Drag Me to Hell
Genre: Horror
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Run time: 99 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: Twenty-eight years after his landmark independent film “The Evil Dead,” director Sam Raimi has not grown up one single day.

He still delights in spewing bodily fluids, exploding eyeballs, terrifying jump scares and throwing his actors around a set like rag dolls as they endure unbelievable abuse to make the audience shriek in fear.

“Drag Me to Hell,” Raimi’s return to horror after helming three monster “Spider Man” films, plays like the perfect mash-up of “The Evil Dead,” its second sequel “Army of Darkness” and “The Quick and the Dead,” his campy western from 1995.

All the dazzling camera tricks – the swoops, the close-ups, the swirling panoramas – are here. The goop and blood and bile is too.

But none of it would matter if Raimi and his brother Ivan hadn’t cooked up a whale of a grisly tale to tell and created the perfect target in nebbish loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), who learns all too well the consequences for deciding to stand up for one’s self.

Over the course of nearly 100 breakneck minutes, Raimi barely pauses to breathe, subjecting Christine Brown to every horror imaginable after she embarrasses a poor gypsy woman seeking an extension on her mortgage.

Christine is attacked by demons, pummeled by invisible hell hounds, forced to spew blood and ingest vomit and bile. The effects are top-notch, but still manage to hold on to the same maverick streak that permeated Raimi’s early work. While he employs CGI at times, it’s clear how heartily he revels in showing a blistering up-close bloody battle inside a car and around a parking garage, for example. That scene, in particular, where Christine first encounters the gypsy face to face is wholly reminiscent of the cramped shots inside the lonely cabin in the woods when Ashley Williams is first attacked by the evils of the Necronomicon.

The beauty of “Drag Me to Hell,” much like Raimi’s early work, is that ultimately, it just doesn’t matter. The great irony is that there is no happy ending for someone trapped in a Sam Raimi nightmare. There is only abuse, suffering and torment.

After seven years in comic book land where the bad guys lose, the hero gets the girl and the townsfolk rejoice, it’s nice to see such an A-list director get his hands dirty with a nasty slice of deliriously dark fantasy.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – No.
Nudity – No.
Gore – Considerable.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – Don’t mess with the old gypsy woman.
Buy/Rent – Buy it.
Blu-Ray Bonus Features – BD-Live Exclusive content and Production Video Diaries.
On the Web – http://www.dragmetohell.net/
Release Date – Oct. 13, 2009