Drag Me to Hell

Rating: *** (out of 4)
Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long
Director: Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi's 'Drag Me to Hell' is an interesting entry to the horror genre. It has repeated loud shock that I'll often dismiss as cheap scare tactics in lesser horror films. It has special effects so over-the-top that it is physically impossible. It has relentless gore and splatter that is puke inducing, and it has a story so simple that it is essentially a B-grade material; read: Christine (Alison Lohman), a loan officer, has offended an old gypsy woman by denying her an extension to her home loan. In revenge, the gypsy woman places a curse on Christine that tranforms her life into a living hell.

Attributes as such would often be critisized as flaws in mediocre forror films. However, you know what? All these somehow works in 'Drag Me to Hell'.

Yes, I know I have an explanation to do, and I'll do that using an analogy. Let's say you go to a Chinese restaurant and order stir-fried beef. The beef dish, when it is served, must be fully cooked. Anything less than fully cooked, you are perfectly entitled to ask for a refund and curse the chef.

On the other hand, if you go to a western steakhouse and order steak done medium rare, you can't say that the beef dish is bad just because it is not fully cooked. Someone with a mature understanding of cuisine will understand that a Chinese stir-fried beef and a steak done medium rare are two different types of cuisine, and hence they should be judged differently. You can't use the same 'not fully cooked' argument to judge them.

Likewise, someone with a mature understanding of cinema would know that 'Drag Me to Hell' as compared to, say 'The Exorcist', are different type of horror films. 'The Exorcist', a classic in its own right, is the kind of horror that works on realism and mood. Unrealistic over-the-top visual effects and repeated loud shock would have spoilt it.

'Drag Me to Hell', on the other hand, is an exercise in irony. It is sometimes scary, yet funny at the same time. Scare and humour are like fire and water, totally opposite. Yet, Sam Raimi makes the two opposing elements works in the film. Watching it, I was genuinely scared in some of its moments. Even the repeated loud shock which I often find annoying in lesser horror films, genuinely jolted me from my seat for a few times. Yet, right after I recover from the shock, I realized the absurdity of it all and started laughing. My fellow audience must have felt the same as their emotional reaction sensed by my ear takes the form of scream, followed by yikes (disgust), and finally followed by giggles.

'Drag Me to Hell' isn't that kind of horror that takes itself too seriously, it is meant to be a campy thrill ride. So, complaining that its visual effect is unrealistic or its gore and repeated loud shock is 'cheap' will be akin to complaining that your medium rare steak is not fully cooked.

Sam Raimi and Alison Lohman gave us a main protoganist, Christine, we can believe and relate to. It isn't a soulless cardboard character like in so many of the lesser horror films. We like her and we care for her. In the beginning, Christine wemt against her own conscience in making a tough decision to deny a loan extension to a helpless old woman, driven by her desperation to impress her boss in order to gain a promotion. In the end, Christine was in a moral dillema when she was told that she could easily pass on her suffering to another person by giving the cursed button away as a gift to that person. To whom she should give it to? Was it the right thing to do? How humane, how nicely done, and how we can't help but to connect to her emotionally, however B-grade or simple her story may be.

Sam, good to see you back at your 'The Evil Dead' roots.