The film

Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a country girl trying to make it in the city. Putting her days as the County Fair Pork Queen behind her, she's got a new thin body and a new upmarket boyfriend (yuppie brand icon and college professor (!) Justin Long).  The last piece of the puzzle is that big new promotion, to assistant manager at the bank. But if she's going to beat out her competition, her boss tells her she'll need to make the hard decisions.

Unfortunately, the hard decisions include denying a mortgage extension to an old gypsy woman, who invokes an ancient curse to extract her revenge. Christine now has three days to find a way out, before the demon, well, drags her to hell.

Why haven't you seen it?

Because it just opened in theaters Friday... and the previews looked altogether terrible. The advertising made it look like another piece of predictable, boring, shlock rolling off the Hollywood horror assembly line.  If you only know him from the Spider-Man series, the participation of director Sam Raimi probably didn't do much to raise your expectations.

Why should you see it?

Because the name Sam Raimi should mean something to you when it comes to horror. It means scares, but it also means laughs - his milieu is the horror comedy. Raimi made his name in Hollywood with low-budget horror flicks like Evil Dead series, all of which will someday take their rightful place in the Movie Night canon. When the movie opens with the old-fashioned Universal logo from the 1980's, Raimi is telling those members of the audience in the know that they should be ready for a throwback to those wonderful days spent in a cabin in the woods fending off a horde of evil spirits.



Raimi is in top form here. After arguably the best scene in the movie (I won't spoil anything, except to say it involves a goat), I heard the woman next to me say, "I didn't know if I was supposed to laugh or scream!" She seriously said it just like that, like she was trying to get a pull quote onto a movie poster. The answer, by the way, is both.

In the years since Evil Dead, Raimi has honed his craft, and the skill on display here in the service of scaring the bejesus out of the audience is formidable. You know the scare is coming, and Raimi knows you know. He turns the familiar beats of a horror film on their ear, wringing tension out of every scene. Oh, and the gross outs, the wonderful, wonderful gross outs! I lost count of the number of different gross things that went into Alison Lohman's mouth. It is more than 4.

After living through the overly serious invasion of creepy, jerkily-moving Japanese girls started by The Ring, and the torture-porn of Saw and Hostel, here's hoping Drag Me To Hell starts a new wave of smart, well made horror comedies.