Spider-man trilogy helmer Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots in ferocious, yet good-natured form with ‘Drag Me to Hell.’
The film is a brazenly entertaining horror outing about a cherub-faced girl who messes with the wrong gypsy.
It might toe the line between being a bit over the top but I found the 80s-inspired lunacy refreshing.
Doing comparably disappointing box office business this past May, I can only guess that the teen audience didn’t quite know what to make of it and us old-school Raimi fans must, apparently, be limited in number - a damn shame considering it’s Raimi’s first outright horror pic since ‘Evil Dead II’ and it’s every bit as entertaining. The film is a demonically funny slap in the face to remind us that horror doesn’t have to rely on why-so-serious torture gore to get your money’s worth.
Co-written with bro Ivan, Sam packaged the film through his production shingle Ghost House pictures with Sam originally not signed up to direct but finding out that he could secure the necessary financing if he did.
Thus returns Raimi to a genre that he personally ushered into the eighties with 1981’s wicked ‘The Evil Dead’. And if nothing else, I imagine it was a blast for Raimi after the drubbing he took for ‘Spider-man 3’ - which featured a villain that he was pretty much forced to include (is it any wonder Venom came off as an afterthought?)
So who is getting drug to Hell you ask? That would be sweet little blonde girl, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) who is just trying to secure that assistant manager’s promotion at the bank. Her boss (David Paymer) makes it clear that it’s down to her and the obnoxious new guy Stu (an appropriately slimy Reggie Lee) and she will need to make some “tough decisions” if she wants a shot.
As if this conversation perked up the ears of the devil himself, Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver) is waiting at Christine’s desk upon her return. Sylvia is a pathetic old woman with a dead eye and fake worn-out teeth. She begs for an extension on her loan (or her house will be taken away), but timing is everything and against Christine’s better judgment, she turns the sad old woman down. Big mistake.
After an impossibly protracted and tension-filled knock-out, drag-out fight in a parking garage, Sylvia snags a button off Christine’s coat to whisper an incantation – this clearly can’t bode well for Christine. It doesn’t take long for Christine to be targeted by the goat-like demon Lamia - a cackling mostly unseen presence content to terrorize his victims for three days before the coup de grâce of…well, check out the title.
Just as Sylvia predicted, Christine comes to her begging to remove the curse but it’s too late – she now only has her skeptic boyfriend (Justin Long) and a local psychic (Dileep Rao) to keep her out of the devil’s grasp.
Ratcheting up the tension with some inventive techniques as well as unabashedly embracing some old ones (you will probably never hear a movie as effectively loud as this one), Raimi fashions a horror film that is the equivalent of one of those old funhouse horror rides - where you climb into a car and it creeps through with loud monsters constantly popping out at you and there’s nothing you can do but laugh and scream.
Some of these ear-piercing shock cuts would probably annoy me in a lesser film but we’re in the hands of a master who goes to great lengths to make things terrifying without resorting to gore-filled set-pieces.
Instead of the usual slasher techniques, Raimi becomes fascinated with disgusting substances both exiting and entering the mouth (although the nose and eyes don’t get left out with a standout sequence each) and one might beg for Sylvia to just pick up a knife after a ‘gumming’ scene that will leave you squirming in your seat.
There’s some truly audacious stuff here that Raimi gets away with because of his tongue-through-the-cheek style (let me just say that PETA members need not apply).
Ellen Page of ‘Juno’ fame was once attached but dropped out which is just as well as her wry screen presence probably wouldn’t have worked as well as the naiveté that Lohman brings. It is a style necessity for a character that automatically doesn’t suspect something is up when Sylvia raps her crusty old fingernails on her desk.
Supporting players are equally effective with Long bringing along his cluelessness and lightening things up a bit after some heavy scares with Rao believable as an Indian psychic who gets in way over his head.
This Blu-ray touts both the original PG-13 cut as well as the unrated director’s cut which is actually a bit shorter. This is one of the rare cases where the theatrical version would be just as preferable. The differences are a bit more gore and goo but don’t really add much.
It sports a great 1080p VC1 high-def transfer with framing at 2.35. Color and detail is top-notch and I couldn’t find one imperfection, source, encode or otherwise. This is my new horror high-def demo for the few pundits that still claim that they can’t tell much of a difference between standard and high def.
For this pic, the audio is just as important as the video and we luckily get an equally impressive treatment with the DTS-HD Master Aud track – a marvel of six-channel use. Things creak, shriek and pounce all around you – with the right system, you’ll be calling for mommy.
We now come to the one disappointment with this Blu-ray package: the special features consist of one set of production diaries. We don’t get commentaries, deleted scenes or the now expected ‘U-Control’ feature that is usually standard with any half-way performing Universal release – this is a frustrating and peculiar letdown as I would have loved to seen all I could involving this pic. The disc is also BD-Live enabled and comes with a digital copy but a big shoulder shrug to those two features.
‘Drag Me to Hell’ is the most fun I’ve had with a horror film in years and will be a real treat for old-school Raimi fans. The high-def video and audio is outstanding so this Blu-ray comes highly recommended despite some weak special features.
Drag Me To Hell [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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