Movie : Drag Me to Hell, or: The Devil is in the (glaring) details
Link : Drag Me to Hell, or: The Devil is in the (glaring) details
Drag Me to Hell, or: The Devil is in the (glaring) details
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Directed by Sam Raimi
***SPOILERS***
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead starts with several teenagers road-tripping to a cabin deep in the woods…and from there: a girl is fucked by a tree; Ash (Bruce Campbell) watches his girlfriend become a giggling zombie and she attempts to beat him to death with a fire poker; blood drips from the pipes, light bulbs, and electrical sockets; the evil dead emerge from graves, spew blood onto faces, jam pencils into ankles, and gain superhuman strength as they toss bodies about the room with ease. Gruesome, treacherous, and goofy all at once, The Evil Dead actually looks pretty tame set against Drag Me to Hell. Going over the top is nothing new for Raimi, and he almost seems like one of the few directors that can actually pull it off. Despite the fact that he’s torturing the hell out of his protagonists, it’s almost an endearingtorture, where Raimi seems to be having so much fun that his care for the characters shines through. But since the overtly goofy Evil Dead II, every comically lavish project Raimi has tackled has been missing that one key ingredient, which even over-the-top films need, and it begs the question: where’s the subtlety?
There’s definitely an answer to that question, and it lies somewhere in Raimi’s fucked up brain. He was praised for The Evil Dead, which, to this day, remains his most accomplished and masterful work, displaying discipline behind the camera and through the pen, allowing the horror to engulf his characters, and displaying it in a way that felt loathsome, silly, and unrelentingly honest all at once. But as he made clear with Evil Dead II, he was trading in his Dario Argentro comparisons, since the only person Sam Raimi wants to be compared to is Sam Raimi. And certainly Raimi maintained his crowd-pleasing approach through Army of Darkness, but long gone was the low-budget, intimate affair of monster battling, taking the Argento comparisons along with it, rendering a comical bloody mess that felt less personal and more willing to please the simpleminded. No harm no foul, but certainly Raimi began to willingly repress his filmmaking abilities, substituting a well placed close up (the shifting eyes between Ash and his girlfriend in The Evil Dead) for, well, pretty much everything that happens in Drag Me to Hell.
And hey, that’s cool—being a goofball behind the camera can produce hilariously wretched results. But along with a subtle hand on the camera, Raimi’s connection with his characters has faded. He’s still torturing his main character in Drag Me to Hell, which is his twisted way of relating their troubles. But poignancy has dissolved. While it’s clear Raimi is fully committed to giving Christine (Alison Lohman) a proper torturing before her eventual satanic demise, the material used to shape her into a sympathetic human being is ludicrously utilized—but not in a good way.
It all starts going downhill from the very start, and from there it’s an up-and-down, bumpy, fickle ride. Raimi opens his film with a child being escorted to a medium, who will attempt to exorcise a curse from the boy. After a brief chant and some averting eyes, a dark shadow emerges, slapping the sense out of the lowly humans, and tossing the boy over a balcony, where he is promptly greeted with a fiery hand dragging him into Hell. Other than a brief explanation from Christine’s psychic companion Rham (Dileep Rao), the origin of this monster and its reasoning for torturing its victims remains unknown—strikingly reminiscent of the history of the creatures in The Evil Dead. This plays directly into Raimi’s hand, since the explanation isn’t the ultimate goal, but instead the mystery lying in the characters’ (and our) minds, which develops alongside exactly why they’re being tortured. But even with this wholly fun introduction, we can see the change Raimi has undergone that’s limited him since The Evil Dead. Much like the drastic gaps between subtle and obtuse characterizations to come throughout Drag Me to Hell, Raimi never displays a grasp for important material over filler material, as the boy’s introduction is useless to Christine’s story and proves to be nothing more than Raimi’s chance for fun. Introducing the monster so forcefully eliminates the enigma that balanced The Evil Dead’s absurdity, rendering the sequence a one-note experience that dampens the suspense of Christine’s first encounter with the beast, along with her entire capricious relationship with it.
Christine is introduced with a subtle observation, with her repeating lines from an audiotape to help improve her speech. We’ll come to understand Christine as a cowardly human being, and her recital of these dull lines exemplifies her inability to speak up for herself. It’s a nice detail that’s amplified throughout the film by her detached role as the damsel in distress. Men discuss, debate, and deliberate the finer details of her dilemmas without her consent or response. Clay (Justin Long) and Rham banter about intuition versus intellectualism regarding psychic capabilities, while Christine sits aside awaiting her fate to be told through extraneous methods. It plays into the fact that Christine must ultimately decide her fate, and even when it seems as though she’s taken control of her situation, a mix-up involving her (you guessed it) boyfriend’s mail seals her hopeless departure. Males constantly hand Christine useless advice, but pretend as though they’re handling the situation with superb confidence. Every attempt made by Christine comes at the advice of a man, and even her fiery votes of confidence end in peril. This dynamic is worked into the story at hand, which is nice, but ubiquity of such a male motif makes the subtlety…well, not so subtle.
The trend continues with surrounding characters, who point out bland and blatant observations relevant to dissembling Christine into nothing more than a dependable female. Such observations are spewed out with the same care as the dead Mrs. Ganush’s (Lorna Raver) internal green puss or Christine’s bloody geyser, which marks exactly what Raimi is striving to achieve. He realizes there’s nothing wrongwith having a little fun, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a vision and attempting to achieve it. Subtlety is not in Raimi’s arsenal, and at no point does he abandon such a motive. But Raimi has mistaken absurdity for relevance, where the only feelings absorbed are born of campy gut reactions. The on-the-spot observations of Christine being a “former fatty” and her lack of backbone do serve a purpose. They play into the comical horror pastiches of Raimi’s former work, attaching no more meaning to Christine’s plight than her shallow materialistic mindset, which is most exemplified through Mrs. Ganush’s cursing of her coat button. And as Christine buys a new coat to impress her man in the closing moments, the return of the cursed button brings her materialistic values and her requirement of male approval full circle.
All of it might seem fine and dandy in outline form, but it’s worth noting that Drag Me to Hell’s greatest moment doesn't lie in Raimi’s attempt to relate Christine’s psyche. It comes during a prolonged sequence at a medium’s home, where Christine battles a demon who inhabits a goat and calls Christine a “black hearted whore.” It’s where we find the absurdity and the mystery intervening and forming a beast divisively different than the rest of the film. Pit against the bulk of the film, this proficient sequence renders entirety of Drag Me to Hell a less welcoming experience, and renders itself ultimately inconsequential and strangely out of place. In The Evil Dead, it’s clear Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) is a prude. It’s clear Ash is a wuss. It’s clear he cares for his girlfriend so much that he cannot kill her. And it’s hilariously clear that when she’s stabbing you with a fire poker, you stop fucking caring. And in Drag Me to Hell, it’s very, very, VERY clear that Christine is a yellow-bellied, insecure, dependant female object. The physical Hell-worthy consequences awaiting Christine for such undesirable traits are much more bombastic than her internal struggles and demise, displaying exactlyhow committed Raimi was to his central character.
Final thoughts:
It’s the damndest film. Raimi has a great eye for his surroundings. His scenes move between one another with grace and ease. He’s not afraid to disgust, and he’s not ashamed to be ridiculous. Everything about Drag Me to Hell screams an unabashed vision of horror mixed with ludicrousness. But those scenes that blend together so well…feel lazily connected. Each scene is so hell-bent on relating the trivial troubles of Christine (that’s a great TV show title!) that instead of becoming character enhancers, they become trivial and one-note themselves. In my opinion, many of the one-liners fall flat due to poor acting (especially on Lohman’s part), which didn’t seem so forced even in The Evil Dead, which features an extended list of C-actors. Maybe it’s because everyone in Drag Me to Hellis trying so damn hard to remind the audience what they’re watching, and never allowing them to do any work. As noted before, nobody’s ego became more distracting to the experience than Raimi’s, who’s so focused on building a film with no discernible comparisons that he’s rendered it a less-than-enjoyable and forgettable piece of cinema.
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