DRAG ME TO HELL

Christine Brown works in a bank and desires a promotion to vice director, which seems to be already in the hands of the slimy Stu. One day, an elderly woman comes to Christina's desk to ask for a third extension on her home mortgage, but Christina, to show determination in the eyes of her boss, denies it, humiliating her in front of everyone. The elderly woman then casts a curse on the girl: in three days, her life will be transformed into a nightmare until a terrible demon comes to drag her soul into the flames of hell. For Christina, it will be a race against time to save her soul, between sacrifices, séances, and moral choices. Between one "Spider-Man" and another, the brilliant Sam Raimi does not forget (and does not renounce) his devotion to horror that made him known to the world. If indeed his production company, Ghost House Pictures, is constantly active, presenting films mostly of questionable quality, his last commitment behind the camera with the genre dates back to 2000 with the appreciable thriller with supernatural overtones "The Gift". The last one so far, because Raimi has returned with great pomp with "Drag Me to Hell", one of the craziest, funniest, and most successful horror films of the 2009 cinema year. The intention to make "Drag Me to Hell" has been in the director's mind for at least twenty years, when he wrote a first screenplay inspired by a story his mother told him as a child to keep him quiet during car rides. And indeed, the fairy-tale derivation of "Drag Me to Hell" is evident both for the moralistic connotations on which the entire story revolves and for the use of elements of collective horror imagery, such as witches, demons, and curses. Elements that are nevertheless well rooted in the Raimi poetic, thus recognizable in a very personal way of telling and showing stories as only a few can do. The camera, in the frequent moments of frenzy, seems to go crazy, there are no lack of tracking shots like in "Evil Dead", as well as the unmistakable scenes with hyper-realistic audio, skewed shots, and virtuoso camera movements, and then again drooling demons, possessed and talking animals, a deluge of organic liquids, and almost cartoonish splatter gags. Sam Raimi's cinema tends to entertain rather than to scare, or rather, scares while entertaining. If the inevitable macabre detail and the use of the alternation of sound tracks seek the easy scare, there are also scenes of healthy expressionistic suggestion, such as in the beautiful scene of the shadows moving in the protagonist's house. But the leading role is played by the numerous ironic and grotesque scenes in which the protagonist finds herself subjected to the most paradoxical "tortures", jostled and mistreated in such an excessive way as to bring "Drag Me to Hell" really closer to a Wile E. Coyote cartoon than to a horror movie. But "Drag Me to Hell" is not a self-celebratory operation, as someone has suggested, rather it is a further declaration of love towards genre cinema and the comic book aesthetic that the director has always manifested. A director capable like few others of succeeding in entertaining his audience with original entertainment without pretensions, always rich in inventiveness and explicit passion. If we then manage to glimpse in the film's opening a reflection of financial actuality regarding the mortgage crisis and the condition of continuous alert in which banks find themselves, so much the better, an added value to Raimi's work and further confirmation that the horror genre is always ready to provide us with an appreciable reflection of the fears that weigh on society (and if you missed it, "The Messenger" does not fail to bring to attention allusions to the economic crisis). A little bit of everything contributes to making "Drag Me to Hell" an excellent film: from the well-ordered script and rich in narrative rhythm - work of Sam and Ivan Raimi - to the retro-flavored music of Christopher Young, to the performance of the entire cast, first and foremost the capable and little-used Alison Lohman ("Big Fish"; "The Illusionist"), who here wears the clothes of the protagonist. A separate discussion deserves the numerous special effects, which this time appear always functional to the plot. Computer graphics are used, but in a parsimonious way (perhaps just a couple of scenes are too much) and the bulk of the work is entrusted to the excellent makeup effects and the silicone puppets that perfectly designate the eighties matrix that lies behind the operation (and it is no coincidence if the film opens with the old Universal logo). In short, "Drag Me to Hell" is a must-see film for those who want to find a Raimi in horror/baraconesque sauce and moreover original; a fun and adrenaline-filled ride on the roller coaster that shows itself as an anomalous nostalgic and retro operation, capable yet at the same time of being fresh and modern.