Drag Me to Hell

Review By: Tom Herrmann
TomHerrmann@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: B-

There just aren’t enough dark-comedy horror films being made anymore. There doesn’t seem to have ever been a particular era where they were out in abundance, but there’s just nothing like Evil Dead coming out anymore. Shawn of the Dead is disqualified on the technicality of being a comedy before it is horror where movies like the Evil Dead franchise are horror before comedy; maybe not Army of Darkness but that is neither here nor there. The small portion of the public thirsting for another brutal feast of bizarre horror with ridiculously comical scares will get a small snack to hold them over with this one.

Conveniently directed and co-written by Sam Raimi, director of the Evil Dead and Spider-Man franchises, it grants even more marred to the constant comparison to the Evil Dead movies. This one takes us out of the woods and into a loan office where Christine (Alison Lohman) is working hard for a promotion. After she finds out that her boss is looking for someone who is willing to make the tough decisions Christine finds herself in a moral bind over Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) who is looking for a third extension on the foreclosure of her home. Christine denies her even after the Mrs. Ganush begs her. The only logical thing for Mrs. Ganush can do for Christine following protocol is to put a death curse on her; what else could she have done? Now Christine is being terrorized by dark spirits who, after three days will drag her to hell (get it?).

The opening was really intriguing because it seemed to play on the classic ghost stories of the 30’s and 40’s by using sounds and shadows to represent the ghosts, along with some very cool architecture that I haven’t seen in a ghost movie since The Haunting, and that was over ten years ago. The subtleties are dropped promptly less than five minutes in when the ghosts start to lay the smack down on the characters and an actual whole to hell opens up and drags a little boy inside. Way to play it cool guys.

Obviously the movie is trying to be outrageous and that is where the comedy part comes into play. One scene that tries way too hard was the garage fight. Without giving too much away, it is a fight between Christine and Mrs. Ganush which seems ridiculous as it is. It gets taken to new levels when office appliances are brought into the mix. It reached its funniest point at the stapler and then was brought to it’s lowest somewhere around the ruler. Take this lack of sophistication with a grain of salt because it was intentional, along with the constant gross out scenes as part of the dark-comedy portion of the film.

The only big issue to take from this is that even though the scenes that were supposed to be funny ranged from mildly humorous to hilarious, ...