Drag Me To Hell (2009); dir. Sam Raimi

Director: Sam Raimi

Country: United States

Year of Release: 2009

Runtime: 99 mins.

I will always respect when mainstream releases take any sort of risk.  But I still can't help finding Drag Me To Hell a disappointment.  As am I certain to frequently profess -- there is no greater artistic crime than mediocrity.  With horror especially.  It demands the weird, the outre, the mysterious, the atmospheric.  With any reaching, many faults can be forgiven.  But Raimi's indulgences here are in all the wrong places.

In this day and age, the public are a jaded lot.  At least in our entertainment, we're not much frightened by witch cults or Satan or monsters or any numerous forms of grievous violence.  Our sense for the supernatural and weird are all but atrophied.  The public sense of mystery -- a sensibility which imbues life with new and strange dimensions -- that imagines and fearfully contemplates the unknown -- I wonder if this, in some way, has diminished.

Drag Me To Hell is a perfect portrait of the horror movie for this audience.  Its heart is made of jump scares.  Certainly, the jump scare is a venerable thing.  But it derives all of its power from context.  Of itself, the jump scare is cheap.  It is the cinematic equivalent of walking up behind someone and whispering "boo!"  It is purely visceral.  It's nothing the mind can appreciate.  If it "scares us," it does so only on the most superficial level.  It doesn't move us any further than that.  It has no imaginative power.  And this movies relies upon them heavily.

This wouldn't be a huge problem if anything else about this movie really worked to support them.  But the other parts of the movie are an inexplicable jumble of comedy and drama.  And none of it really fits together.  The comedy undercuts the horror.  The drama is diminished by both.  And this makes the movie somewhat schizophrenic.

After a lackluster opening unfortunately effective in its foreshadowing of the CG in store for us later in the film, Raimi spends a good amount of time introducing us to his characters.  Surprisingly, these are some of the most effective scenes in the movie.  We like Christine.  We quickly become interested in the office politics at her job.  We want her to succeed.  But then Raimi introduces the two things that diminish this movie more than anything else: gross outs and physical comedy.

Now, there's supposed to be a morality element to the story -- Christine is unkind to the gypsy woman, so she is cursed.  But the gypsy woman is horribly and exaggeratedly disgusting.  And Raimi goes out of his way to emphasize this in excruciating, distracting detail.  There are, for example, close-ups of sneezed-up yellow goo.  But these gross out effects are exactly like the jump scares -- only instead of jumping, our reaction is "ew, gross."  Still visceral.  Still nothing to really think about.  Nothing really affecting on any deeper level.  Worst of all, it robs the woman of any pathos.  How are we supposed to buy into the morality play, if we feel no sympathy for the wronged individual?  This undercuts the whole angle of the plot the scene seems intended to establish.  And what could have actually meant something, ends up being a cheap joke.  And really, this is the pattern the whole movie follows.  Meaningful development is set up only to be sacrificed for cheap gimmick.

But the physical comedy is worse.  Take, for example, the scene in which the gypsy woman attacks Christine in her car.  After a certain point, I have no idea what this scene is intended to do.  It isn't really scary.  It's kind of gross again.  Christine is gummed by a gypsy.  And then the situation gets serious.  The gypsy goes in for another gumming, when all of a sudden--

Christine stabs the gypsy woman in the mouth with a ruler?

Then -- thanks to movie magic, a Computer Generated ruler flies in a straight line out of the gypsy's mouth and cracks the window behind Christine.  

I really can't quite explain how absolutely ridiculous this looks on film.  Or how completely unnecessary it is to CG a RULER.  There is also a CG handkerchief.  A demonic CG handkerchief.

Look, Evil Dead 2 worked because Bruce Campbell is a virtuoso physical comic.  And the sheer bizarro quality of it all added to the madness.  A lot of it happened, notably, when Ash is alone in the house.  It had a palpable affect on our experience.  But here the comedy and gross stuff don't contribute to plot, atmosphere, character, or anything else.  The problem is this stuff isn't even all that compelling by itself in even the barest exploitative or gratuitous sense.  

But this all reaches a head during the seance.  Everyone loves a good demon summoning.  But right as things are getting dire and the characters are fleeing from the unfortunate fellow whom the demon has possessed.  Right in the midst of this unholy demonic potential.  Right then.  The possessed man -- who is floating, mind you, above the seance table.  The possessed man begins to dance a jig in mid-air.  

He.  Dances.  A.  Jig.  

While grinning and making little dancey noises.  Doot dee doot dee doo.

It sounds funny, doesn't it?  Just lighten up, you say.  It's all in good fun.

But I can't laugh anymore. Drag me to sleeeeep.  Because I'm tired, Sam Raimi, so very tired.  If I can just....make it...to.....Bruce Campbell's chin....I can curl up....in its cleft....and maybe....maybe I can find peace...

Because, let me tell you something.  You know when I most enjoyed watching this movie?  When it acted like a drama.  When we were worried about Christine's job and whether Clay's parents will like her.  Sam Raimi made me wish his horror movie were a drama.  I didn't care about his demons or possessions or demonic handkerchiefs or gypsy curses or ghostly pots and pans or spooooky shadows.  I cared about the characters he created.  The problem is -- Raimi didn't seem to care about them half as much as I did.  And ultimately, the sophomoric obsession with CG ruler slapstick undercuts anything the horror could have done to make us care what happens to them.

Plenty of horror movies don't rely on complex characterizations to be effective.  But when you take the time to set it all up, it is that much more inexplicable when you do nothing with it.  And the sting of wasted potential is that much stronger.

We could have felt something.  Instead we just jumped a little and went on with our lives.