Drag Me To Hell

Since Sam Raimi left the world of horror to make increasingly leaden comic book blockbusters, the American horror film landscape has languished in a tedious rut. In a given year, it's hard to find any major horror release that isn't torture porn, a dire remake of an 80s slasher flick, or a J-horror ripoff.  With no Raimi around, to remind people that comedy and horror share the same cinematic DNA, horror filmmaking is an airless, mechanical slog of hitch-gaited waifs and dismembered girls in cutoff T-shirts.  Thankfully, Drag Me To Hell marks the triumphant return of Raimi's intoxicating combination of slapstick and scares.  The movie is filled with scenes that start off giving the audience a standard-issue horror "jolt," and end by provoking a surprise burst of laughter.

Drag Me To Hell is old school all the way.  The basic plot skeleton is exactly the same as The Ring: a women has several days to stop her impending supernatural death by placating a malign spirit, all the while dealing with terrifying portents of her fate.  But instead of relying on the oh-so-millennial J-Horror notion of haunted technology, Drag Me To Hell features a plot engine that's been around since the Silent Era: a gypsy curse.  

Alison Lohman is adequate as the doomed young woman, an ambitious loan officer who refuses a mortgage extension to a baroquely wizened Gypsy crone (Lorna Raver) who unleashes a goat-horned demon to drag her to heck in three days.  Her kewpie doll looks and big, luminous eyes help make for some great reaction shots to Raimi's inspired array of Grand Guignol shock gags, all of which are shot with the same breakneck lurches between deadpan and semi-hysteria that let you know you're in the Raimiverse. After a grim decade of humorless, factory-issue horror films, it's a blast to be back.