Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me To Hell is about an ambitious L.A. loan officer named Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) who has a charming boyfriend, professor Clay Dalton (Jason Long - the Mac Guy). Her life is all good until a witch-like gypsy named Mrs. Ganush arrives at her bank to beg for an extension on her home loan. Christine denies the extention and in retaliation, the old woman places the powerful curse on Christine. Christine begins to be haunted by an evil spirit and because she is misunderstood by her skeptical boyfriend, she seeks the aid of a psychic to help her. In order for Christine return her life to normal from the hell it is becoming, the psychic advises her on ways to reverse the spell.

Everything about Drag Me To Hell slightly misses the mark. Everything is just almost. Its like its is just watered down or filtered. The movie is PG-13 which automatically makes all horror movies not scary. There should be a law against making PG-13 horror movies because they are very rarely any good. Drag Me To Hell is a victim of this as well.

You are supposed to feel for Christine, you are supposed to want her to defeat this curse. Yes, she made a tragic error in letting her ambitions get in the way of helping this old woman, but she made a mistake. We all make mistakes right? And while she doesn't deserve what she gets, we just don't really ever feel too strongly for Christine. Maybe it was Lohman's blah performance, maybe she was not meek looking enough to feel for, maybe it was just a badly written part. Whatever it was, you don't feel an attachment to her.

Don't get me wrong, there were a couple of times where I jumped, and there were a couple of pretty scary parts, but not enough for me to say this is a scary movie. This movie is written and directed by Sam Riami. He's the guy behind the Evil Dead movies which were kind of silly, outrageous "scary" movies that didn't take themselves very seriously. I think with this movie, the filmmaker was a little confused on whether he wanted to make this a serious scary movie or a silly scary movie. There are a couple of gory scenes but they are so outrageously gross that they are kind of humorous. There's a nose bleed scene where blood just starts spraying all over the place, and a scene involving a corpse where goo just pours out of its mouth. There's also a scene involving a talking goat. I mean come on! I'm no filmmaker but I don't really know how you can make a talking goat scary. Even with all this, the movie does make you think that something pretty cool is about to happen. There is even an attempt at a twist in the movie, but if you even paid sort of attention, the "set up" of the twist is so obvious earlier in the film that you spot what is supposed to be the twist very early and basically figure out exactly how the movie will end.

I had kind of high expectations for this movie because while the trailer didn't really impress me, I read some reviews of some critics calling it one of the scariest movies they'd ever seen. Either these guys were paid to write that, or they are total wimps when it comes to scary movies. I mean, Dark Knight might have been "scarier" than this movie. I wouldn't really recommend this movie to anyone. It will leave horror fans disappointed. Justin Long, who I think is pretty funny, is not. And its got just enough scares and gore to make those scaredy cats out there uncomfortable. Skip this one at the local Blockbuster.