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Red Redding wants to DRAG ME TO HELL and you too! Raimi wants to drag all of us!
Hey folks, Harry here with long time AICN test screening reviewer, Red Redding with a look at DRAG ME TO HELL. Red now joins Quint and Kraken as people I absolutely hate for having seen this before me. ARGH! The anguish and pain coarsing through my body as I read reviews on this movie is killing me. I WANT TO SEE A WONDERFUL SAM RAIMI HORROR FILM NOW PLEASE!!!!!!
Red Redding here with a review of Drag Me to Hell, Non Disclosure Agreement be damned (although I hope AICN doesn’t rat me out). Besides the video quality, this seemed like the final cut as the movie was only 1 hour and 45 minutes and moved at a very nice pace.
The plot: Christine (Alison Lohman) denies an old gypsy woman a third extension on her home. Said gypsy woman puts a curse on her where she will be tormented by a demon for three days before the demon comes for her soul and drags her to hell. This movie shows what happens in the three days of the tormenting and what she tries to do to get out of it.
There is really only one word that I can use to describe how I feel about this movie: Good. To some that might be disappointing because you wanted this to be a master horror movie; it isn’t. In fact, I really do not think it is a horror movie at all. Yes there were a few (see: maybe three) scary parts, but on the whole the movie was not scary. Fortunately, this movie has a lot more going for it than just trying to be a horror film. This movie is funny, intense/suspenseful, and more importantly, entertaining. It is a solid movie to go to the theater on opening night and see with a bunch of friends. Just don’t take the movie seriously because that is not what this movie is about. It is campy as hell, but not cheesy at all. There is a difference and Sam Raimi knows this. I was actually surprised at how much I laughed/smiled because of my notions that this was a horror movie. Drag Me to Hell reminded me of Evil Dead 2 a lot. In the first Evil Dead, Raimi tried to make a scary ass film and only partially succeeded because of his small budget. When that movie made its money and he did Evil Dead 2, he realized what Evil Dead had become in the public eye and he intentionally made it funnier and campier and not as serious (that is just my opinion on it) and I think it is the better of the two. Fortunately it is unlike Army of Darkness; that was campy and cheesy to high hell and this movie feels nothing like that. As far as performances go, Alison Lohman was pretty damn good. It was nice to actually feel for a character in this type of movie. Justin Long played the same nice guy he has played in other movies. The gypsy woman was awesome in her short time on screen and the remaining supporting cast played their parts well enough.
The main negatives about this movie really come in the form of the overall movie. It just felt like nothing new that we haven’t seen before and it was pretty predictable. I would say that it is a standard horror movie, but the “standard” horror movies that have been and are coming out are absolute garbage (i.e. Rob Zombie’s Halloween and the upcoming Friday the 13th, etc. etc.). So compared to those movies it is much better. Just like I said in my review of The Informant (on a side note, I am not a plant. I live near Hollywood and see screenings through moviefone.com) it is entertaining, but as an overall film, it is just good. 7.5/10
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god love em...
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...that came up with this one?
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Keep doing slap stick horror movies and let someone else do Spider-man 4. Spider-man 3 was razzie material. Fucking embarrassing. Raimi is obviously out of ideas for web-head. Bring in someone new and hungry. A purist with talent and vision.
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SM3 was embarrassingly bad. I could have wiped my ass with the entire second half if it weren't so rough.
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i thought evil dead is a comedy. but then comedy is what passes for horror these days.
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where art thou
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"The main negatives about this movie really come in the form of the overall movie."What? What the hell? In the first paragraph he writes "There is really only one word that I can use to describe how I feel about this movie: Good." This person is not a plant because pkants are slightly more intelligent. This person has the brains of an amoeba, a bacterium or a piece of moss on the side of a tree. Hes not a plant though, of that we can be sure.
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Which can only be good!
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Indeed.
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I was hoping for Raimi to come back in full "I'M FUCKING SORRY" mode with a complete mind-fuck of a picture. Now that he has the budget to make the movies he wants why not an evil-dead like retread? Go for the scariest movie of all time vibe you started with Evil Dead 1, Sam.
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...unfortunately.
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This is quite possibly the worst reviewer I've seen in awhile. He manages to extend his diatribe on nothing for far too long and tells us nothing about the movie except fleeting contradictory views that don't match his initial take on the film. Tedious review.
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Bruce Campbell was on the radio here in the UK last week and gave some really good reasons why Evil Dead 4 should never happen. It's a really funny interview, and he talks about Spiderman too. You can get it on iTunes, Mark Kermode's film reviews.
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Feb 13, 2009 8:04:47 AM CST
People who call Spider-Man 3 "embarassingly bad"...
by nasty in the pasty
...have not seen many movies.
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Is embarrassing when you compare it to its predecessors. Had there been a dance number and more crying than a daycare in Spidey 1, at least we would've known this series wasn't gonna end well from the get-go.
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Feb 13, 2009 11:05:37 AM CST
There is really only one word that I can use to describe how I f
by somashine
WHOA! I mean blown away here by the vocab police! Lol..just Good..like its food or how are you today? lol..no need to act all amazing
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Something still bugs me about the overwhelming hatred towards Spider-man 3... yes, its the campiest of the three. And yes, far too many villains/subplots were crammed in for it to be a coherently good film. But the action is tremendous, by far Raimi's best action work... and the action is plentiful. I recently watched SM2 for the first time in a year or two, and jesus that movie is plodding. Most fans laud SM2 as the best of the series because of its character development... there's very little character development; its mostly 20 minute intervals of Aunt May crying about Uncle Ben, followed by 10 minutes of Tobey looking like someone farted. None of the 3 films are cinematic classics, but all 3 of them could have been much, much worse... fans should be more thankful of the work Sam did.
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no way, bro, that movie freaked it's audience out precisely BECAUSE of it's small budget. It was able to put the ideas forth well enough for them to be effective. Sorry if you watched it in a living room out of sequence from the other films.
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Maybe one of the worst reviews ive ever read, poorly written and poorly thought out. Oh, and how many times did Harry say the word "I" in his ONE LITTLE PARAGRAPH? 15, 16 times. Im suprised we werent told what he had for breakfast or that he just got off the phone with the head of Fox Searchlight. All ranting aside, Raimi is a fucking genius, ALL 3 SM movies were GOOD, some very good, others just good, but they are all good. To anyone who may not think that ED I and ED II are not classics, you are a cunt. Quick and the Dead is also awsome.
God this site is falling into the toilet....
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