Adriana Barraza, a goat, and Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi, 2009).
Commercial horror with the vicious glee and exuberant silliness of an EC comic. Sam Raimi appears, on the evidence of interviews, to believe that his little film carries a moral message. This proves only that one does not have to be very deep to make a good movie. If we take Raimi seriously, we have to conclude that he has the moral vision of a radical Protestant bolshevik, and frankly he's not that complex a thinker. The "morality" of this story is really just stylized cruelty wound up tight like a mousetrap programmed to snap at well-timed intervals, which is the only thing that really makes it more interesting than any other PG-13 horror comedy. Because the main character is a loan officer who rejects an old lady's plea for an extension on her house payment, some reviewers read the film as a thoughtful socio-economic critique of some sort. Again, forget it. It's nothing but base carnival spookhouse manipulation that only asks to be taken seriously at the climactic moment--making that the funniest moment of all.
2 comments:
Isn't there "something to" the simulation of social critique via the loan-officer-rejects-elderly-woman plotline?
**spoilers below**
Ok, Kasey, you win. I just saw this the other night and liked it, but it's forgettable, perhaps due to my wish that it be more engaging (in the Sartrean sense) with some of the minor tropes that seem brushed away. That said, some of the scenes horrified me in a really visceral way: the car fight scene is pretty fabulous.
I wanted this to be embedded with the type of political commentary that The Host had pouring from its plot. Oh well.
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