Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Sometimes fans don't like it when a director strays too far from what they perceive to be his/her comfort zone. And probably an equal number of fans hate it when a director repeats himself a few too many times. You can't please everybody (I think I'll copyright that because it's so damn original). It's tough to think of another director that fans would love to see do nothing more than repeat himself than Sam Raimi. If he did nothing but make EVIL DEAD and SPIDER-MAN movies, most of the world's geeks would be completely satisfied. But if that had happened, we would have never gotten such tasty nuggets as DARK MAN, A SIMPLE PLAN, or THE GIFT. But a director like Raimi, like the consummate artist that he is, needs to stretch his wings every so often just to remind himself that he can. Watching a nearly finished work-in-progress print of DRAG ME TO HELL at SXSW last March saw Raimi somehow managing to do something I didn't think was possible — satisfying both schools of thought by making a non-franchise movie that still managed to tap into all of the thrill-house antics that have made him so damn much fun to watch over the nearly 30 years since THE EVIL DEAD first changed the face of horror.

Raimi also remembers that you can show the world that you are a more mature filmmaker than you were 30 years ago while reminding everyone that the kid inside still likes to have the whiz scared out of him. And Raimi manages to scare us in a wholly satisfying manner in a PG-13 format. Let me just say this before I go any further: I've seen the finished film, and I'm a little surprised that it got a PG-13 rating. What I also noticed is that there is no swearing stronger than the word "bitch" (at least not that I can remember) and there's no nudity. So Raimi effectively said to the MPAA, "I'm not giving you any other opening besides cartoony blood and guts to give me an R rating," and so they didn't. And if you don't give this film a shot because it's PG-13, you're categorically insane and I'll hereby revoke your Horror Fan ID badge and decoder ring. I couldn't stop thinking about Robert Wise's 1963 masterpiece THE HAUNTING, perhaps one of the scariest films ever made, a film that used nothing more than sound, shadows, and inventive camera work to scare us to death. Raimi's takes entire chapters from Wise's playbook, as well as a few tricks out of his own bag, to make us grip the armrests and curl our toes with fear.

But DRAG ME TO HELL also remembers how to have fun. The sweet and petite Alison Lohman (MATCHSTICK MEN; THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE) is a nice stand-in for Bruce Campbell as the human ragdoll who get tossed around by unkind--and largely unseen--beings from the spirit world who have attached themselves to her thanks to a gypsy's curse. Lohman's Christine Brown is a loan officer vying for a promotion from her boss (David Paymer), and she refuses to grant an extension to a little old lady named Mrs. Ganush (the splendidly wicked Lorna Raver, a TV character actor in her first big film role). Mrs. Ganush gets on her knees to beg for the extension, but Christine refuses, so the old gypsy lady lays a whammy on her something fierce. There's a fight scene between the two women in a parking garage (I'm sure a lot of you have seen it) that signals exactly the tone that Raimi is striving to achieve--fun, exciting, a little sickening, thrilling and whacky.

Lohman finds out from a medium (Dileep Rao) that the demon that has been cursed upon her will violently haunt her for three days before breaking through the earth's crust to literally drag her to hell. In the film's opening sequence, we see a scene set decades earlier when the same curse is placed upon a young Mexican boy who meets that exact fate. Christine's boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) is skeptical but is trying to be understanding and supportive to her beliefs. There's a strange backstory to Christine involving her being raised on a farm and the fact that she used to be fat that is amusing, but I'm not really sure that information enhances the story. For most of the film, Raimi relies on CG shadow effects, one of the great soundscapes in recent horror film memory, and his usual demented sense of playfulness ("Here kitty kitty.") to bring us to a masterfully staged séance set piece that uses every trick in the book and adds a few more publications to the shelves. Some may view what goes on during this 12-15 minutes as an EVIL DEAD Greatest Hits package (if anything, it's like one of those Greatest Hits sets where the band has to re-record all of their own songs due to ownership rights.) Possessed people float in the air doing demonic dances, inanimate objects in the room suddenly get very animated, and the voices of the possessed sound a hell of a lot like the demons inside folks in that cabin in the woods.

I also love DRAG ME TO HELL's subtext. Christine is a loan officer in a bank, and the film could certainly be viewed as a "Kill the Bankers" statement. On that level alone, the movie feels very timely. However you choose to look at it, DRAG ME TO HELL acts as a great pallet cleanser for both Raimi and his fans between SPIDER-MAN movies. Sam and his brother Ivan have concocted a screenplay that is low in concept but high in execution. The film is filled with things that ooze, gush and explode with nastiness of every shape and size, and it may be the closest thing we ever get to another EVIL DEAD film. My only real complaint with the film is that Raimi relies a little too heavily on cheap scares punctuated by loud music alongside his well-earned moments of genuine terror. I'd actually forgotten how gifted Raimi was at building tension, and I don't think he's ever done it to the extent he does with this work.

But comparing this film to EVIL DEAD isn't entirely fair or accurate (even though I just did), and the fact that DRAG ME TO HELL opens with the '80s-era Universal logo (and another vintage treat for those who stick around after the credits) shows that Raimi is trying to make a modern-version of a classic Universal scare film (or at least a much-improved version of Thinner). Whatever he's up to, I'm on board, and I hope that any loss of control that he might have felt as a result of working on SPIDER-MAN 3 has been somewhat brought back to him as a result of this. And pay attention studio heads: DRAG ME TO HELL is the result of letting this great, proven filmmaker do what he does best with next to no interference from the outside world. It's not a perfect film, but the flaws are Raimi's to own and for fans to debate. What works here, however, works so damn well that I can't image fans of Raimi, fans of horror, or fans of groovy filmmaking being disappointed.

-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com