I Admire Your Pictures Very Much

A Review of Drag Me to Hell
By Jeff Webb

Drag Me to Hell is one of the best horror films to emerge from Hollywood in recent years. Directed by Sam Raimi, the man responsible for the iconic Evil Dead trilogy, the film is just pure scary, campy fun.

The story revolves around bank employee Christine Brown, played sweetly and innocently by Allison Lohman, who denies a housing payment extension to gypsy Mrs. Ganush in the interest of earning a job promotion. In retaliation for the bank foreclosing her house, Mrs. Ganush places a curse upon Christine. For three days, Christine will be tormented by evil, and on the third day she will be, as the title indicates, dragged to Hell.

The film is full of Raimi’s trademarks: evil spirits, possession, scatological and physical humor, quick camera zooms, absurd close-ups. The overall effect gives the film a somewhat light-hearted tone, despite the dark territory of the story. However, that is precisely Raimi’s objective. Completely tongue-in-cheek, Drag Me to Hell doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. As a result, the film is all the more refreshing when compared with most other contemporary horror films, films that tend to be overly serious and exist for nothing more than punishing their audiences. Drag Me to Hell, meanwhile, harkens back to horror films of old, when scary movies would terrify their viewers, but, at the same time, provide an endless amount of fun.

If the film has one major flaw, it is that it indulges in the technology of today to tell its story. Here, Raimi, once a masterful low-budget filmmaker, uses CGI as opposed to good, earnest make-up effects for most of the film. However, most of these CGI effects, while ambitious, come across as incredibly cheap and fake looking, some of them laughably bad. One really must wonder, though, if this was perhaps Raimi’s point. The entire film is purposefully cheesy, so why not the effects? Whether intentional or not, this one flaw—if it is a flaw—does little to detract from the overall effect of the film.

In this still-young summer movie season, Drag Me to Hell ranks right up there with Star Trek as the best of the season. Refreshing, campy fun, Drag Me to Hell is, pun intended, one hell of a film.