A funny thing happened to Sam Raimi on his way to becoming the cult king of minor horror hair-raisers: he became a praised prince of major movies.
So he left behind The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness and gave us The Quick and the Dead and A Simple Plan and, most prominently, three Spider-Man epics.
Now, with the web-slinging trilogy behind him, director Raimi -- working from a screenplay he co-wrote with his brother Ivan -- returns to his horror roots by directing Drag Me to Hell, a hell of a roller coaster ride that's anything but a drag but can also be infuriatingly indulgent.
For devotees of the genre or Raimi's early work, this is a return to horror heaven in a way, but with so many intended laughs accompanying the scares that it plays like a comedy, and occasionally like a dip into the Three Stooges pool.
Alison Lohman plays Christine (remember the Stephen King vehicle?), an ambitious Pasadena bank executive who has to make a tough decision. Should she as a loan officer offer the sickly, cranky Hungarian gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) the third extension on her home loan that she's begging for? Or should she foreclose and evict her?
Against her better judgment -- and hoping to please her boss (David Paymer) enough to get a promotion to assistant manager -- Christine chooses the latter path, after which the angry woman puts a nasty supernatural gypsy curse on her.
Christine is indeed assaulted, first by the woman herself, then by shadowy demonic spirits intent on carrying out the action of the title within the next three days.
But she fights back with the help of her baffled psychology-professor boyfriend, played by Justin Long, a psychic (Dileep Rao), and a medium (Adriana Barazza).
With the recession helping the choices-we-make narrative to resonate ever so slightly more than is the case in most horror flicks, Raimi -- who obviously still enjoys dabbling in the genre he "graduated" from and indulging his tongue-in-cheek approach -- employs his ever-ready sense of humor, his trademark camera swoops and glides, his juggling of fear and absurdity, and an exasperating willingness to go deliriously over the top in this campy generic exercise.
If only he weren't so hellbent (literally) on embracing the lowbrow and showcasing the ridiculous, as if he were apologizing for the disciplne and maturity he has of late displayed in his undeniably well-made mainstream movies.
Lohman is a game protagonist and does a creditable job, deftly calibrating her well-intentioned and sweet-natured lead character's changes as she gets more and more desperate and determined and closer and closer to the dark side.
But Raimi drifts in and out of an interest in his characters, abandoning their three-dimensionality whenever he turns his special effects department loose on a graphic-horror set piece.
And his soft spot for the kind of gross gags, many of them involving hyperbolic bodily-fluid eruptions that make 12-year-old boys shriek with delight while the rest of us roll our eyes doesn't help. That kind of comedy dilutes the supernatural horror, which in turn diminishes the humor.
That is, the giggles cancel out the shivers and vice versa.
Notice that the film carries a PG-13 rating, but barely and questionably at that, given the subject matter. Not that it's anywhere near what has come to be known as "torture porn," but there's plenty of gore to go around.
So we'll put a curse on 2 stars out of 4 for a devilishly spooky but excessively juvemile Sam Raimi horror throwback. Drag Me to Hell is an exercise in terror that mixes tones in error.
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Christine is indeed assaulted, first by the woman herself, then by shadowy demonic spirits intent on carrying out the action of the title within the next three days.
