Drag Me to Hell

You can palpably sense the joy that Sam Raimi has invested in his film Drag Me to Hell, released last year. After directing three Spider-Man pictures, which must have felt like running a small country, Raimi returns to his cheesy horror roots with this wonderfully campy fright flick. From the grinning skull logo of the production company, Ghost House, to the very last image, any fan of pure horror can't be disappointed.

Allison Lohman stars as a meek loan officer in a Los Angeles bank. She is bucking for a promotion, and when her boss makes it clear that he expects her to make tough decisions, she takes it out an old gypsy woman asking for an extension on her mortgage. The old woman begs her, but Lohman tremulously sticks to her guns and turns her down. She then gets attacked by the same old woman in her car (in a sensationally-edited scene involving a stapler) and then gets cursed. Things go really bad when a goat-horned demon starts tormenting her.

Instead of bloody gore, Raimi giddily uses a wide variety of body fluids and creepy crawlies to get a rise out of the audience. Lohman spews blood out of her nose, gets vomited on, and there's a memorable scene at the end in which she needs to open a grave at the end of the film and ends up covered in mud. All of this is done with pitch perfect tone by Raimi--it's never too serious, and there's just enough winking going on to keep it fun at all times.

I do wonder about the poor gypsies, though. They don't seem to have an anti-defamation league. Ever since the Universal horror movies of the 1930s they've been associated with some bad shit going down. This film isn't particularly kind of the frailties of the elderly, either, specifically dentures.