DRAG ME TO HELL

Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi, Director, 2009 

HOOK: Sam Rami’s blood sacrifice to invoke the great horror movies of the past.

LINE:  “Soon it will be you who comes begging to me.”

SINKER: Remember when movies were fun?

SPANKY: Allison Lohman (Willy’s illegitimate daughter) and Justin Long have a genuinely touching relationship and there are some fresh scenes—possessed woman meets boyfriend’s parents at dinner, psychic reciting Jung and the depressed heroine filling her face with ice cream scooped from a carton—besides the requisite demonic séance, girl struggling with a corpse in a grave she’s dug up and the vomiting of blood and grubs, but the pacing of this film is like a good novel where we root for the central character and at times against her (even if the middle of the film is a bit slow). The director is shamelessly manipulating an audience and we are there to be shamelessly manipulated. This gets my vote for best title of the year, best ending and most interesting question: not what would you do if you were damned to hell, but who would you chose to send there in your place if you could. John?

“TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four)

JOHN: Watching this movie I was fifteen again, reveling in the gothic effects, nervously laughing at the shadows on the window of a suddenly claustrophobic house and drowning in the eyes of a young blonde whose worst fears have suddenly become realized. The best scene in the movie: a fly darting in the window lands on the camera lens and then buzzes to the sleeping Alison’s face where it crawls into her nose. Eeeeeeeek! The titles over an obscure book of illustrated nightmares, the charged, fifties movie-music and the final payoff, are all great. By the way a fat woman next to me got a cell phone call during the movie. I damned her to hell and, unexpectedly, she burst into flames. How’s that for irony.  

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four)