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Despite the inexplicable critical acclaim, there’s little point in trying to deny the fact that Drag Me To Hell is a mediocre entry to the horror genre. Here’s a film that tries to be scary with a couple of largely ineffective “boo!” moments, and it also tries to be funny with its cheesy and over-the-top dialogue and situations. While Drag Me To Hell is virtually unsuccessful at manufacturing scares (I think I only jumped in my seat once), I’ll admit that it does a slightly better job at being amusing. The only problem is that, with some of the ostensibly funny moments, it’s very hard to tell whether they actually are intentional and meant to make the audience crack up, or if we were actually meant to take the situation seriously. In fact, I think that the only moment in which it’s quite clear that the humor is intentional is when our heroine, Christine (Alison Lohman), is driving towards a cemetery, determined to carry out her plan, and yells “I’m gonna get some!” As for everything else in the film that may or may not cause laughs, it’s really hard to tell whether it’s intended, and I certainly can’t give the filmmakers credit for apparently providing entertaining material that they may not have actually thought up.
The scene that works best in the film is the one in which Christine’s boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long), takes her to meet his parents. There’s a nice sense of awkwardness, and the character of Clay’s mother benefits from the fact that, though she’s initially portrayed as a caricatured unwelcoming mother-in-law, there’s an eventual shift once she gets to know Christine better. When Christine hallucinates while an unwitting Clay and his parents continue eating their lunch, we pretty much witness the best material this film has to offer. However, the truly horrible séance scene that we get later in the film overshadows everything else, and in a very bad way. The obligatory twist towards the end is totally predictable (and this isn’t a spoiler, because anyone with half a brain will see it coming a mile away).
I’m aware that Sam Raimi’s latest film isn’t supposed to be a groundbreaking piece of originality, seeing as its intention is to be reminiscent of older horror flicks, but there’s just very little that Drag Me To Hell has to offer in terms of actual terror, and in addition to that, its caliber as a comedy is difficult to gauge. In fact, this year has actually seen a better attempt at giving us an old-fashioned horror movie, and that was My Bloody Valentine (which came out at the very start of the year, and could be seen in 3-D). It was quite clear that that movie was having fun with itself, and it moved along at a nicely fast pace, with a decent amount of shocks to keep viewers entertained. Raimi is responsible for one of my all-time favorite films, which is Spider-Man 2, even though what he did with the third movie in that franchise was incredibly disappointing. Drag Me To Hell leaves even more to be desired: while it’s not a, um, hellishly bad experience at the movies, it’s still a weak cinematic effort that seems more suited to be played by teenagers as background noise during a get-together on Halloween night.
4/10
