Drag Me to Hell

Reviewed by Billy Bob Biggs.

Directed by Sam Raimi.

Written by Sam & Ivan Raimi.

Starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao and David Paymer.

After a long, dry spell where he made big-budget superhero flicks, Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell, the story of a nice, ambitious bank employee who rejects the wrong person's loan and is set on the express train to hell, or maybe the bus to Beelzebub, since it's gonna take three days to get there.

The movie starts off with Christine (Alison Lohman) attempting to impress her bank boss and get a promotion by refusing to give a kindly old lady an extension on her mortgage. Unfortunately, the kindly old lady goes all batshit and hides in the back seat of Christine's car, always the best way to approach your loan officer. The conversation doesn't go so well and they end up pulling each other's hair out and poking one another in the eye until the old lady craftily hides under Christine's car until she can pop out and rip a button off her coat, cursing it and Christine and putting her (and her coat) on a 3-day path to Hell!

That's right, Gypsy curse fans, for those of you who have been waiting since 1996's Thinner for another entry into this fine sub genre, your wait is over! Amazing they are so few and far between considering the relevance to our lives today. I can't go two blocks without seeing nasty, one-eyed crazy gypsy ladies putting curses on some poor hot dog vendor or cab driver...

So anyway, Christine may be a morally ambivalent yuppie, but she can sense when she's got a hex on her soul so she immediately goes to have her fortune read by Dileep Rao, who, despite operating a little retail amulet and magic powder shop, has enough magic in him to recognize that he doesn't want this cursed girl within 10 feet of him, and he sends her packing.

Soon Christine is back home with her kitty, Justin Long having gone home to play with his coin collection, and the demon makes its first appearance. See, it takes the demon three days to work up enough power to drag Christine to hell so initially he just shows up to say "howdy," cast scary shadows on the wall and slap her around a little.

Christine becomes convinced that she has been cursed and goes back to Dileep, who begins taking her credit card payments and advises her to make amends with the old gypsy lady, which doesn't work. Christine runs around for two days prior to her deadline trying various things to get rid of the curse, making animal sacrifice, trying to transfer the curse to someone else, all the while having visions of the old gypsy lady attacking her in a shed, gruesome eyeballs popping up in her soup, and the demon showing up for her nightly flogging.

I won't give more away, but it's Sam Raimi back to his gruesome, Three Stooges horror best.

12 buckets blood. Eyeballs roll. Corpses roll. Stapler fu. Volkswagen fu. Goat fu. No breasts. Billy Bob says check it out.