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“We think you’re the most special people in the entire world…so don’t even think about taking out your cellphone, because I’ve been working out, and I will fucking rack your brains into the back of your head. I’m gonna anally rape you. I’m not even joking.”

That was the inimitable Tim League, founder of the beery palace of world cinema nerdery in central Texas, the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, introducing the SXSW/Fantastic Fest presentation of three segments from Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming follow-up to his surprisingly beloved Borat. It was an apt threat to procede a glimpse of a film that critiques the very American habits of posturing, stereotyping, and irrationally vilifying, but only via engaging in them. That’s Cohen’s schtick, of course: he sells ugly Americans their ugliness back to them, provoking shame and anger from his unsuspecting subjects and, from well-educated audiences of better-thans, horror that easily, almost unthinkingly, manifests itself in laughs.

But the 20-something minutes we were shown of the film (which is currently listed on IMDB without a credited director) indicate that Cohen has hardly been up to business as usual since Borat. That film, in turning its namesake Kazakhstanian “reporter” into a household name, made enough of Cohen’s potential marks wise enough to the star/social satirist’s working methods (and his litany of faux-foreign naifs that front them) to spark debate throughout the production as to how Cohen would, er, keep it real. The footage we saw suggests that “realness” wasn’t necessarily as strict a part of the agenda this time around.

We viewed three scenes, all preceded by a taped introduction starring Cohen as some version of himself, sitting at an editing bay and playing up his Britishness: a photoshoot casting session where Bruno interviews the parents of baby actors, all of whom seem willing to agree to subject their children to anything (up to and including dead or dying animals, condemned structures and amateur science) if it’ll get their kid a job; a segment of a talk show hosted by Richard Bey, in which Bruno trots out his adopted black baby (who wears a half-shirt with the label, ’Gayby”) and declares his intention to find a husband; and an episode of an ultimate fighting show hosted by Bruno in disguise as his allegedly hetero alter ego Straight Dave, which devolves into a beer-throwing riot when a fight awaken’s Bruno/Dave’s latent homoerotics.

Of these scenes, only the casting session felt like familiar, Borat-esque, “we’re making a documentary wink wink” shenanigans. The others seemed to employ a mix of scripting, staging and serendipity to approximate the earlier film’s total anarchy. My instinct watching the talk show scene was that it was entirely scripted; my research indicates that cut rate Jerry Springer clone Richard Bey hasn’t had a TV show since the late 90s. The ultimate fighting scene seemed similarly contrived, the hysteric encounter between the too-gay-to-be-contained Bruno and a crew of good ol’ homophobes similarly lifeless.  This stuff definitely delivers laughs, but in their current incarnation the segments lack that spark that made Borat so exciting, that element of danger.

We were warned that two of the segments, the casting and the Richard Bey show, were being shown in a much longer form than would appear in the film. While it’s not completely clear is how it all fits together narratively, there does seem to be a theme to the settings, one which ties into the necessarily evolution of Cohen’s methods. From casting to trashy talk shows to filmed athletainment, Bruno is traveling through situations that have a certain artificiality built-in. Stage parents are desperate to sell their children into a fantasy; the Richard Beys of the world preceded reality TV producers in manipulating pathetic lives until they looked like entertainment; wrestling and its variants always include an element of theater. If Cohen had to amp up the element of staging in order to get his job done in a post-Borat world, it’s interesting that he seems to be doing it within realms that rely on the construction of reality. What remains to be seen is whether or not that construction will make for the unrestrained comedy that we’ve come to expect from him.

Under discussion:

Drag Me to Hell  (2009)

There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and end credits, but generally looking ready to judge) showed the final product will give you what you want. There will be cartoonish gore and gleeful bad taste; yes, there will be Evil Dead shout-outs. Alison Lohman shall suffer the punishment of beautiful blonde women everywhere: she will atone for her selfishness, and she will do it in a wet t-shirt.

The screening began 40 minutes late with, fittingly, an introduction from Harry Knowles himself. “I don’t know if the thought has gelled in your mind that we’re about to see the new Sam Raimi horror film,” he enthused, and the crowd whooped. Knowles indulged the old pep rally trick of not hearing the crowd and demanding louder cheers; eventually, the enthusiasm petered out, and when Knowles said once more that we would be seeing the NEW SAM RAIMI HORROR FILM, a lone voice retorted “We will.”

Raimi emerged to a standing ovation, did a schticky comic routine of reading the wrong speeches, then brought out brother/co-writer Ivan and producer Grant Curtis, and then it kicked off — to another outstanding round of applause, as Raimi’s got the old-school ’70s Universal horror logo. It’s a cool gesture, but unlike Superbad and Zodiac’s similar resuscitations, it’s no real indication of what the film will actually be like. There’s nothing particularly old-school about it, unless you think Evil Dead is when movies started: still, the logo’s tenuously justified by the inevitable prologue in 1969 Pasadena, with a little boy who’s been hearing voices after stealing a gypsy’s necklace. The title is gleefully literalized; cue bravura title card, and the sound of a capacity theater losing its shit.

Drag Me To Hell is more than a little lazy about the exposition no one will remember because it won’t make a good YouTube clip. Christine (Lohman) is bucking for promotion at her local bank, but she’s competing with slimy newcomer Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee), so when she needs to deny an old lady a loan to prove she can make “tough decisions,” she turns her down. Big mistake: Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) is waiting in the parking lot, in her alarmingly c.-1973 car, and she’s got her talons sharpened. And sharp implements. And a big fucking brick to throw through the window. In a zippy 15 minutes, Raimi delivers his first major setpiece: a ridiculously brutal face-off, complete with all manner of unexpected fluids and impalements. But Ganush casts her gypsy curse, and then it’s all over for poor Christine, who will be tormented by a camera zooming in onto her face every five minutes and sloooooooooowly tilting diagonal before she’s attacked by sudden loud noises and Satanic flash frames. (Raimi takes great pleasure in scrupulously obeying horror-movie cliches — “conventions,” depending on your POV — then destroying them in a finale as unsurprising in its subversion as it’s supposed to be satisfying.)

Drag Me played like a screening of Evil Dead II for those who already have it memorized; what I personally think seems way less relevant than reporting that people seemed pleased. I found the opening stretches mostly unconvincing: the non-genre scenes are pretty sad, the inter-office rivalries of Christine’s office job too thinly sketched to be as funny as apparently intended, and many of the big scares are of the joy-buzzer variety. As Christine’s boyfriend Clay, Justin Long sucks the air out of pretty much every scene he’s in; presumably hired to add a blatantly comic cue, he’s way too slacked-out to contribute. Lohman, as always, is gorgeous but uncharacteristically generic. Raimi enjoys his goofy comic set-pieces, but a nervous meeting with Clay’s parents is mostly an exercise in oversold comic cliches about class snobbery, which would be fine but the jokes aren’t very funny; the French waiter sequence in Spider-Man 3 was more fun (no, really). But it picks up momentum and inventiveness as it goes along, most notably in an admirably deranged exorcism sequence.

Drag seems a little too easy — its theoretically nervy finale seems like pretty much the only possible endgame given the target audience — but, like a competent band churning out a decent single for an album’s worth of pleasurably nostalgic filler, Raimi gives the fans what they want. Most of the scares are both exactly when you think they are yet surprisingly freaky; Raimi’s got the knack of honing in on Lohman’s face for an excruciating amount of time before letting things kick off, and he times everything to excruciating length. (He also knows how to stage a hectic climax without having it degenerate into unblinking screaming noise, which is nice.) I don’t really know why he thinks it’s so much fun to have characters spout deliberately worn-out lines like “I don’t know what I believe anymore” or what his obsession with goopy fluids is about, but it seems to resonate with the people who’ve been waiting for it longest. That’s good enough, at least for this kind of festival screening. Is this really a Raimi comeback? I don’t think so, but it’s got more than enough to resonate with the converted, if not with newcomers.