TheRetroCritic

A look back at Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell .

Directed and co-written by Sam Raimi, Drag Me To Hell was a horror film from 2009 about a loan officer who makes a very powerful enemy when she denies an elderly woman a loan as the latter attacks her before rewarding her with a terrible curse. Raimi's return to the horror genre after completing his Spider-Man trilogy, Drag Me To Hell is every bit as violent and wacky as you'd expect from the man who brought us The Evil Dead and its madcap sequels. If anything, this is far more a comedy than it is a horror film. There are gross-out "scares" but those are more hilariously odd and disgusting than they are actually frightening. Take the multiple scenes in which the poor cursed heroine Christine (Alison Lohman) gets thrown up on or when she's the one throwing up various fluids, for example. Most of the scares in this movie are so cartoonish that it's just impossible not to laugh at them. Christine battles the old lady in a car at one point using office eq

I review the first three Spider-Man movies. Part 2 coming soon...

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films never aspired to any gritty realism or a dark, brooding tone. They were bright, colourful, cartoony, gloriously silly comic-book flicks with the principal goal of just being loads of fun. And no matter how dumb the films got, they were always entertaining. So after Spider-Man 3 , the franchise's jump-the-shark moment, and before the eventual reboot I thought I should check out the best film of the trilogy to see if it still holds up. And you know what? It really does. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not flawless: you do get some very goofy moments here and there and the film could have been trimmed a tiny bit but, on the whole, this is one surprisingly solid Spidey movie which fixes most of the first film's shortcomings and is all the better for it. For one thing, you've got a good villain in Alfred Molina's Doc Ock. With the Green Goblin's tight rubber suit far from sight, Molina makes Dr Octavius appropriately geeky