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Movies & TV

Drag Me To Hell

DRAG ME TO HELL (Universal, 2009) D: Sam Raimi, w/ Alison Lohman, Lorna Raver. Rating: NNNN DVD package: NNN Rating: NNNN


You won’t find a better Halloween renter. It’s a classic mix of screams, gross-outs and laughs, often all at once. That’s Sam Raimi’s trademark from his Evil Dead movies, and it’s still fresh.

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A loan officer (Alison Lohman) gets cursed by an old woman and has three days before a demon drags her to hell. This leads to lots of set pieces involving aggressive wind, shadows and the crone herself. The scare elements are simple and repetitive, but Raimi has the imagination to find new things to use, the timing to bring them to life and a drive to excess that recalls The Evil Dead.

Lohman is an adequate screamer and perfectly cast as a featherweight sweetie to whom these bad things should not be happening. But she’s no Bruce Campbell, and Drag Me To Hell lacks the overall dementia that made the Evil Deads enduring classics.

Justin Long, who has the thankless role of Lohman’s boyfriend, gets to be funny in a good half-hour making-of doc that covers, among other things, big effects scenes, the relation of setting to performance and the goat.

According to my DVD player’s counter, the theatrical cut and the unrated director’s cut touted on the cover differ by seven seconds. Maybe I need a new player. Maybe not.

EXTRAS Theatrical and unrated versions, making-of doc. Widescreen.

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