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Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the
years before finding his Spider Man gig, with Drag Me to
Hell Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name
(namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling
camera and viscous ickiness back.
Made early last year from a long-shelved script by Raimi and brother
Ivan, Drag Me has a serendipitously timely victim. Playing a
bank loan officer, petite, marshmallow-cheeked Alison Lohman bears the
brunt of the film’s supernatural humiliations. Lohman’s Christine Brown
is putting the finishing touches on her self-reinvention as a young
professional: eye on a promotion, renting Los Angeles hillside real
estate and heading toward marriage with an up-market boyfriend, Clay
(Justin Long). Only leftover photographs and snide comments from Clay’s
WASP parents give unwelcome reminders of the tubby farm girl she used
to be.
One day, smothering her conscience to impress her boss, Christine
refuses to take pity on an ancient gypsy woman about to lose her home
(Lorna Raver). The Louvin Brothers were right: Satan is Real. The hag
hisses a hex, and Christine’s life plan is derailed by a chain of
diabolical interventions that play like Seventeen magazine’s
“Embarrassing Moments,” as written by Antonin Artaud. Christine spouts
a geyser nosebleed at work, is ambushed by hallucinations while meeting
potential in-laws, and starts studying animal sacrifice. A visit to a
psychic confirms she’s had a demon sicced on her and, if it isn’t
appeased in time, she’ll get the title treatment.
With a PG-13 rating, the movie still smuggles a good amount of
awfulness into adolescent minds. The running joke involves getting
Christine into situations where her mouth—usually wide open,
screaming—is invaded by incredibly vile things: a spelunking fly,
a gush of grubs, embalming fluid. Otherwise, the harassing spirit comes
on Moe Howard-style—one-two snapping her head back and forth, or
unloading a full-body across-the-room heave. If the booga-booga shocks
are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its
last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob
Murawski through a burlesque exorcism, Christine’s dash to find a
substitute for her place in Hell, and the final slamming door of the
title card.
The combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick made
Michigan State dropout Raimi a Fangoria star with 1981’s
resourceful Evil Dead, on the vanguard of an international
groundswell of indie horrors.
Was this throwback Raimi’s way of collecting himself after
disappearing into Spider Man 3‘s narrative overgrowth? The sense
of control is palpable; Raimi, ever the engineer, takes pleasure in
screwing with audience identification, shifting between collaboration
and contempt for our heroine. We take Christine’s side against a
brown-nose co-worker, Clay’s pinky-in-air parents and that gypsy
witch-bitch, but it’s squeaky-cute Christine who is all along the
secret villain. On the surface an Evil Dead successor, Drag
Me replays as farce Raimi’s A Simple Plan, also based on the
boomerang return of transgression.
Christine getting bonged on the head with a cross for forgetting the
Golden Rule doesn’t indicate a particularly nuanced moral vision. Does
Raimi—who began his career on a shoestring in the Tennessee woods
and now commands $300 million bonanzas—actually believe
professional ambition should be punished with eternal damnation?
