Drag Me to Hell (Theatrical Review)

[Bojangles]

Okay due to totally unforseen circumstances involving a friend of a friend, I actually saw this yesterday, and after taking a bit to think on it, these are my feelings -

It all evened out about average. I enjoyed the story a lot, the fact that you have a tangible problem leading to a realistically handled fantasy problem, watching characters you could easily root for or against was a great strength. The CGI to me was about half-and-half in the way of effectiveness; The fly was perhaps the most realistic piece of computer animation I've seen, "hell" on the other hand looked like it came from a SciFi original picture. There were plenty of scares in the picture; From appearance to appearance the demon was a good mix of physicality and synaesthesia, and the old lady was a beast! That is where the film surprised me, I figured DMTH would be just another "monster is summoned and appears every so often" film, but the scares came throughout the film, in quite original ways. As I said before the characters all come across as sympathetic one way or another, which makes all their various plights very watchable and rather tense.

Now, where the film does not do as well is in the fact that Raimi cannot stop being Raimi. This can be good in places: The fight with the gypsy was sheer "Evil Dead 1", as was the seance encounter... However, stuff like the "bile" scenes, "here kitty kitty", and the homage after the "Bugs Bunny scene" Bo mentioned just came off as laughable, and not in a good way... In this film, the comedy does not mix well with the horror, it serves to cheapen things a lot of the time. Things are not handled realistically at times simply for the sake of a gag or two (Take the "fingernails" scene, the first scare with the handkerchief or a bit of the stuff at the dinner table). Occasionally in addition to silliness the dialogue also veers into cliche, which serves to have some quick "groan" moments (Thankfully, not a lot of these).

All in all "Drag" wasn't the kind of film I call my cup of tea, but with that being said I mostly expected the kind of bad stuff that would be in there, and my expectations for a "horror film" were still drastically exceeded.

At this point I say 6/10

Great review. It was nice to hear your opinion. Actually, I always look forward to seeing your opinions.