Kelly Wand"Drag Me To Hell" review
June 29th 2009 09:46
Credit risk.
Drag Me To Hell, Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to wacky horror after 22 years that felt like 63, is an atmospheric, laidback, amusing pastiche of Thinner meets The Ring by way of The Haunting (the good ‘63 one, which it references). Although its loud, exquisitely timed grace notes are best seen with a big audience, it'll likely seem a stately, mannered Victorian poetry reading compared to the frisky, fast-paced genius of Raimi’s 1987 masterpiece Evil Dead II. But while slaving in Sony’s Spider-Man furnace for six years may have given Raimi too much of a taste for CGI effects in material that cries out for a grittier, cheaper texture, it also seems to have helped him hone his already loony comic sensibilities into something like razor-sharp elegance. Where Army of Darkness strained to gracefully make the horrific funny and vice versa, there are a lot of laughs in Drag Me To Hell, and, a bit incredibly, none are unintentional.
The script, penned by Raimi with his brother Ivan (Ted shows up offscreen for a second as a doctor who assures Justin Long that his girlfriend’s nervous breakdown is “nothing to worry about”), is clever, goofy and rich with poetic dread, usually in the same scene, and its (probably deliberate) narrative inconsistencies can even be charitably viewed as intentionally evocative nods to the primal terrors and eerie dream-illogic of a Grimm’s fairy tale. It also has that awesome title, an iconic finale, and a ton of scenes of beautiful Alison Lohman getting thrown up on and orally/nasally violated. Whereas Bruce Campbell’s Ash was lovably dickish, Lohman’s Christine Brown is a sweet, innocent loan officer. And interestingly, whereas Ash looked progressively more ragged the more punishment he took from his supernatural oppressors, the progressively hotter Lohman’s torments make her.
We learn a lot more about Christine in one movie than we know about Ash after three. We discover she grew up on a farm and used to be fat. She has a kitten and a boyfriend named Clay Dalton, who teaches Skepticism in the Supernatural or something at the local university, a position that apparently pays better than you’d think. Christine desperately wants a minor promotion at her bank, mainly to impress Clay’s mom and her future mother-in-law, whom she learns disapproves of her because she grew up on said farm, even if she now works in finance and makes delicious baked goods and is beautiful, intelligent, tasteful, and affectionate. (If that sounds like a plotline from any silent movie from the ‘20s, it’s because movies made back then were shot at 16 fps, and Sam Raimi likes undercranking.)
Unfortunately for Christine, her promotion to the desk by the brighter window is also being sought by an unctuous rival named Stu Rubin even though he’s Asian. Christine may be competent, industrious, and stunning, but since Rubin is less experienced and repeatedly a patronizing dick to her in front of the boss, he’s in the front running, and the boss gravely advises Christine to be crueler to their debtors (i.e., ”make the tough decisions”) if she really wants that promotion. To her eternal misfortune, she interprets this as a mandate to apologetically foreclose on Sylvia Ganush, a wretched, shabby gypsy crone (played with hilarious zeal by Lorna Raver), who has a glass eye, leprous nails, a bad cough, and dentures the color of pickled caveman semen. Ganush breaks down in the middle of the office and begs her shrieking and wailing for an extension, finally clawing at Christine in an apoplexy of rage and degraded humiliation. Christine calls for security, which in gypsy-speak is a grave insult. This traumatizing encounter is soon followed by an ingenious tour de force showdown in a parking garage involving a handkerchief, spittle, stapled eyelids, and seat-belts – a sequence so beautifully staged, acted, and timed that it totally eclipses everything else that happens for the next hour.
Although Christine technically emerges the winner of the contest, she unwisely forgets to drive away afterward, instead letting this dangerous scuttling creature grab a button from her coat, curse it with her breath, and return it to her accepting fist without putting up any resistance at all. Ganush then vanishes, and the cops eventually show up but apparently don’t impound Ganush’s car*, as we’ll see it again later in her driveway. The moral: when you staple old women, always aim for the lips.
Night falls. Christine can’t escape the persistent sense that she’s being stalked by demons, although their intentions at least initially seem restricted to trying to irritate her with deafening foley work. A psychic named Rham Jas, whose place of business happens to be three feet away from where she’s standing at the moment and always open, grimly informs her that she’s been cursed by the gypsy and, after a little more cash and prodding, furthermore that she has only three days left till some demons drag her to hell, during which time she’ll be relentlessly and arbitrarily tormented and victimized by an invisible lamia and his pet fly. (You’d think with such rock-solid connections to the underworld, gypsies wouldn’t have to sweat mortgage payments so much, but my theory is that Satan’s the CEO of Christine’s bank. And all banks.) Rham Jas suggests she try killing her cat, advice Christine reluctantly complies with, after being tossed around, spelunked, eyeballed by a piece of cake in the best dinner-with-in-laws scene since Eraserhead, and majestically thrown up on some more.
Instead of soliciting a second opinion (or, better yet, hiring another gypsy to remove the curse), she keeps going back to Jas, who finally admits that the lamia seems unimpressed by her feline offering and says their only recourse is to have a séance, which will cost exactly 10 grand up front.
Raising the 10 grand proves insuperable to Christine, even though she has a house, presumably sterling credit, and a job in finance, but luckily her teacher boyfriend picks up the tab. The séance is mostly a failure, like everything else Jas has proposed. Rather than insisting on a refund, Christine gets yet more advice from him: she can give away the cursed button to someone else, who will inherit the lamia (advice that might’ve been handy two days and one innocent cat earlier). Finding a suitable candidate proves more ethically difficult for Christine than she anticipated. And things finally conclude with a fairly telegraphed twist that I enjoyed but sort of wish had been the penultimate setup to something genuinely unexpected. And longer.
Drag Me To Hell is endearing and enjoyable and watchable. If it has an issue (outside of the needless PG-13 constraints; Raimi seems to be making a point to the MPAA but I rather wish he’d made it instead with an X-rated Spider-Man), it might be that the lamia is a great antagonist conceptually and historically but too spectral, invisible and impossible for Christine to interact with much to be satisfying visually, and that Ganush, her more tangible foe, can only puke on her whether dead or alive, and is put out of commission pretty early. (A perplexing number of people I saw the movie with afterwards interpreted Christine’s demonic issues to be imaginary a la the last few minutes of Taxi Driver. My response is that her prospective mother-in-law certainly seemed to see that fly.)
Finally, it’s also hard for the greedy 12-year-old in me not to feel a little cheated that we never get an actual glimpse of Hell, or the creatures whose gnarled talons drag one down to it (or why they drag so slowly). There are very, very few visions I’d like to see more than Raimi’s Inferno, past and future Spider-Man sequels notwithstanding.
*”The Classic,” obviously. (And if you don’t know what “The Classic” is, you need to stay in more.)
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