Drag Me To Hell

2009
Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver and Dileep Rao

Plot: A loan officer ordered to evict an old woman from her home finds herself the recipient of a supernatural curse, which turns her life into a living hell. Desperate, she turns to a seer to try and save her soul, while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.

There Must Be Peanut Butter on That Chin
by C. True

The Raimi brothers apparently wrote Drag Me To Hell after Army of Darkness and it reeks of a sillier time in Sam Raimi's career. The story is straight B horror movie but its approached with a zeal that makes you wish more people approached the genre with some fun and not just gratuitous boobs and machetes. Having recently watched Wrong Turn 3, which I will decline to review at this time, I'm reminded of how often these movies rely on gore to accomplish all the scares. Instead of blood and guts Sam Raimi decides to have fun and disgust us by putting his poor heroine through some truly grimy scenes. She has a corpse somehow puke fixed fluid slime in her mouth and its just the kind of movie where she seems only momentarily phased and is back up and going in no time. She also gets her mouth filled with maggots, has flies flying in and out of her nose and mouth while she sleeps and has her chin sucked on by corpses and living hags alike. And her pluckiness is one of the reasons the movie is fun, she's not whiny, no "why me" and when she's forced to choose between a cuddily animal and her soul she doesn't even seem to bat an eyelash. There is also a great fight sequence between our main character and the old gypsy in a parking garage that shies away from all timid girl fumbling and the result is a gnarly beat down. The seance business and the psychic are rather blase but things moved quickly enough for even mediocre elements to go relatively unnoticed. It's not a fabulous film but if you don't enjoy watching it you may take movies too seriously (or justifiably have a weak stomach; this is not a movie my mother would enjoy).

I think most girls who could handle the gross-outs would probably like this horror movie more than most. Its rare to see a horror movie where the lead female character has some balls (substantially more than her boyfriend).