Review: Drag Me to Hell (2009)

DRAG ME TO HELL (2009)
Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver

SYNOPSIS:
Alison Lohman is a bank officer who refuses a mortgage extension to the Gypsy from The Wolf Man or maybe Thinner or, actually, both. Guess who gets cursed. And if you’re the type who’d use the phrase “hilarity ensues” then – HAW! HAW! HAW! – boy-oh-boy, does hilarity ever ensue! LOL! SMILEY FACE SIGN! RMATOLFLFUCKYOU!

McBLOVIATION:
“Those who would sacrifice essential Horror for temporary Comedy deserve neither Horror nor Comedy.” – President McBeardo

Drag me to the toilet.
There is nothing I loathe so much as a filmmaker who overwhelms his horror movie with comedy. So you can see where we’re going in regards to Mr. Sam Raimi, eh?

The “horror comedy” cop-out makes me suspect that the director A) does not have the skills to make an effectively frightening horror movie, B) holds horror in contempt, and/or C) fears that horror will make him look “ridiculous” and therefore he sets out to beat everyone else to the ridicule.

Maybe some combination of the above represents the case with Drag Me to Hell creator Raimi, and maybe not. All I know is that none of his work since the original Evil Dead has been frightening and, aside from the first Spider-Man, he hasn’t amused me in the slightest, either.

And yet, from Bruce Campbell grunting “Groovy!” in Evil Dead 2 and then fighting primitive-computer-animated nothingness in Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi has become one of the most influential forces in horror movies — by removing the horror from them.

As John Hughes was to teen sex comedies in the 1980s, so Raimi is to fright films: a Destroyer, except with none of the cool military-vessel/KISS-album connotations of the term.

And also like Hughes, golly gee, he even gets to revel in a PG-13 rating here. Yay! Dance, you mewling castrati, dance!

DMTH is Raimi’s worst effort to date, and this represents an achievement for the mega-talent behind the Kevin Costner baseball movie that ISN’T Bull Durham.

The willfully irrational and elementally inaccurate critical hosannas over DMTH would be infuriating if they were not also going to be entirely forgotten in a month.

Every so often, our mainstream reviewers must fall all over one another in an attempt to prove they’re “down” with genre filmmaking. Most recently, I’d cite the bizarro frothing for The Devil’s Rejects. And now this.

Foo-eey, says me.

No aspect of DMTH charmed me. Not the “live-action cartoon” slapstick. Not Alison Lohman, who is like White-Out on a movie screen. Not the sub-Sci-Fi-channel CGI. Not the Evil-Dead-iness of it all. Not the joy-buzzer “shocks” that ceased to even be noticeable after the third time. Nothing.

I hate this movie. And if you don’t hate this movie then I hate you, too. All the way to Hell.

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