Film: Drag Me To Hell (Review)

For those who're rushing to the theatres...

Something interesting that stands out in the modern abundance of blood/gore slasher horror genre in today's cinema. Three quarter part classic horror that startles audience and a quarter part humour that soothes the tensed muscles from the frights. Predictable plot, maybe, but not your typical predictable scares in the Japanese/Korean/Thai horror genre manner.

For those who've spare time to read on...

For a man who has been so successful in his Spiderman franchise, it's nice to see him excel in a side project that is a smaller-scaled one in comparison. Horror seems to be of Sam Raimi's forte and interest, with certain portion of this film leaving me feeling that somehow there's a little homage paid to classics like The Exorcist.

Drag Me To Hell tells a tale on how an innocent young lady got herself a curse bestowed upon her and her fight for survival against this black magic tragedy in aim of breaking the curse. An aspiring bank loan officer, Christine Brown, made a poor decision between impressing her boss for a possible promotion and helping an old lady out with an extension of her house loan, thus obtaining a hellish curse of the Lamia (some goat demon) from the relentless Mrs Ganush.

I'm particularly impressed by the performance of Lorna Raver, who played Mrs Ganush. She's probably the main source of scare and humour in the film. She gave the audience one too many frights and nightmares to bring home for the night, as I overheard the midnight screening crowd dispersing with random discussions on how they're afraid of old ladies on their way home that night. From her monstrous filthy drumming nails to her disgusting mucus and oral fluids dripping so disturbingly, she's probably one of the most horrific old ladies I've ever came across.

Another plus point was getting Alison Lohman to play the extremely innocent and fragile looking young Christine Brown. Lohman, 30, looked nothing like her age and provided a convincing demeanour of a young female bank loan officer. Towards the end she provided a portion of saucy personality in her fight against the curse that I still find too cute, especially for the cemetery scene.

It's a nice touch by Raimi pertaining to the motifs featured in the film. The housefly and the canted screen whenever Lamia haunts, are really effective. Adding the above with Sam Raimi's style of horror and the superb soundtrack, this might be one of the better horror flicks in my opinion. You should be interested, trust me and book yourself a ticket this weekend if you haven't yet done so in the theatres.

Just a quick thought, if Christine Brown had helped out Mrs Ganush with her home loan extension, it would have easily been the bank being dragged to hell. I wonder if Mrs Ganush had been going around the banks in The United States just before the financial crisis. Maybe that's why the banks are facing so much trouble in today's context. Now speaking of which, I would very much like to place a curse on my job and hope some financial crisis drags it to hell, I have been so cooped up with work to provide for MSR these days. Maybe I should ring up Mrs Ganush one of these days.