Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Dileep Rao
Tagline: "Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days, she's going to hell."
Random Trivia: Both Bruce Campbell and Ellen Page (Juno) had to skip the project due to scheduling issues. In Page's case, it was the lead role.
Horror. Where the fuck did it go?
Horror is a genre at war with itself currently. There are two camps in this battle: Gore Porn (Saw, Hostel, and their clones), and remakes (Friday the 13th, Halloween, and the forthcoming Nightmare on Elm Street).
Neither side has a particularly spectacular argument for their approach at the moment. While a few of them were decent - I have a soft spot for Jason Voorhees, as well as most of the Saw movies - the majority of them are utter dreck. My Bloody Valentine 3D? The entire film had a single cool scene (if you saw it, you know it - the pick-axe through the head with the eyeball stuck to the end of it).
Most of the movies coming out of horror-ville of late have been warmed over dreck with weak scripts, weak thrills and chills, and weak acting. When it comes to horror, weak acting and an iffy script are almost expected, but that's where a solid story and some serious scares come in. If you don't have those, you're dead in the water.
What the genre has really been lacking of late has been a serious, original scary movie. Something not based on a film from ten or twenty years ago. Something that's not just a series of gruesome scenes with little or no reason to exist. Something not self-referential, not striving for humour (if it happens, fine, but don't force it). Something not concerned with Scream, Saw, or college-aged kids in Abercrombie & Fitch outfits driving SUVs to abandoned houses or summer camps.
So lets look at what a compelling horror flick needs:
- Scares. The jump in your seat, bite your nails, or turn your stomach kind. Best if you can manage all three.
- A menace. Jason. Michael Myers. Freddy Krueger. Leatherface. The fucking critters were scary little furballs. CHUCKY, JACK!
- A story. And note, this is not the same as a solid script. We expect lame dialogue and for the brain dead camp counselors to split up at the worst time and run straight into the killer/monster, but at least give us a reason for the movie to exist!
- Gore that isn't just broken bones and blood. Go for the pus, the slime, the mutation! Give us monsters and things that go bump in the night again!
Drag Me to Hell takes note of all this, and cashes in in every category, whilst being a surprisingly well-acted outing. Why?
Because it's Sam Fucking Raimi. Doing something very cool here - along with a script co-written by brother Ivan, getting back to his horror roots.
Army of Darkness may have been more fantasy than horror at points, but there is no denying it as the pinnacle of all that is awesome. Going back a bit further, Evil Dead, and sequel/remake Evil Dead 2 are really cabin in the woods style horror flicks, traditional and to the point for the most part.
Drag Me to Hell is very similar.
Simple story: Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer for a small bank. She's looking for a promotion, something to get her ahead in the field - and the assistant manager chair across from her desk sits empty, beckoning her. For her manager (veteran character actor David Paymer), it's a toss up between her, and new kid at the bank Stu, played by Reggie Lee. Stu's the type of slick office go-getter that's easy to hate: greasing the palms with basketball tickets, sucking up, and digging at co-workers in all the right places. The type of guy who would overhear the boss asking you to pick him up a sub, and place an order right along side him like you were HIS lackey as well. Then bitch that you got his order wrong to boot.
This does not sit well with Christine, but she's too reserved to do much about it. Still, she needs to get noticed, take the lead, and to do that, she needs to show some backbone. She is, after all, the quiet farm girl, working her way on up - much to her own embarrassment, and the annoyance of her boyfriend's upper class mother. Clay, said boyfriend, played by Justin Long, has got to be the youngest professor I've ever seen, and the most useless male "lead" in a film in a long time. [HalfBaked's Note - I actually liked Justin Long's performance, he did well with the role]
That's not too big an issue, however. This is a film about the girls; Lohman's Christine, and an old gypsy lady played by relative unknown Lorna Raver, who is in desperate need of a mortgage extension. Looking to show that she can make tough decisions, Christine turns down her application - a grave mistake that ends in the crazy old bitch attacking her in the bank's parking garage, and cursing her with the Lamia, a demon that will torment her from the shadows for three days before dragging her soul down to hell - literally.
My buzz is in full swing as the story unfolds. With no notes to go on, I'm relying on a very foggy memory to get me through this review. Here's what's in store:
A ton of fucking jump scares! Lurched from my seat at least a half-dozen times. That's no small feat. [HB- "Wuss"] I sometimes consider jump scares - where there's no pay-off, i.e. fast cut to a creepy looking coat rack - a cheat, but here, they're used effectively, and many that look like cheats turn out to be anything but. Case in point - ooh, it's a scary fucking handkerchief. Until it IS a scary fucking handkerchief and floats up to your face then tries to fucking smother you.
And how many times did the old gypsy lady hoark or honk into that snotrag anyway? [HB- "I counted 5 I think"]
Gross. There's plenty of gross-out here as well. Stephen King once said that if you can't terrify them, go for the gross out. Sam Raimi must have been listening. Mucus, pus, bugs, worms, and fuck - embalming fluid flooding out of a corpse into the open mouth of Miss Brown. How much goo does this bitch swallow in this movie?!? [HB- She does take a lot of money shots, but I don't know how much she actually swallowed. No one ever swallows...]
As an added bonus, there's a goat. A fucking goat, and it is all that is amazing for WTF moments whilst watching a film baked. It's brought in during a seance that goes horribly wrong, one of the few horror movie cliches that Raimi hits in Drag Me to Hell, but the goat makes everything forgivable. EVERYTHING.
The movie does have its faults - if I never hear anyone say "I don't know what to believe anymore," it'll be too soon, and Justin Long really only has one gear, and it's annoying. The ending also forces you to accept that Christine, who for the entire flick has been intelligent if naive, will go full-retard at the last minute and begin acting like a rash action movie chick.
There's also a bit of a message going on in Drag Me to Hell, what with the financial crisis, recession, housing collapse in the U.S., and how unjust the system really is - but Raimi wisely keeps the preaching to a minimum, and focuses on the scares.
Minor quibbles aside, Drag Me to Hell is a return to real fucking horror. With a PG-13 rating at that.
*Hey Guys, HalfBaked here too. I saw this with Lightly in theatres so I added in some comments if I felt like it...and my overall would actually be a 5 out of 5 because of the fact it's a Horror Movie that was done well, which is hard to come by now-a-days. (and props for doing it with PG-13!)
Overall rating: 3/4 Baked (4 out of 5)
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