From Talladega to hell and back

I had just finished my first few days here at The Daily Home, and it was time to hit home for the weekend. However, it was too late. The damage had been done.

I’d gotten the reporter’s itch and could not observe anything without talking about it. To avoid trouble, i.e. more work, I knew I’d be best off sitting at home and doing nothing. But when a horror movie beckons, a good journalist knows to heed the call. I understand Connie Chung goes by this same philosophy.

“Drag Me To Hell” sounded like it could possibly be a horror movie, so I took a chance on it. Amazingly, I was right.

In it, Alison Lohman plays Christine Brown, a bank loan officer hungry for a promotion. On what started out as such a nice, normal day, she ends up rejecting a third home extension to an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver). Like a first-time novelist, the gypsy doesn’t take rejection very well. She confronts, by which I man violently assaults, Christine after work and, to add insult to injury, places a curse on her that will send her to hell in three days.

It’s not a quiet trip into that good night. Christine is constantly tormented by demonic presences and loss of control over the events around her and even her own body. She desperately consults with a seer (Dileep Rao) to figure out a way to avoid her fate. Until she can, she must keep her sanity and not let the curse destroy her life in the meantime.

A large part of the buzz surrounding “Drag Me To Hell” is that it’s director Sam Raimi’s return to horror movies since the “Evil Dead” films two decades ago. Of course, any big-budget Hollywood movie is going to have a different feel from an 80’s independent flick with a crew consisting of the director’s high school buddies. That said, Raimi has indeed shown that he still relishes the genre and really wants to have fun with it.

The bottom line is that this is a really fun haunted house movie that happens to have scenes beyond the house. Raimi delivers some genuine shocks and suspense. He doesn’t shy away from the occasional gross-out gag, either. It’s always advisable to keep a sense of humor with the macabre.

There haven’t been too many horror films out there lately for pure amusement rather than cashing in on the “Based on a true story” technique. Here’s one that’s fiction and fine with it. Fans of fright (and slapstick) will get a kick out of “Drag Me To Hell,” and you just can’t beat a good terror tale in a dark and crowded theater. If you’re on the edge about seeing a horror, that’s understandable. To guide your decision, I can guarantee you this: it’s got the most projectile body fluids you’ll see in a PG-13 movie this year.