"Drag me to Hell"
Nice to see our Sam getting back to his whacked-out horror roots with a fine little film that manages to mix his hyper-kinetic, slapstick, horror violence (though no real gore sadly) and sticky fluid throwing with top notch FX work and high tech gloss.
Nicely played by all, this is packed with memorable moments, but perhaps it does blow its load too early with the truly stunning, laugh out loud funny, gross, exciting, creepy as hell car park fight scene, as our heroine, Christine, fights off the rampaging power of a pissed off old Gypsy woman with a grotesque eye and even worse dentures.
This is easily one of the finest moments in Raimi's career.
From then on we have some good and well crafted scares and smackdowns as Christine's 'dragged to Hell' possible fate gets nearer.
Raimi astutely plays these fright scenes for (for the most part) black comic laughs and the chance to pile on the slapstick violence.
This ensures the incidents become purely entertainment, instead of seriously delivered false scares, which would have been a huge and costly mistake as the plot has explicity told us that actually...she's not in the slightest bit of real danger yet.
Fans of his early work will relish the muck, filth, vomit, goo and blood plastered all over these scenes as well as the 'Three Stooges' level of bodily abuse.
And almost all the effects are expertly rendered and imaginative.
And if it wasn't for one easily avoidable cock-up near the end involving far too much (needlessly and easily avoided) fuss being made about something happening that should barely have got any coverage at all...The film would also have ended as effectively as the journey to that ending most certainly was.
The ending itself is perfectly fine...Raimi just blew the possible effectiveness of it by foolishly telling us pretty much what was going to happen 10 minutes or so before.
There were also a few other niggles.
Much is made of Christine's bashed up lip in one sequence, only to have said bashed up lip in the very next scene (in huge close-up no less) then shown to be absolutely unmarked in any way! Boy, frozen peas are a miracle cure!
We are also informed about the Seer who Christine goes to visit offering to refund money paid for her aborted fortune reading.
Yet, in one continuous scene, all the Seer ever does is take hold of the credit card, walk into a room, turn the light off and sit down at the table to do the reading.
Unless the guy is not just a palm reader but also Human credit card reader...he never took any money!
The film also has some plot hiccups as far as huge jumps in the narrative go, which makes me think a number of bridging scenes were cut.
For example Christine goes from walking out of a dinner, to a bust up at the Indian Seer's shop, to her trying to gather money together to pay for help when all of a sudden her boyfriend comes in and says he has paid the Seer!
But as far as we are shown the boyfriend was never with her during any of these scenes, she has had no contact with him and has no idea at all about the need for money or what it's for.
And seeing as only Christine can see and hear what she does...there is actually no sense in her uber-sceptical boyfriend suddenly becoming uncertain about what he believes.
It seems some kind of rushed editing of screenplay or actual footage shot was the order of the day.
Al this aside though..."Drag me to Hell" was a nice return to his roots for Raimi and, although disappointingly low on gore, it delivers tons of fast paced, slam bang supernatural violence, laughs and thrills.
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