Drag Me To Hell (15)

Alison Rowat's Review

While it falls to better informed sources elsewhere on these pages to recommend dining options, a word of warning for those planning to eat before seeing Sam Raimi’s film: don’t do it. Pan the Dover sole, forgo the burger, and say sayonara to the pasta.

Otherwise, you’ll be seeing them again sooner than expected after experiencing this gruesomely amusing, slickly executed horror.

Before Raimi spun three pictures out of Spider-Man he was best known as the satisfyingly warped mind behind the Evil Dead trilogy. He not only knows which buttons to press to have audiences squirming, he delights in pressing them.

Blood and guts are nectar and caviar to this director. While he eventually pushes his luck with this picture, his return to the horror market, you’ll be having too much fun, or feeling too queasy, to care.

At the core of Drag Me To Hell is that hoary horror favourite, the gypsy curse. Not very politically correct, hugely insulting in fact, but as the ancient tablets say, he who looks to splatterfest films to avoid stereotypes is a mug.

Alison Lohman (Things We Lost in the Fire) plays Christine Brown, the recipient of the curse. Lohman herself is a blessing to the film.

Her character might weigh as much as a bag of marshmallows, but Lohman puts iron in her soul. Just as well, given what lies ahead.

Christine is a loans officer in a Los Angeles bank. The screenplay, by Raimi and his brother Ivan, cleverly lays a trail of clues to her nature. Here is a young woman from a humble, troubled home, lacking in self-esteem but fiercely ambitious. She’s driven – much play is made of her dramatic weight loss – but forgiving of others’ weaknesses, kind but determined to get what she wants. In short, an ideal heroine for a horror movie, where the moral compass will spin like a wheel on a racing car and only the quickest wit will be able to tell which way is up.

Appearing across the loans desk one day is the elderly Mrs Ganush (played by the wonderfully named Lorna Raver). With her phlegmy cough, jagged brown teeth, cruddy fingernails, and a winning habit of whipping out her dentures every two seconds, Mrs Ganush has what you might call a high yuck factor.

But come on, she’s a poor old lady, she’s about to be thrown out of her house for falling behind on the mortgage, and Christine, with one nod of her pretty blonde head, can make the nasty bailiffs go away.

Normally, nice Christine would dispense said nod, but she wants promotion, and the only way to get that is to be tough on loan defaults and tough on the causes of loan defaults (if only Christine had been in charge of the US economy in those pre-credit crunch times). So she gives Mrs Ganush a big fat no, and receives an ancient curse in return. Within three days, learns Christine, a Lamia or black goat, will rise from the bowels of the abyss and drag her to hell. Now that’s what you call a dissatisfied customer.

Christine, being a practical sort, won’t take this damnation lying down. With the aid of her sceptical boyfriend (Justin Long) and a friendly seer (Dileep Rao) she tries to find a way to avoid her cursed fate. As she does so, the Raimi brothers put her, and the audience, through exquisite torments.

One scene encapsulates their fiendish inventiveness. Imagine you’re asleep and a fly enters the room. Where would you most dislike that fly to land? Check. Which part of the face would you least like it to crawl into? Check.

Now imagine this is happening to your worst enemy. Where would you draw the line at the fly going now? Check again.

As for Mrs Ganesh, she has ingenious ways to turn a body’s stomach. Like Freddy Kruger in a skirt, the old dear just doesn’t know when to stop.

As with most splatterfests, the pudding is over-egged as the end nears. The Raimis, to give them their due, bring the show in at under 100 minutes. Short, sharp, and with lots of shocks; just as a horror movie should be.

Justin Long, who proved himself a perky, likeable presence in Die Hard 4, performs the same sterling service here as Christine’s sensible boyfriend. Like Lohman, he’s adept at keeping a straight face while all around lose their minds. She is excellent. Reminiscent of Kirstin Dunst’s Mary Jane in the Spider-Man movies, she exerts a huge presence on screen.

Knowing the audience for this type of movie is alive to the conventions and hip to the horror beat, the Raimi brothers play around to their dark hearts’ content.

Their taste barometer only has three settings – bad, very bad, and look away now. If you possess similar, Drag Me to Hell is for you. If not, enjoy the Dover sole.

Paul Greenwood's Review

The great majority of Hollywood horrors of the last few years have either been tepid remakes of Asian ghost stories, or exercises in gore and brutality that have to be endured more than enjoyed.

Praise should be offered up then for the return of Sam Raimi, who after a decade of being distracted by the Spider-Man movies, gets back to his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell, an endurance test for all the right reasons.

Raimi opens up his box of tricks and instigates a brutal and unrelenting assault on an audience that just won’t see it coming. There will be screams. It’s a machine in its simplicity, a merciless exercise in sustained terror that probably only the Spanish film (REC) has been able to replicate in recent years.

The entire story is built around a gypsy curse placed on Christine (Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a bank who turns away an old woman begging for an extension on her mortgage. After being forced to fight off the old woman in the first of many gruelling sequences, Christine finds herself under a curse where she will suffer three days of torment by a demon known as a Lamia, before being dragged down to burn in hell for eternity.

It’s not often that all the elements of a horror movie come together to form such a complete and satisfying whole. Much of the brilliance of Drag Me to Hell is in its soul-shuddering sound design, its atmospheric but never over-the-top music and the sincerity of the performances.

These are all woven together by a master filmmaker who even manages to inject moments of twisted humour while he’s terrifying us. Anyone can make a loud noise designed to make an audience jump, but it’s the potency of the accompanying images that gives great horrors their power. Raimi builds one ferocious set piece on top of another, culminating in a séance sequence that is good as anything ever committed to celluloid in the name of horror cinema.

And, aside from the occasional icky gag, it’s all done with a minimum of blood, gore and digital effects. It’s old school terror, the kind Raimi himself helped reinvent with The Evil Dead back in the video nasty days, and that rarest of fright flicks where you actually yearn for the sanctuary of the quiet moments.

Drag Me to Hell is astonishing, an instant classic of the genre, and there’s every chance it’s the best American horror since The Exorcist.