Predictability is wearing thin. In Sam Raimi’s newest offering, Alison Lohman tackles the role of Christine Brown, an up-and-coming loan officer rising through the ranks on her competitive odyssey to land a spot next to the big fish at a municipal bank branch. Sadly, her quest is inconveniently interrupted by an aged gypsy and the standard arsenal of curses and diabolical minions that the Travelling Folk typically have at their disposal. In an effort to outmaneuver budding opportunist Stu (Reggie Lee), also with the munchies for the coveted position of Assistant Manager, the usually saintly Christine chooses career over caritas and rejects the lovely Mrs. Ganush (the aptly named Lorna Raver) a third loan extension in order to appease her boss (David Paymer), himself the epitome of corporal blindness and disinterest in the plight of the common people. Having managed to accidentally shame the pleading woman, the rising bank star suffers the unfortunate circumstance of being bestowed with an age-old curse whose basic elements include her, an anthropomorphic goat-and-demon combination and the flaming pits of Hell.
Drag Me to Hell is humorous. It is, in fact, full of humor. Unintentional, but existent. How this is considered to be a return to form both in the context of the director and the horror genre is beyond me, but with the exception of a smattering of redeeming features, the clichés jump out at the viewer almost as often as the image of the deranged Roma woman, who doesn’t stop cropping up despite – no great revelation here – shuffling out of life halfway through the picture. There’s just so much wrong with the film that not even its unpretentiously simplistic structure just seems to be a product of profound lack of inspiration. Whether it’s laughable lines like “I beat you, you old bitch!”, the digging up of corpses in the graveyard, the accursed-searching-for-forgiveness game, the three-days-to-save-yourself routine, the guilt-ridden blame-the-heroine-for-the-antagonist’s-death theme or the séance-to-drive-the-mean-spirit-away scene (complete with token Mexican mystic, seeing as how Mexicans are so spirited), the ease of foreseeing scenarios has never been so blatantly forced upon the viewer.
This is completed by an incomprehensible cast and character selection. Even the establishing of Christine’s personality is done on a fifth-grade level; “one” does not sympathize with the frustrated 1995 Pork Queen (sic), whose relations with other characters seem as forced as most of the dialogue. There is no chemistry in the film, and despite the genuinely frightening characterization of Lorna Raver as the raving gypsy, things are unfortunately exacerbated by stock characters popping up out of the blue; the stereotypical lower-echelon bearded fortune teller, looking like he lost out to Shaquille O’Neal in Kazaam (Dileep Rao), is the (im)perfect case in point. The motivations and transformation of several secondary characters triggers the what-the-hell effect, Stu suddenly going from hyperprofessional ruthless bank employee to blubbering frightened mess for no particular reason.
All this, topped with a rich layer of predictability and shovelloads of horror recycling, is what drags Drag Me to Hell to the very place it so blatantly asks to be dragged.
