Drag Me to Hell

As I'm sure you've figured out if you've read two or three of my reviews, I rely heavily on Rotten Tomatoes to help me decide what movies to go see. Also, if you know anything about my taste in movies, I generally can't stand horror movies. The last good horror flick I saw was The Decent back in 2005, and before that who knows when. So with Drag Me to Hell, I wanted to see it for its 95% (at the time, now 93%) Tomatometer rating, but I was weary of the horror aspect. I had never seen the Evil Dead movies in their entirety, and am definitely not a fan of Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies. My love for going to the movies in general pushed me over the edge and I ended up seeing this late in the weekend with some friends.

The plot is appropriately simple: a girl is cursed by a pissed off gypsy and has three days to break it. Raimi threw in the home foreclosure element to be current, but it really could have been anything.

As expected this movie is a lot of fun and very tongue-in-cheek. The effects are under-elaborate, but Raimi manages to pull off some genuinely creepy moments using shadows, wind and normal creaky house noises. This movie was also very repetitive. Each day, the girl would be fine, then get paranoid, and then attacked by a demon. The fun of it was seeing to what lengths this girl would go to save her own skin. This film is rated PG-13, and it really pushes it to the limit, not with gore, but just some really gross stuff. Usually that stuff is what got the most laughs, and it added to the personality of the film.

In no way is this film for everyone, but it is well done for what it is. I had a lot of fun with it, and recommend it to any horror fan or general movie buff.