I saw an early screening of the new Sam Raimi movie, Drag Me To Hell. It’s a movie that Raimi fans have been dying to see, since Raimi has taken a break from the Horror genre for a few years, working on movies such as The Quick And The Dead  with Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, A Simple Plan starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thorton, For The Love Of The Game with Kevin Costner, and of course, most recently and profitably, Spiderman 1-3. But Raimi has a core of dedicated fans from his Evil Dead series, as well as movies like Darkman and Army Of Darkness. For those dedicated fans, Drag Me To Hell is a fun, scary, funny thrillride. For those who are not fans of Raimi’s mix of slapstick and horror, Drag Me To Hell absolutely, unequivocably sucks ass!

It all depends on what type of a person you are. I brought my wife with me, since her tastes can greatly differ from my own. For instance, she does not find the Three Stooges to be even remotely funny. She is not a fan of gross-out humor, and she generally likes her movies to be somewhat believable. In her warped mind, a Zombie army is not a believable plot point. Basically, she’s the last person that should be watching a Sam Raimi horror flick, and as expected, she hated Drag Me To Hell.

Now, I’m a bit more open minded when it comes to resurrections that occur without the help of Jesus. Raimi’s movies all have great innovation when it comes to camera movement, angles, plotline, and viewpoints. His horror films all follow certain classic horror guidleines, making them both innovative and classic at the same time, and Drag has all of those elements. The most interesting classic horror film element in this film is the sin which the main character commits in order to be impure enough to deserve such horrors. Typically, these plot points include giving up your virginity (as discussed in Scream), molesting a sacred object or piece of land, such as a sarcophagus or an Indian burial ground, etc. In Drag, the main character, played by Alison Lohman (Ellen Page of Juno fame dropped out, supposedly due to SAG strike scheduling issues, although rumors abound that she didn’t like where the movie was going) is in the Housing Lending Industry and she makes the hard decision to take away the home of a little old lady who is behind on her payments. The little old lady turns out to be a Gypsy with curse giving abilities (a la Thinner) and I’m sure you can guess where things go from here. But the Housing Lending Industry getting what’s coming to them is as timely and culturally significant as the Gas Crisis which stranded the main characters in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the radiation which created giant everything in the 50’s, including ants in Them.

While Drag Me To Hell does have a lot of these interesting points, while it does have scares, laughs and thrills, and innovations, it is also filled with bad acting (the exception being Dileep Rao who plays a fortune teller) and WAY over the top gags (at least in the early screening I saw). This will not surprise Raimi fans, who appreciate the homages to the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes, but for everyone else, these gags and the poor reactions to them by the actors, will ruin what could have been Sam Raimi’s best horror film yet.

Cinema This Week appears every Friday at Noonish

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