Drag Me To Hell review

Drag Me To Hell is the new horror movie from the director Sam Raimi. It's a story of young Christine who works at the bank. Anxious to prove to her boss that she could handle the position of the assistant manager, she makes a "tough decision" and refuses an old lady an extension on her mortgage. Unfortunately the old lady is a gypsy and feels that Christine has publicly shamed her, so she places a curse on our blonde friend, and we watch Christine get increasingly desperate as her predicament becomes worse, and as she realises what it is all leading to (the clue's in the title).

I loved how the film felt like: sort of not serious, tongue-in-cheek, done professionally but cheaply. And it really has everything you could imagine: gypsy curses, animal sacrifices, disturbings of graves, seances, possessions (one including a goat), cat-fights (couple times with a corpse). Several giggles were elicited, and as the story takes its twists and turns and becomes more and more absurd and surreal, you get a delightful mix of laughs and scares - and of course, the gross-outs :)

It seems that the genre of horror these days has been charged with the difficult task of finding really creative ways to gross us out. Depending on your preferences, the film can inspire a life-long fear of any of the following: old ladies, buttons, flies, Hell, harvest cake, mortgages, handkerchiefs...

In short: hurrah for things that don't take themselves too seriously.


As a movie-going experience, it was brilliant. It was showing at the bestest cinema round here, the Electric Cinema in Birmingham, which is the oldest operating cinema in the UK. We went to the last showing of the evening at 9pm, and there weren't that many people there (being antisocial, I like that). The company I went with was good too, with much post-movie chat in the car and a drive-through dinner on the way home. And when I got home, there was a fly in my bedroom... I'm always like that with horror movies: in the cinema itself I'm not so scared (I admit to being jumpy in the cinema too, but only out of surprise :P) but for weeks afterwards my imagination runs wild, and little things that remind me of something in the film properly frighten me.
/ [iippo]

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