Drag Me To Hell
‘Drag Me To Hell‘ – a title that’s an apt metaphor for my morning commute over the past few months but that’s a story for another blog post, we’re to here to discuss Sam Raimi’s eagerly awaited return to genre film-making, a kinetic roller-coaster of a movie that has already made my weekend. If you’ve been following my twitter feed then you may have noticed my intentions to have caught the movie at a special midnight screening at the Curzon Soho last Wednesday, this would have resulted in a 3am bedtime given the films 100 minute run time and the frequency of London’s night buses, not a realistic proposal for a school night. Instead on the hottest day of the year I ambled over to my local cinema for a matinee screening of Raimi’s latest lunacy, any excuse to avoid the cursed sunlight works well in my book.
Written by Raimi and his brother Ivan ‘Drag Me To Hell‘ is the story of Catherine Brown, a modest yet faintly ambitious bank loan clerk with a slightly misguided yet essentially good spirit. Seeking to obtain a 
valuable promotion our heroine is goaded by her ineffectual boss into demonstrating her ability to make tough decisions, an instruction issued with the coincidental arrival of a grotesque gypsy whose home is about to be repossessed by the bank. Denied a stay of execution by our resigned heroine the hag wields a terrible curse on Catherine which condemns her to death in three days, her immortal soul destined to be cast into the underworld, her final hours plagued by the merciless violence of the terrible demon lamia. Any torture of bankers obviously goes down like gangbusters these days but we’re given just enough to sympathise with Catherine through some broad strokes of characterisation, she has a loving boyfriend who is about to pop the big question, she seeks to conceal her rural farm upbringing and the shame of her alcoholic mother, she has the drive and appetite to prosper in the rough, tough city of angels. Catherine begins a desperate quest to absolve the curse, roping in the assistance of a local mystic and her confused boyfriend, her investigation culminating in a terrible solution that would challenge the hardiest of mettle.
I haven’t laughed this much at the cinema in a long time. It’s not in the slightest bit scary nor is it trying to be, there are a few serenely executed jumps and a mischievously wicked sense of humor that you’d expect from Raimi’s return to the genre that propelled hs career. There’s some of this and some of this, for the most part Raimi reigns in the crash zooms and dutch angles, preferring to rely on some judicious use of sound to build tension and fear – this was one of the loudest films I think I’ve ever seen. For you squares out there yes this makes an appearance but there was no sign of Ash which was a vague disappointment. It was a little too polished, just a little too ‘studio’ for my tastes but the mayhem concludes on a quite unexpected EC comics inspired denouement which should silence those forum dwellers who complain that Raimi’s lost his edge, his cartoon cruelty since he went off to make the family friendly Spidey flicks. The final word goes to Sam’s greatest creation, I couldn’t have said it better myself;
Minty's Menagerie 
Recent Comments