FILM: DRAG ME TO HELL

REVIEWED BY ADAM KAMIEN

NEARLY two decades after the release of the third film in the Evil Dead trilogy, Jewish director Sam Raimi has returned to his horror roots with stunning effect.

Most people will know Raimi as the director of the recent Spiderman trilogy, but horror devotees have been fawning over the auteur since the release of his seminal horror/comedy Evil Dead II in 1987, which elevated him to cult legend status before the film was out on VHS.

After a string of critical and box office failures -– the hugely profitable Spiderman movies aside -– his latest film, Drag Me To Hell, is already being hailed as a cult classic. And with good reason.

The Evil Dead movies, in particular Evil Dead II, are regarded as genre-defining by pundits and have been imitated and derived for the last couple of decades.

But with Drag Me To Hell, Raimi proves that he is still the master, even though purveyors of torture porn and digital effects now dominate the landscape.

The premise is simple. Christine is a 20-something woman working as a loans officer, vying for a promotion to assistant manager. In an attempt to prove to her boss she is capable of making the hard decisions, the normally sympathetic Christine refuses an old Gypsy a loan extension, despite the woman literally begging her to reconsider.

Later that day, the woman follows Christine to her car, and in one of the film’s best scenes, places a wretched curse on her.

Christine goes to a medium and finds out she has been inhabited by the Lamia, an evil spirit that drives its hosts mad before sending them to the fiery bowls of hell. Christine has three days to exorcise the spirit before her fate is sealed.

In a recent interview with The Age, Raimi said he injected humour into his horror films because he was “a coward at heart. When I see things, I can’t even approach them without looking at the funny side of it. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism. And for some reason, that’s how I present my horror.”

Make no mistake, Drag Me To Hell is a hell of a lark. The film boasts a kitten sacrifice, maggot eating, possessed goats, stapler fights and -– in a stroke of horror genius -– the regurgitation of said kitten.

But the violence in Drag Me To Hell is cartoonish and inconsequential and the scares come from old-school horror techniques rather than the sinewy, oozing gorefests proffered by the next generation of horror filmmakers.

Raimi will now turn his attention to Spiderman 4 -– was there ever any doubt -– but fans of horror everywhere, and indeed a fair few that aren’t, will undoubtedly be thankful for Raimi’s sojourn from the studio machine. This is pastiche horror of the highest order and an instant classic.

Drag Me To Hell is screening nationally.

Watch a video trailer of Drag Me To Hell