Sam Raimi is so gross, I swear to God. It's a good thing he's fun to hang out with. Otherwise he'd be that kid on the playground that nobody even wants to look at because he's always flinging boogers and lighting his farts on fire.
And he's a master of his craft, Raimi, without room for a sliver of doubt, a master. The care he takes with camera movement, lighting, editing, effects, it's all extraordinary. Personally, I was happily floored by the brilliance of his color palette in this one.
But here's the rub. You can (kind of; OK, I'm simplifying) split his CV down the middle: the mainstream films, exemplified by the Spiderman trilogy (which are under no circumstances to be dismissed. The mainstream films have things like emphasis on story and character development added into his mix of talents, and I'm a huge fan of those things); then there are what I think of as the Real Sam Raimi films, les projets de son coeur, if you will, exemplified by the Evil Dead trilogy. Drag Me To Hell falls into this latter category, which are not so much stories told as sequences of running gags that startle you then make you laugh and go "Eeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww!" Please note that I did not choose a random number of "e"s and "w"s in that "ew". They were carefully counted and placed, since the "this is gross, but you're gonna laugh" factor is upped exponentially in every subsequent Raimi outing. The question is, can a series of gross-out gags make a worthwhile movie? And, like every question posed about movies, the answer is that magic is always possible on the silver screen, even from the gutter, the trench, or the water-filled grave of a maggot-eaten corpse.
The first two Evil Dead movies were not great but seemed fantastically ground-breaking at the time (although after watching Michael Reeves' She-Beast, I was astonished at the Sam-Raiminess of it, a full fifteen years before Evil Dead), and the third, Army of Darkness, was plain good fun, as was Raimi's homage to the Spaghetti Western, the Quick and the Dead, my personal favorite. The characters in all of these undergo tortures and tribulations, it's part of the drill, but in Drag Me To Hell we cross a peculiar line. Maybe it's because the previous heroes seemed stronger. You don't worry much about Bruce Campbell or Sharon Stone; you're fair certain they can take their share of punches (or gunshots or demon-ravagings or whatever is the violence du jour), even if it, well, drags them into hell. But this hero is a sweet little farmgirl trying to make it in the city (staunchly played by Alison Lohman in the face of near-constant batterings and blood-spewings and getting gnawed upon by toothless gypsies), and Raimi makes her run a gauntlet not just of physical violence (which would be alright. My God, will you listen to this? what have I become?) but of social and public humiliations as well. In the end, it just feels like sadism.
It has about as much story as would fill a decent episode of Amazing Stories, and the characters round out a little more fully, but not much. Their personalities are indicated for the most part through pat conversational pieces and comic-book-shallow actions. The only time there is any real glimpse of three-dimensional interaction is at a dinner party when our heroine is meeting her boyfriend's parents and the mother unexpectedly warms to her, but that single moment of humanity is cut short by another crushing moment of humiliation. >SPOILER ALERT< The worst part, I guess, is that I saw what the ending would be while it was still a mile off down the track. That doesn't always ruin a film for me, but it did this one. I couldn't enjoy her hard-fought triumphs because I knew that they were going to be snatched away from her by the chuckling man behind the camera (do you remember Muttley? He was a cartoon dog when I was a kid, and he always sniggered wheezingly into his paw whenever some bad thing befell his master, Dick Dastardly. That's how I picture Sam Raimi shooting the end of the film).
I suspect it'd have been funnier in the theatre. These things are easier to enjoy when there's a group dynamic involved, and you're jumping and screeching and laughing along with other folks. As it was, in the privacy of my own living room, there were some funny things, particularly at the seance: the lamia-possessed man dancing his manic sailor's hornpipe over the fire, and who can resist laughing once the sacrificial goat starts a-cussin'?
I'm glad that Raimi still has a blast directing these things. I'm very happy that he has kept hold of his childlike enjoyment even after all these years in the purportedly soul-killing hell-dimension that is Hollywood (that's all hearsay, actually, and I may be wrong about it. It might be a very nice place). I sincerely hope he keeps working forever. One of my favorite things in the world (second only to the face of a footballer about to take a free kick) is a director with a powerful vision, and he is absolutely that. But is there a reason you must not miss this? None that I can think of, unless you're a Raimi completist... which I whole-heartedly encourage you to become, if you think you'd have a talent for it. If not, it shouldn't be difficult to find more compelling journeys into hell at your corner video store.
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