The Haute Critique on Spout

Drag Me To Hell was AWESOME.

It was the Three Stooges meeting the Excorcist on a train through Awesometown.

Sam Raimi has proven with Drag Me To Hell that he could direct Evil Dead 4 without it sucking.

Hold on.  Let me start at the beginning.

Earlier in the day, my ladyfriend and I decided to go see Drag Me To Hell.  I had been under the impression that DMtH would be a straight horror movie.  I have a passing familiarity with Sam Raimi’s previous “horror” movies, but not until opening day of DMtH did I see it described as “slapstick horror”, and when I did see this description I started to get excited.  I love… no, *love*… wait, LOVE the Evil Dead movies.  I like horror movies well enough for the most part, but the comedy/action/horror of San Raimi’s older films tickles me deeply.  I was a huge Three Stooges fan as a kid and Raimi manages to recreate that sort of mood mixed with his own gory, mystery goo-splattered flavor packet, and a dash of Dobbsian Discordianism.  Overall, Sam Raimi is one of my favorite directors, I have just now decided.

So, after a quick hufflepuff of the ol’ quiddich pitch, we moseyed up, grabbed our tix from the automated kiosk and made for the gloom of the theater.  What followed was not mind expansion, or sensory satisfaction, but total hilarity.  As things get rolling, It seems like a regular movie, and kind of a cheesy one.  The characters wear their motivations on their sleeves.  It’s like a cartoon really.  The characters don’t have much depth, but they couldn’t be allowed any depth.  Could you enjoy a person’s comedic torture if you had any deep insights into their character?  And they are tortured most exquisitely.  I don’t mean the Eli Roth type of torture porn that has infected the horror genre of late.  I mean old fashioned cartoonish, slapstick violence It’s almost Zennish in it’s purity.

Alison Lohman is the plucky heroine.  Easy to root for at first, but becoming easy to leave to her comeuppance by the end.  Justin Long overcame the stigma of his Mac ads.  Ted Raimi popped up appropriately.

The only bad thing about Drag Me to Hell was that it wasn’t Evil Dead 4.  Deep down in my fanboy heart, I kept hoping that in a particularly dire and hopeless moment a chainsaw would come tearing throught the fabric of reality and that Bruce Campbell’s Ash would step out of the portal, utter a pithy line and start stomping demon-ass.  Alas, Bruce Campbell was not to be had.  What was to be had was a movie with the same spirit.  I enjoyed it completely.

Drag Me to Hell on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127180/

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