a movie except noise and some pretty funny lines.
For a brief while, I had a devil of a time trying to figure out why “Spider-Man” director Raimi — a fellow who long ago graduated into serious, big-money movies—would want to go back to the low-budget junky gore and goo-and boo-fests of his emergent self (when he made, for instance, “The Evil Dead”).
There’s something lovable about it, mind you, in the same way as it was lovable when Jerry Seinfeld, after ruling prime time, went into small comedy clubs to break in a new act.
It seems, though, Raimi’s not kidding. He’s going to be remaking “The Evil Dead.” And if you want to guess, the reason for this other than nostalgia is that his collaborator here is his brother Ivan.
In the words of George S. Kaufman, the trouble with incest is that it gets you involved with relatives. So too with really bad but occasionally funny horror movies.
Small suggestion: Whatever you do, if you’re inclined to see this movie, see it with the largest number of people in a theater that isn’t concerned with audience members making wisecracks at the top of their lungs. Under those circumstances, this could be the current great party movie at your local megaplex. Otherwise, wait for the video and see it when you can invite over your nastiest and rowdiest friends.
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