Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

Hope this works. Going to try to use Posterous to get quick reviews of stuff online. Here goes.
 
Saw Drag Me To Hell last night. I went from flat out uninterested to quite excited over the space of a couple of weeks, after hearing positive reviews from people.
 
My take: it’s a lot of fun, and it feels like an old school Sam Raimi movie. Which will either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your view of Raimi.
 
It’s got classic Raimi camera work, floaty Evil Dead demons, lots of banging and clattering as spirits try to come through, juvenile use of explicit grime and snot, and feels like a reasonable companion to The Evil Dead. I honestly expected a Bruce Campbell cameo to complete the link.
 
There are some good jumpy moments, even if most are the extremely cheap “go very quiet then make loud noise” kind, and a good creepy atmosphere despite the occasional laugh out loud moments. Oh and at times it’s pretty gross.
 
It’s not perfect: you can see the end coming a mile off (although I suspect you’re supposed to be chuckling along for the last 15 minutes knowing what’s coming), sometimes the Evil Dead thing is a little too blatant, and there’s some extremely ropey cgi. Also I’m not the biggest fan of Alison Lohman (I’d really have liked to see Juno’s Ellen Page in this as originally planned) but she does ok. In true Raimi tradition she takes a awful lot of stick an ends up covered in a multitude of nasty looking substances.
 
So set your expectations to “gross out, creepy, funny, slighly unoriginal, but lots of fun” and go and see it, I’d say.

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