Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/5/09
My
day job is in the financial sector, and I can tell you without a doubt
that the road to Hell is paved with middle management. Following
meaningless rules no matter who they hurt, nickel and diming customers
in the name of profit margins, and generally looking at the world through
the prism of tomorrow's stock price and “getting ahead” are steadily rotting
our collective morality and devastating our economy with no end in sight.
We've all got our reasons: everybody's doing it, honesty's for suckers,
I've got bills to pay, blah blah blah. Perhaps what our corporate
mentality needs is a little Old Testament shakeup, and Sam Raimi's ready
to deliver it with the ruthlessly moralistic thriller Drag Me to Hell.
For his first non-Spider-Man outing in nine years, the Evil Dead
director reconnects with his grindhouse roots to tell the tale of a
loan manager for whom a tiny little sin comes with a really big price.
Light on its' feet, and positively giddy with the filmmaker's skill at
delivering scares, Drag Me to Hell will make you think twice the
next time you're tempted to stamp “DENIED” on an application you could
approve if you wanted to.
Christine
Brown (Alison Lohman) has a good life, with a solid job as a bank's loan
manager that could lead to a promotion and a great boyfriend in college
professor Clay Dalton (Justin Long). But despite all her hard work,
she might lose that promotion to kiss-up Stu (Reggie Lee) and she worries
that Clay's wealthy parents (Chelcie Ross and Molly Cheek) will finally
get their way and find him a more “appropriate” girlfriend than former
overweight farm girl Christine. Her boss Mr. Jacks (David Paymer)
gives her a not-so-subtle hint that the promotion will go to someone who
can make “the tough decisions”, so when elderly gypsy Mrs. Canush (Lorna
Raver) shows up at her desk asking for an extension on her mortgage to
avoid eviction, Christine reluctantly chooses to deny it despite the desperate
woman's pleas. When she leaves work for the day, Mrs. Canush is waiting
for her in the back seat, attacking like a maniac to get her hands on a
button from Christine's coat, upon which she places a curse. Consulting
with storefront psychic Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), she learns that this curse
will torment her for three days and then a goat spirit will, yes, drag
her to hell. And so she is attacked by more and more vivid visions
as the spirit draws closer. Nothing Rham suggests to break the curse
works, but, for a price, perhaps an old enemy (Adriana Barraza) of the
goat spirit could be persuaded to save her. As the hours tick away,
Christine's shaky moral compass will be tested, because there just might
be a way to lawyer her way out of this curse...
There
are two levels upon which to enjoy Drag Me to Hell, and we'll start
with the one that's spoiler-free: fans of Sam Raimi's early work
(the period from his debut horror classic The Evil Dead through
1995's criminally underrated western spectacular The Quick and the Dead)
will be thrilled to see the return of the manic energy and anything-goes
spirit that's been missing from even the best (A Simple Plan, Spider-Man
2) of his “serious artist” period. On paper, this is a truly
dark and ghoulish story, but it's brought off with such high spirits and
cinematic slight of hand that it's infectiously fun. Raimi delights
in all kinds of scares, from slamming doors and rattling pans all the way
to the ominous approach of a monster's shadow under a door. What
separates a great horror director from an adequate one is the ability to
visually sell a shock the same way a great comedian massages a joke so
that it doesn't matter whether it's funny on paper or not; it's all in
the telling. A scary movie moment tends to play like this:
“Oh, no, something scary's coming... they keep dragging it out, it's gonna
be so scary... AHHHHHHHH!”. Here, Raimi delights in using his shot
choices and camera movements to milk those first two beats for maximum
impact, and when the shocks come, they don't disappoint.
Drag
Me to Hell is rated PG-13, but the movie doesn't need truly overt gore
to get the job done because the filmmaker is carrying around an excellent
list of What Scares Us. He delights in sticking things in people's
mouths that don't belong there, and Mrs. Canush is a skillfully conceived
Old Lady Ghoul, from her one bad eye and nasty, sharp yellow fingernails
to that little drop of slime hanging on her lip. And that's BEFORE
she dies! Uncomfortable proximity to corpses, bugs in food, and pretty
much anything else that's gross, but not R-rated gross, is thrown in there
for good measure. And, of course, there are more conventional scares
built around lunging ghouls and characters battered by phantom winds, not
to mention a glorious non sequitur of a shot involving a goat.
In
order to create an atmosphere that's as fun as it is horrifying, Raimi
relies on a bright color palate and getting performances that are about
75% emotionally engaged so as not to encourage too much empathy with the
characters. Lohman walks a much more difficult line than she's likely
to get credit for, playing the scares in a melodramatic enough way to keep
us from focusing too much on her suffering while perching the character
between being sympathetic enough that we care and just that little bit
of selfish edge that makes us wonder if she doesn't have this coming.
Long is a bit miscast as a college professor, no matter how new at his
job, but he does project the appropriate concern. As fans of Prison
Break's second season know, Lee is a master of oily cretinism, and
excels here at playing the kind of guy who'd make you risk your immortal
soul just so he won't win. Barraza is great in the Zelda Rubinstein
role. But my favorite of the supporting performances came from Rao,
whose mystic never really seems to know what he's doing despite assorted
grave protestations, and all of his “help” comes with a price tag, at times
exorbitant. Even as the end credits rolled, I had no idea if this
guy ever knew what he was talking about.
*****SPOILER
WARNING: SEE THE MOVIE FIRST, THEN READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW*****
Now for that other level upon which I enjoyed Drag Me to Hell, as
a smackdown of Bailout Era morality. Christine is what passes for
a “good person” in some circles these days: she would rather do the
right thing than not and only throws old ladies out on the street or murders
her own cat when times get tough. Sure, you'll say, Mrs. Canush,
stole candies off her desk, was kinda gross, and later proved to be a total
psycho. Perhaps a better-groomed old woman might have inspired more
sympathy, but I doubt it because we see over and over that the only regret
Christine ever feels is for being cursed. I absolutely loved the
tone of the final scene, when her slick, self-absorbed admission of guilt
inspires Clay to tell her what a good person she is. Oprah would
be proud. Now, if only she could keep her envelopes straight...
But
the point of the story is this: while the gypsy curse might speed
Christine's journey to Hell, it doesn't change the end result. Because
it's easy to ruin someone's life by checking a box, that doesn't make it
a small sin, and that loss of perspective has led us to the society we
have today. As the climactic business with her attempts to get rid
of the envelope reveals, she's not a monster, and can't look someone in
the eye and kill them (unless they're a cat), but that doesn't get her
off the hook.
The
script by Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan is in some ways A Christmas
Carol without the redemption. We see how the sadness of her childhood
made Christine desperate to reinvent herself as a Woman of Business and
to fit in with Clay and his family. And we also see, systematically,
how every one of the things she morally transgresses to get would have
broken her way if she'd just done the right thing. I doubt I'd have
had so visceral a reaction to the movie's outcome a year ago at this time,
but now that we've seen in the Wall Street meltdown and mortgage crisis
just how one “my money over your future” decision after another conspired
to bring us down, it really felt like this should be the orientation film
for every office worker in this country.*****END OF SPOILERS*****
The
things that make a horror movie like this fun also tend to make it a tad
distancing, and I didn't really feel the emotional connection to Drag
Me to Hell that would have made it great. But it is spunky, clever
and agreeably mad as Hell and unwilling to take it anymore. I had
fun watching it and fun thinking about it after it was over. After
the inert Spider-Man 3, it's also great to
see Sam Raimi back on his game. I'd recommend this movie to everyone
in management at work, but I'm pretty sure they'd all say “That poor girl,
what did she ever do to anybody?” THERE'S some horror for you... |
