- Tragedy seems to follow nine-year-old Esther. She was orphaned in her native Russia. Her last adoptive family perished in a fire Esther barely escaped. But now the Coleman family has adopted her, and life is good. Until amate takes a serious fall from a slide. Until an orphanage nun is battered to death. And until Esther s new mom wonders if that tragic fire was an accident. From Dark Castle Produ
Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is on her way to having it all: a devoted boyfriend (Justin Long), a hard-earned job promotion, and a bright future. But when she’s forced to make a tough decision that evicts an elderly woman from her house, Christine becomes the victim of an evil curse. Now she has only three days to dissuade a dark spirit from stealing her soul before she is dragged to hell for an eternity of unthinkable torment. Director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man and The Evil Dead Trilogy) returns t! o the horror genre with a vengeance in the film that critics rave is “the most crazy, fun and terrifying horror movie in years!†(Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly)Touted as a return to Sam Raimi's horror-movie roots,
Drag Me to Hell is indeed closer in spirit to the director's
Evil Dead pictures than to his
Spider-Man films. You got your gypsy gargoyles with rotted dentures, your upchucking corpses, your flexible two-way orifices--yes, Raimi's definitely back in the saddle. There's even a story: a sad loan officer (Alison Lohman) turns down the aforementioned denture-wearing gypsy for a loan extension, which leads to an evil curse and a date in hell in three days' time. A séance, an animal sacrifice, and a session in a storm-tossed graveyard will make the 72 hours pass very nervously, thank you, along with assorted scares. Justin Long plays Lohman's upper-class boyfriend, and Raimi fills the rest of the cast with some unusual and unfamil! iar types. Along with the giddy horror-comedy that bursts out ! of the m ovie every 10 minutes or so, there's also an underlying mood of pity: Lohman's character is something of a hard-luck sad sack, who does enough wrong things to make her seem like a truly abject individual, well outside the heroic model of most multiplex offerings. (Lohman's own little-girl-lost quality adds to this feeling.) But don't let that get in the way of the fun-ride aspects of this goofy enterprise:
Drag Me to Hell is a bunch of Z-movie gags wrapped in top-drawer production values.
--Robert Horton
Stills from Drag Me to Hell (Click for larger image) Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is on her way to having it all: a devoted boyfriend (Justin Long), a hard-earned job promotion, and a bright future. But when she’s forced to make a tough decision that evicts an elderly woman from her house, Christine becomes the victim of an evil curse. Now she has only three days to dissuade a dark spirit from stealing her soul before she is dragged to hell for an eternity of unthinkable torment. Director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man and The Evil Dead Trilogy) returns to the horror genre with a vengeance in the film that critics rave is “the most crazy, fun and terrifying horror movie in years!†(Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly)Touted as a return to Sam Raimi's horror-movie roots,
Drag Me to Hell is indeed closer in spirit to the director's
Evil Dead pictures than to his
Spider-Man films. You got y! our gypsy gargoyles with rotted dentures, your upchucking corp! ses, you r flexible two-way orifices--yes, Raimi's definitely back in the saddle. There's even a story: a sad loan officer (Alison Lohman) turns down the aforementioned denture-wearing gypsy for a loan extension, which leads to an evil curse and a date in hell in three days' time. A séance, an animal sacrifice, and a session in a storm-tossed graveyard will make the 72 hours pass very nervously, thank you, along with assorted scares. Justin Long plays Lohman's upper-class boyfriend, and Raimi fills the rest of the cast with some unusual and unfamiliar types. Along with the giddy horror-comedy that bursts out of the movie every 10 minutes or so, there's also an underlying mood of pity: Lohman's character is something of a hard-luck sad sack, who does enough wrong things to make her seem like a truly abject individual, well outside the heroic model of most multiplex offerings. (Lohman's own little-girl-lost quality adds to this feeling.) But don't let that get in the way of the fun-ri! de aspects of this goofy enterprise:
Drag Me to Hell is a bunch of Z-movie gags wrapped in top-drawer production values.
--Robert Horton
Stills from Drag Me to Hell (Click for larger image) Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 10/27/2009 Run time: 122 minutes Rating: RA bad seed with a Russian accent, 9-year-old Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is a nasty little girl with a nasty little plan. Unfortunately, this malevolent tyke has landed in the home of! adoptive parents Kate and John (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsga! ard), an unsuspecting couple with two kids of their own and considerable grief over recent family tragedies. It doesn't take long for Esther to make her creepy presence known, as broken limbs on the playground and torched tree houses can attest. Give this movie some credit--the psychological underpinnings are all set carefully in place: Maternal trauma? Check. Backyard pond as emotionally charged danger zone? Check. Feminist parable about husbands not listening to troubled wives? Check. The casting of reputable actors such as Farmiga and Sarsgaard also ups the movie's class quotient; Farmiga in particular has an emotional workout, and this gifted actress strikes few false notes even as the scenario becomes increasingly lurid. (There's some déjà vu here: Farmiga also played a mother realizing her kid was "not right" in
Joshua, a much superior film.) Director Jaume Collet-Serra, of
House of Wax notoriety, knows full well the unsettling weirdness of seeing a child commi! t murderous mayhem, and he presses all the buttons with something like unholy joy. The movie begins to drive off the rails even before a clumsy twist hits the fan near the end, and at that point, the mechanical exercise becomes downright silly.
The Omen's Damien has nothing to worry about.
--Robert Horton
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