Retrospective: Drag Me to Hell

Distinguishing between how well a movie works and whether or not I enjoyed it usually isn't a problem for me. I can think of many movies I respect on a technical level that I hated watching. What's more difficult is figuring out if a movie that personally upset me a great deal is successful or not. Such was the case with Drag Me to Hell, which put me in a weird position. I'd never seen a Sam Raimi movie that I hadn't enjoyed. To this date I'll defend major chunks of Spider-Man 3. But Drag Me to Hell defeated me — rare among the 1400 or so movies I've seen in 27 years. Have to applaud Sam Raimi for that, I suppose.

Drag Me to Hell is hardly a bad film. It successfully tells its funny/scary story of a girl from the Heartland who sells her soul to get ahead in capitalism. It's about as poignant as a slapstick horror flick that premiered during the 2008 financial crash can be. Yet I was left cold by it — maybe because of the racist stereotypes about Roma people and Indians. Maybe because it feels like Raimi treading ground he largely covered 20 years earlier — evil texts and angry sentient household objects abound in Drag Me to Hell. Even the ending, funny as it is, left me just a bit cold.

Maybe this is because I've been so traumatized by the doctrine of Eternal Conscious Torment that anything that takes it as read that people will be damned forever can't reach me. Or maybe the animal cruelty upset me to a degree that took me out of the movie a bit, even though I'd been bracing myself for Christine Brown stabbing her kitty cat to death. I could be too triggered to see the movie's virtues. That's probably my fault. But I'm just bummed out that a Sam Raimi movie both upset and underwhelmed me. I hope Send Help is good. The director of Evil Dead II, Spider-Man 2, and Darkman has gotta have another good movie in him. After two decades in IP-Land with a brief back-to-basics interlude in Drag Me to Hell, we need a new Sam Raimi banger.