Review - Drag Me To Hell

Consider me dragged

I usually don’t read reviews of a film I intend to write about, but I thought Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell so ridiculous that I had the nagging suspicion I was missing something. I know Raimi’s reputation, of course, though not so much his actual films, and I hate to think I’m the only semi-literate filmgoer that didn’t get the joke.

Turns out I was. Many critics thought the movie a sly and facile romp through the gory landscape of accumulated horror-movie history.

I tend to dismiss horror films that tinker with the genre for the sheer exercise of it. I like my evil without psychological symbolism or ironic sub-text, and I'm not keen on sociological metaphors or over-the-top splatter with a Halloween-fun feel. I like the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers not because it’s an allegory for McCarthyism, but because it’s genuinely chilling – at least the first five or six times. A fine scary movie, in my book, is one that  obliterates, not suspends, disbelief.  Maybe five films have done this well enough to genuinely set my skin crawling: Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Blair Witch Project. Each uses a different strategy in eating away that prophylactic awareness of artifice that evolution's put in place to keep you from soiling your pants at thigns happening in two dimensions. In Night of the Living Dead, it’s the running commentary on the radio cleverly mimicking the viewer’s own disbelief at the events on-screen. The Exorcist imagines perfectly realistic reactions of people witnessing a supernatural event. Rosemary’s Baby uses the trappings of modern Manhattan, the very antithesis of the remote and gothic settings of conventional horror, to depict evil hidden in plain sight. And The Blair Witch Project leverages the documentary form in achieving maximum verisimilitude. That film, which I saw in my 30s, scared me so thoroughly it reminded me of the weekly appointment my grade-school eyes kept with the palms of my hands during New York City's "Creature Features" in the early 70s. (In the lobby after one screening of The Blair Witch Project, I witnessed an usher's explaining to two shaken adolescent girls that the film they'd just seen wasn't real.) These films tap into my primitive narrative self – the one whose greatest titillation comes from pretending what’s on screen is actually occurring.

Which is all my way of saying that I'm not the best audience for the wink-and-a-nod Raimi. I either missed or ignored all the meta stuff going on in Drag Me to Hell and instead found it to be a by-the-numbers exercise in the most tired trappings of the genre: gypsies, goo, flies, poltergeist manifestations, oblique camera angles, and a hunted heroine, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a bank loan officer in a workplace competition with an oily toady  for a promotion. When a gypsy from the same tribe as Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man comes in asking to renegotiate a foreclosure (the gypsies really need a Hollywood anti-defamation chapter), Christine’s manager (David Paymer) treats it as a test of her management potential. It's a sign of the times that the evil unleashed in the film stems from a mortgage gone awry, and I wouldn't be surprised if the character of the avaricious bank manager heralds the supplanting of lawyers by financial industry sleazeballs as Hollywood's uber-pariahs of choice. The culture of banking takes a beating here: A big sign advertising low-rate mortgages gets a lot of screen time, there's an allusion to all the money banks make from "foreclosure fees," and Christine's boss says of her coworker competition, “he’s quite aggressive and we like that,” as if describing a budding Bernie Madoff.  CONTINUED

Comments

[John Markowitz]

The people who see it as merely "wink wink, nod nod" are wrong, I think. There is a lot of in-film evidence that the "ridiculous" plot is not supposed to be taken at face value. For instance, the thing that fights Christine in the parking lot, and "curses" her, is likely not the little old woman at all, but a Demon in her form, putting on a show to convince Christine she is cursed, so she'll actually do things that actually cause her damnation. What crime would actually deserve being dragged to Hell? How about trying to damn someone else to Hell? That's what Christine does at the end of the film.