Popcorn and Death by Fire

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

For more than half of the past decade, director Sam Raimi has had a very, very big problem. Its name was the Spider-Man franchise, and ever since its box office shattering release in 2003, it has played the dual role of making Raimi wealthy beyond imagination and devouring his soul.

For a while we didn’t recognize this new Sam, a man we thought we knew and loved, a man who brought us such immortal images as cinema’s only human-on-tree sex scene (The Evil Dead), and Bruce Campbell being chased around a cabin by his own severed hand (Evil Dead 2). Could this possibly be the same man who cast That 70s Show’s Topher Grace as Spidey’s menacing arch-nemesis, Venom? Who gave Peter Parker a song and dance number? Really? It hurts to say it, but yes, this is the same man, warped and twisted though he may have become. But I have good news: the Sam Raimi we once knew is back.

Drag Me to Hell is proof that Raimi can still have fun making movies. It is a scary, funny, exuberantly made slice of supernatural mayhem, never dull, always fun to watch. After a questionable prologue involving a possessed boy wearing a poncho, Raimi kicks things into fifth gear with a seemingly endless barrage of screams and laughs, a balance he pulls of with a skill-level unseen since his Army of Darkness days. The highly likable Alison Lohman plays an ambitious loans specialist at a Los Angeles bank who incurs the wrath of an old, one-eyed Gypsy woman when she refuses to grant her a loan extension. Like any of us would have done, the woman physically attacks Lohman, steals a button from her coat, and places a demon hex on her that results in daily physical and psychological torment. Seized by a sudden urge to not die a horrible violent death, Lohman sets out to break the curse, much to the chagrin of her disbelieving college professor boyfriend (a very funny Justing Long), and employs the aid of a fortune teller and a skilled medium to do so. Will she be successful in breaking the curse, or will she meet her maker and get dragged to hell? Both questions are answered in this film.

Despite its high entertainment value and skillful pacing and execution, the film is not without its flaws. Some of the CG-effects are far from convincing, and the final plot twist is a bit predictable if you’ve been paying close attention (you will be sitting there for a solid fifteen minutes just waiting for it to happen). However, it is unlikely that this will dampen your enjoyment of the film overall. The jump-out scares are as effective as any I’ve encountered (I’ve never been so frightened of a handkerchief in my life), the pace never drags, the casting is solid beyond expectation (Justin Long is actually perfect for his role), and the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan is kept afloat by some good laughs (the dinner scene with Long’s parents is a lot of fun, and the Gypsy woman is hilariously gross as she plops her slobbery dentures on Lohman’s desk while hacking up enough phlegm to fill a soda can). Though much less insanely inventive than the Evil Dead films, Drag Me to Hell still contains flashes of the spark that made us love Sam Raimi when he was a rookie. For that alone, it is definitely worth seeing.

But perhaps what stands out most about the film is its deviation from the terror-torture-sadism horror trend that we have become used to in recent years. Not that we don’t all love a little terror, torture, and sadism in our movies once in a while, just not all the time. Drag Me to Hell is a reminder that horror films can be scary, funny, and utterly ridiculous at the same time, all without being completely stupid. Fans of rare scary-funny gems like Shaun of the Dead or people just looking for a fun night at the movies, check this one out. It won’t disappoint.

AND...

The Wicker Man (1973)

Have you ever seen a grassy field full of people having public sex outside of a pub? Or a young Scottish woman trying to seduce a virgin police inspector through a combination of singing and nude dance? What about a mother curing her daughter’s sore throat by sticking a live toad in the girl’s mouth? Unless you have seen 1973’s occult mystery The Wicker Man, the answer to all of the above is probably no. And if this is the case, you are missing out on quite a unique and memorable film experience.

Starring Christopher Lee and the unfortunately named Edward Woodward as the policeman, Wicker Man is quite unlike any film you will ever see. I review it in conjunction with Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell because both are concerned, to varying degrees, with the occult, paganism, and the bad things that supposedly happen when pagans meet people from mainstream society. In all of the above cases, entertaining results are inevitable, and Wicker Man is no exception.

Though barely seen upon its initial release, and having survived near destruction not long after, the original negative of the film was retrieved by a group of young distributors and given a proper release in the U.S. Audiences loved it, and since then the film has achieved cult status and been recently remade, with Nicholas Cage in the lead role. I have not seen the remake, and am unlikely to do so any time soon. For me, it’s “give me Edward Woodward or give me death.” Semi-fun fact: word has it that many of the actors and crew members loved the story so much that they worked on it for almost nothing, including Christopher Lee, a big star of the Hammer horror genre at the time, and writer Anthony Schaffer, responsible for Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).

The film begins with Woodward making his way from the mainland to the secluded Scottish island of Summerisle, where he begins probing the disappearance of a young girl whom many of the townspeople insist never existed in the first place. Of course, not everything is as it seems, and before you can say “maypole dance,” Woodward is up to his neck in intrigue, deceit, pagan rituals, and more nudity. To give away any more of the plot would be criminal, but suffice it to say the pacing is brisk, the themes are compelling, and the actual Wicker Man himself is one of the more menacing images in cinema history.

But what makes the film particularly special is its interesting approach to the age-old Christianity versus paganism debate. Woodward, the uptight Protestant who has chosen to save “himself” for marriage, is a far cry from the typical civilizing missionary meant to rescue the souls of idol-worshipping savages. His beliefs, though certainly more mainstream than those of Summerisle’s residents, are never taken for granted as being correct, or even normal. They are given the same level of validity, and are thus equally open to criticism and ridicule. At one point, Woodward shouts at Lee in disbelief that the people of the isle are ridiculous for performing fertility dances, meant to achieve conception without intercourse. “Haven’t these people ever heard of Jesus Christ?” he cries, to which Lee responds that Christ himself was the product of the union between a human woman and what technically amounts to a ghost. Woodward, of course, is speechless. And until the film’s climax, when the natives get particularly nasty, the message seems to be that religious validity is completely relative.

The fact that a movie often classified as “horror” can open up this kind of conversation is a testament to writer Anthony Schaffer’s uniqueness of vision. Rarely has the occult been treated so thoughtfully and even-handedly in a film, especially without causing it to lose its brisk pace or entertainment value. Overall, despite some oddly placed Broadway-style song numbers (don't ask), The Wicker Man is close to par with such acknowledged genre classics as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). If you're up for a not-so-standard mystery full of twists, bizarre imagery, and a healthy sense of the absurd, Wicker is your man.