Poll Position: Drag Me To Hell (2009)

I was starting to worry that only the new additions to the poll would win, but after a few weeks of being bested, Drag Me To Hell finally got its moment in the spotlight. You'll notice that its place on the poll has been filled by new combatant House from 1986. The title is pretty vague, but it's about a haunted house filled with monsters, or so I believe.

Drag Me To Hell is written and directed by Sam Raimi, the same guy behind the great Evil Dead movies, as well as the Spider-Man series. With such a hit and miss career (lets face it, Spider-Man 3 was garbage), I wasn't sure what I was going to be in for, but I was pretty sure it was going to be pretty crazy. Hit the jump to find out how crazy.


Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a normal girl, working at a bank as a loan officer. All she wants is to get the promotion to Assistant Bank Manager. As a last ditch effort to push herself forward, and stand out just that little bit more, she refuses giving a 3rd mortgage loan extension to a (creepy) little old lady. Sure, it's a mean thing to do, but it'll make the bank a lot of money. In the process, she ends up humiliating the woman, who then attacks her and curses her. She seeks the help of a fortune teller (Dileep Rao), who then sees the demon when he touches her. He decides to try and help her rid herself of the curse before it matures in 3 days and her soul is dragged into Hell and devoured.

Lorna Raver plays the old woman who curses Christine

Almost right away, I knew I was in for something crazy and awesome. There is a small intro sequence that shows what happens when you don't get rid of the curse in time, and the ground erupts and cracks open and huge demonic hands come out of the fiery depths and pull the person, in this case it's a boy, into what can only be Hell. The effects were great and it instantly gave me a great impression of what I was going to be seeing. The movie certainly didn't disappoint, as every time the demon attacks Christine, something wild, gross, or bloody always happened. It also always seemed to be able to top itself from the previous event, really making me believe it was growing ever closer, and getting stronger in the process.

I can see that this movie won't be for everybody though. A lot of the crazy attacks have a subtle comedic twist to them. For example, when being attacked in her car, her attacker ducks down below the window of her door where she can't see them. Wisely not wanting to open the door or window to see where they went, she has no other choice than to press her face up against the glass in a desperate attempt to see where they are. As if that wasn't enough silliness, she then moves her head around trying to see, and her skin makes that funny rubbing noise on the glass.

Christine takes part in a seance to rid herself of the curse

While some people might feel this takes away from the tension of the film, I found it created calm moments in the middle of the freaky scenes, which allowed for yet more jumps when the action picked back up, seconds later. In other instances, this sense of humour manifested itself in crazy, almost cartoon-like moments, like an out of control nosebleed, or some eyes popping out of a ghost, or a particular incident with a goat. While I can admit that these moments weren't "scary," I still liked them in their own goofy, charming way. Also, because of the cartoony way the effects are played, even though the graphics weren't the best, they became acceptable, and fit really well.

The settings were always really good and very detailed

The last thing I want to mention will be the acting. For the most part, it wasn't the best, and I found it actually pretty inconsistent. Alison Lohman did alright for the most part, but there were a few moments I remember rolling my eyes at some terrible line delivery. Also, I pretty much hated Justin Long, who plays her rich boyfriend. This movie would have been so much better with someone who can actually act. I mean, he seriously ruined every scene he was in! Probably the best performance (which isn't saying much, but this guy was actually good) would be by Dileep Rao, who was also in Avatar and Inception. I really liked him, and I wish he had a larger role, but he at least was there to help make the seance scene pretty good.

In the end, I have to admit that despite some poor acting, I quite enjoyed the movie. It was fun and silly and even thought it's not officially listed as a comedy, there is enough funny here that I think everyone would agree that it is. I think I would recommend this to my friends, but it's so close on the line of silliness that I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't like it. It's pretty hard to ignore how much Justin Long sucks, and I wouldn't be surprised if he utterly ruined the whole movie for some people. Thankfully I banished him from my mind whenever he was absent, and I was able to enjoy the wacky horror for what it was. I think Sam Raimi should stick to horror movies in the future, and leave my favorite superheroes alone.