UK Release Date: 26-10-2009
Price: £19.99/£24.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Sam Raimi
Country: US
Distributor: Lions Gate Home Entertainment

Sam Raimi’s notorious 1981 shocker The Evil Dead and its sequels have probably influenced every tongue-in-cheek horror film since with their frenetic pacing, deadpan black humour and over-the-top gore; some would say he’s got a lot to answer for (including the two turkeys reviewed above).

Drag Me to Hell is a return, then, to familiar territory for the one-time cult director who garnered mainstream notice with his three Spiderman blockbusters: a story of a terrible gypsy curse and an implacable pursuing demon that balances some genuine creepiness with a few good laughs.

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is an ambitious loans officer in an LA bank, with one eye on the assistant manager’s job and another on her society boyfriend (Justin Long). When a creepy old lady called Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver) begs for an extens­ion on her mortgage, Christine ignores her own instinct to help and turns the woman down. As a result, the boss-eyed old hag (who looks likes Bela Lugosi’s mad grandma) places a curse on her and Christine finds her life being turned upside down by a terrifying demon which will drag her to hell after three days… unless she can find some way to lift the spell.

It’s an old-fashioned morality tale straight out of an EC comic, complete with suitably over-the-top supernatural manifestations and cartoonish gore; it’s also, at times, a black comedy of manners about class and social climbing, and a perfect recession horror movie that taps into everything from our loathing of greedy, amoral bankers to our attempts to disavow the horrors of old age and poverty, as embodied in the ghastly embarrassment-made-flesh of Mrs Ganush, all false teeth and leaky bodily fluids, as she invades the ‘rational’ space of the modern bank.

The film, while hugely enjoyable for the most part, isn’t good enough to keep all these balls in the air for its entire running time, and falls back on typical Raimi shock tactics when it can’t think of anything else to do. The other problem is that the plot twists are so obviously signalled that the film’s somewhat bungled sidestep into ‘Casting the Runes’ territory is obvious before it should be and starts to try the viewer’s patience. But for all its faults of obviousness and laziness, Drag Me to Hell remains eminently more watchable than most current horrors.