I can absolutely understand why the people who love Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise also love Drag Me to Hell. Following that first 1981 trip within the woods, which was gunning for a solely scary experience, the audience’s unexpected laughter-ridden response led the rest of the Evil Dead franchise down a path more focused on “spook o blast” slapstick horror-humor. Even Raimi’s cult favorite Darkman, which was equal parts horror, action, and superhero movie, displayed the same kind of manic execution, very icky set-pieces, and a frenetic and unhinged sense of humor. If it weren’t for his extremely undervalued 2001 ghost story The Gift, which was a straight, dark, and humorless horror/thriller, I would say that Raimi was neither interested in nor had the confidence to make a genre pic where he couldn’t rely on silliness and buckets of slime. That The Gift didn’t make any money might have been the last reason Raimi needed to leave serious horror behind as a director.
If Drag Me to Hell has somehow eluded you all these years, yet you adore the Evil Dead series, then this movie is for you. It contains all the stalwarts of that franchise, but this time in a gussied-up mainstream flick starring the pretty Alison Lohman and the prettier Justin Long. Everything else remains the same: goo, slime, goo-slime, slimy goo, and screaming. The spectre of the dead gypsy (Lorna Raver) constantly shows up either in ghostly form or corpse form and manages to projectile vomit all manner of foul things directly into Lohman’s mouth: maggots, corpse slime, embalming fluid (I think), entrails, and more. Drag Me to Hell is 90 minutes of nasty shit being gooed into an unwilling mouth, and right around the time Lohman drops an anvil on the head of the gypsy, which causes both the spectre’s eyes AND more black goo to fire into her mouth, you start to wonder what on earth you're doing with your time. (The operatic musical score by go-to horror composer Christopher Young, however, is the tops.)
I’m going to be pretty blunt: I hate Drag Me to Hell. I hated it in theaters ten years ago, and this opportunity to revisit the film hasn’t yielded any less hate. Years before The Evil Dead returned in the form of the new-ish Starz series, fans moaned that Raimi was dragging his feet on making Evil Dead IV, and Drag Me to Hell seemed like a direct response to that. “Give the people goo!” he probably bellowed. Because the similarities are profound: people are possessed, causing them to float and make scary faces and speak in terrible demon voices; more goo, more blood; even a terrible CGI goat comes to angry life at some point, mimicking the laughing and squealing animal heads from Evil Dead 2. There’d be absolutely no mistaking Drag Me to Hell as anything other than a Sam Raimi movie (although, while his Oldsmobile appears, Bruce Campbell doesn’t). It’s absolutely cut from the same cloth as Evil Dead 2 and especially Army of Darkness. If you’re someone like me who doesn’t particularly care for either of those, then you must run, screaming, from Drag Me to Hell. But if you're someone who does love the latter half of the Evil Dead franchise, open your mouths and prepare for goo slime.
