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Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the
years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to
Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name (namely,
the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling camera and
viscous ickiness back and serving a concept lowbrow enough to
discourage A-listers.
Made early last year from a long-shelved script by Raimi and brother
Ivan, Drag Me has a serendipitously timely victim. Playing a
bank loan officer, petite, marshmallow-cheeked Alison Lohman bears the
brunt of the film’s supernatural humiliations. Lohman’s Christine Brown
is putting the finishing touches on her self-reinvention as a young
professional: eye on a promotion, renting L.A. hillside real estate,
and heading toward marriage with an upmarket boyfriend, Clay (that he’s
played by that icon of yuppie brand identity, smug MacBook shill Justin
Long, is slyly perfect). Only leftover photographs and snide comments
from Clay’s WASP parents give unwelcome reminders of the tubby farm
girl she used to be.
One day, smothering her conscience to impress her boss, Christine
refuses to take pity on an ancient gypsy woman about to lose her home
(Lorna Raver, with a malevolent dead eye, horking up neon phlegm). The
Louvin Brothers were right: Satan is real. The hag hisses a hex, and
Christine’s life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical
interventions that play like Seventeen magazine’s “Embarrassing
Moments,” as written by Antonin Artaud. Christine spouts a geyser
nosebleed at work, is ambushed by hallucinations while meeting
potential in-laws, and begins studying animal sacrifice. A visit to a
psychic confirms she’s had a demon sicced on her and, if it isn’t
appeased in time, she’ll get the title treatment.
With a PG-13 rating, the movie still smuggles a good amount of
awfulness into adolescent minds. The running joke involves getting
Christine into situations where her mouth — usually wide open,
screaming — is invaded by incredibly vile things: a spelunking
fly, a gush of grubs, embalming fluid. Otherwise, the harassing spirit
comes on Moe Howard-style — one-two snapping her head back and
forth or unloading a full-body across-the-room heave. If the
booga-booga shocks are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its
audience right in its last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by
crack editor Bob Murawski through a burlesque exorcism (with a
possessed goat, seemingly related to the cackling trophy in Evil
Dead 2), Christine’s dash to find a substitute for her place in
Hell, and the final slamming door of the title card.
The combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick made
Michigan State dropout Raimi a Fangoria star with 1981’s
resourceful Evil Dead, on the vanguard of an international
groundswell of indie horrors. Kiwi-era Peter Jackson, Return of the
Living Dead, Re-Animator, Frank Henenlotter, Nekromantik
— these grassroots sickies, marked by tumor-black humor and
try-anything camerawork, were an inventive, sanguinary alternative to
the flat-out awful middle range of ’80s movies (and, in some cases,
resumés for a next generation of blockbuster technicians).
Was this throwback Raimi’s way of collecting himself after
disappearing into Spider-Man 3‘s narrative overgrowth? The sense
of control is palpable; Raimi, ever the engineer, takes pleasure in
screwing with audience identification, shifting between collaboration
and contempt for our heroine. We take Christine’s side against a
brown-nose co-worker (Reggie Lee, very good), Clay’s pinky-in-air
parents, and that gypsy witch-bitch, whose lingered-on grotesqueness
forestalls sympathy — but it’s squeaky-cute Christine who is all
along the secret villain. On the surface an Evil Dead successor,
Drag Me, an allegory with karmic logic from E.C. Comics and Jack
Chick, replays as farce Raimi’s A Simple Plan, also based on the
boomerang return of transgression.
Christine getting bonged on the head with a cross for forgetting the
Golden Rule doesn’t indicate a particularly nuanced moral vision. Does
Raimi — who began his career on a shoestring in the Tennessee
woods and now commands $300 million bonanzas — actually
believe professional ambition should be punished with eternal
damnation?
