Who Deserves Hell?

A young woman kicks an old lady out of her home and earns a curse for it in 2009's Drag Me to Hell. This is the horror movie Sam Raimi made with the cache he'd acquired from making Spider-Man movies and it's surprisingly similar to this year's Send Help, the movie he made with the cache he'd gotten from making Doctor Strange 2. I liked Send Help but I think Drag Me to Hell is stronger, particularly considering how relevant the plot is at the moment when it seems I'm constantly seeing headlines about some elderly person being kicked out of the home they'd lived in for fifty years due to the unprecedentedly cold and cutthroat practices of landlords.

The great thing, though, is that Christine (Alison Lohman) is not a cutthroat. She works at a bank where she's in charge of loans. She's angling for a promotion to assistent manager, much like the character in Send Help, but Christine's a much more mild mannered character. She's told that to get the big job she's going to have to show she can make the tough decisions. After a guy who's barely worked at the bank a few days shows he's clearly the top candidate for the job, Christine holds her nose and denies a loan to the old lady. Unfortunately for her, this old lady can call down the wrath of a lamia and Christine finds herself tormented by ghosts and demons.

This movie is very reminiscent of the first two Evil Dead movies. Raimi even indulges in similar POV shots of the demoniac entity as it rushes in on Christine's location. And, like in Raimi's classic Evil Dead films, although rules are established for the ghosts and demons, there's the sense that they can break those rules whenever they feel like it.

I really liked this movie because, like Obsession this year, it feels like one that would spark debate after people leave the theatre, like the issues of guilt and responsibility would stay in the mind of the viewer long after the credits roll. It's also a lot of grim fun.