And yet other than The Gift, his neo-Gothic melodrama, Raimi hasn’t made a real horror movie since Army of Darkness in 1993. His mainstream career has never done much to temper his devoted cult base, but it is enough to make you think twice when Drag Me to Hell, his ballyhooed return to the genre, makes such an obvious bid to be a midnight-movie event. The film ravages a doe-eyed loan officer (Alison Lohman) who denies a mortgage extension to an elderly gypsy (a brilliant Lorna Raver) and gets a nasty curse in return. It comes equipped with blood-squirting noses, murdered kittens and oozing body juices galore. The impetus is clear: Raimi is back to his roots, an overdue corrective to limp contemporary horror flicks. We, the audience, nod in grateful reverence.
The good news is that Drag Me to Hell is a profane, exuberant, hysterical movie. At times almost shockingly low-rent, it looks and feels as if it was filmed on the Universal backlot in 1985, which is obviously intentional. Raimi’s acrobatic camera settles on endless ominous winds, shadows with literal claws and a glossy color finish that clashes nicely with the buckets of projectile muck lovingly hurled at our heroine. In that capacity, Lohman is surprising well cast, and the movie traces the evolution of her character from a self-professed vegetarian farm girl into a ruthless, often hilarious defender of her soul. She goes to amazing measures to avoid the titular fate, always with gamely good humor.
Oddly, then, Raimi never quite takes the movie as far as he could. As versed in this kind of material as he obviously is, he also seems decidedly resigned—the film is content to trade in stock monster-movie gimmicks rather than the more inventive sequences that made the director famous. This is clearest in a marquee moment involving a séance, which might be the strangest, most exhilarating set piece staged in any movie this year. It offers a taste of the kind of transportative filmmaking within Raimi’s range, but most of the movie can’t reach those heights.
And really, maybe it doesn’t need them. Raimi kicks back like a master who doesn’t have anything to prove, but enthusiasts of Evil Dead will find it difficult to complain. Even if Drag Me to Hell isn’t particularly scary, even if it idly disregards its potential, it’s been a long time since a horror movie of such obvious wit and loving theatrics hit American theaters. It would be unreasonable not to indulge.
Old Raimi is back, kind of
Sam Raimi has had a long and curious career, but his legacy as a filmmaker has never been in competition. Yes, after The Evil Dead, he quickly took on studio work, and even before the Spider-Man trilogy made billions worldwide, his name was already attached to a host of incongruous titles—The Quick and the Dead, A Simple Plan, For Love of the Game. But he will always known for his dourly imaginative Evil Dead movies, the bombastic, brutal, hilariously tasteless semi-trilogy that over time enshrined him as a godfather of modern horror.