Review: Drag Me to Hell Is Slimy, Slapstick Horror Fun!

Director Sam Raimi returns to Evil Dead-style over-the-top scares

Review in a Hurry: While you wait patiently for Sam Raimi to make Evil Dead 4, he gives you the next best thing: Alison Lohman taking a Bruce Campbell-style beatdown all movie long at the hands of an ugly old woman and some invisible demons. The story's a bit thin, but the over-the-top shocks are hysterical fun in every sense of the word.

The Bigger Picture: Opening with a retro Universal logo from the early '80s, Drag Me to Hell telegraphs early on that this is a bit of a throwback—the Spider-Man director's finally getting back to the scared-silly stuff that made him famous in that decade.

Almost immediately, a nerve-jangling, scratchy violin score (from genre veteran Christopher Young) kicks in, and the thrill ride begins as a little boy gets sucked into the underworld. This despite the best efforts of a helpful psychic, who can somehow afford to live in a mansion even though she's apparently quite useless at her chosen profession.

A couple of decades later, we focus on Christine (Lohman), a cute blonde who might just be in line for a promotion at the bank where she works...if she could only learn to make tough decisions. Alas, she decides to get tough for the first time with a nasty—and very unhygienic—gypsy woman, who can not only whup ass like Moe from the Three Stooges, but can also summon a dark curse that more or less goes like this: A shadow-demon will pull nasty pranks on Christine for three days, then, you guessed it, drag her to hell.

You know how in substandard horror movies, there are always cheap scares from loud stings on the soundtrack, or a cat jumping out, or someone suddenly standing behind someone else? Raimi pulls out one of those approximately every 30 seconds here, except he also jacks the volume up on them way beyond the level your average director would feel comfortable with.

Yes, it's a PG-13 movie, but the rating is meaningless—though the only blood comes from the most over-the-top, gushing nosebleed you've ever seen. Raimi layers on the muck, slime, mucus and icky bugs to a degree where you won't know whether to laugh or puke. Don't take the kids unless they're past the point of being prone to nightmares.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Though the style is awesome, the substance is occasionally weak: The plot's basically just a rip-off of Stephen King's Thinner, and Justin Long's tepid love-interest character has zero chemistry with Lohman.