31 Days of Halloween Day 3: Drag Me To Hell (2009)
October 4th 2010 23:08
Day 3, and I thought I would try something a little bit campy. The camp in question is brought by Sam Raimi, courtesy of his gross-fest comeback Drag Me To Hell. And with a title like that, you're not really going to be expecting something serious, are you?
The story begins with Christine (the ever-enigmatic Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a rather teal-infested bank, going through the motions of her daily duties and eyeing the empty Assistant Manager's desk that seems to be on display for our benefit. She wants the job, but has to compete with a brown-nosing, hard-talking, customer-denying colleague who has only been there a week. A few more minutes of exposition tell us that while she has an awesome, caring, intelligent, successful boyfriend, she feels that her modest farm-girl, fat-girl background is holding her back (something with which her boyfriend's parents - but not her boyfriend - seem to agree).
So naturally, the moment she decides to try out being an asshole for a day is when a poor, frail old woman with the saddest eye (one is fake) you've ever seen walks into the bank and begs her for a third extension on her mortgage payment. Keeping true to her natural good-willed character at first, she asks her boss if they can help her. He tells her sure, but a denial would make the bank a hefty profit, and show upper management that she is capable of making Assistant Manager-type tough decisions.
Taking it upon herself to essentially crush the old lady's dignity and take her house away from her, she wimpishly denies her the extension. The lady tries to reason with her, and then actually falls down on her knees and begs. When the answer is still no, she lunges at Christine and security drags her out.
Congratulated by her boss, she is suddenly tasked with taking home important papers to work on, and now has a serious shot at this promotion. But out in the car park (why doesn't anyone park out on the street in these movies?), she gets attacked by a napkin, and the old lady really does beat the shit out of her.
Several kicks, hair-pulling, and gummy face-eating (yes, I'm serious) and some surprisingly adept hands-free car maneouvres later, Christine finally kicks her out of the car and slams the door. Instead of actually driving off, she shouts, "Ha, I beat you you old bitch!", sits back, and waits for the crazy old bint to rise up Jaws-style with a brick and smash her window to smithereens. Grabbing a button, she utters some spooky-sounding Slavic words and then swans off.
Yay, it's over!
Okay, not quite. Now that a curse has been spoken, the brothers Raimi (Sam wrote this with his brother Ivan shortly after Army of Darkness) now have free reign to do the impossible. Or, should I say, the special effects department.
I'm not sure whether I was grossed out more by the scene when the demon is spewing insects on Christine's face, or that in which Christine yanks on a nearby rope in her garage that drops an anvil on the old lady's head causing her eyeballs to pop out and splat all over her face. On second thought, I'm pretty sure it might have been the scene in which Christine accidentally crashes the old lady's wake, trips over her open casket, thereby pulling her corpse onto her and causing her to projectile vomit into her mouth. I'm pretty sure I put down the blancmange after that.
Yes, the violence is cartoonish, even more so than actual cartoons, but when you're dealing with the subject matter of going to Hell, you might as well lighten up a little.
God (no pun intended) only knows that this didn't happen with the camera filters - the filmmakers manage to make summer in San Francisco look drearier than an October morning in West Sussex. Add to that Christine's typically Californian blondeness being muted by her mawkish, bland fashion choices, and you have pretty much stripped all the joy out of the film, with the only moments of colour paired with the more ominous moments (such as Christine's red lipstick and yellow dress in the dinner scene).
It wouldn't be Raimi without some farce, and let me tell you, this movie has it in spades (a room-spraying nosebleed, Faustian violins, an open grave-cum-makeshift swimming pool etc). But the true guffaws come during the movie's obligatory séance scene, in which a goat (a HUGE one, by the way) becomes possessed, has its eyes turn a funny colour, talks, bites people, and generally exhibits the kind of comical behaviour of a farm animal suffering Tomacco withdrawal.
While movies like Hostel and Saw cater to torture porn, and movies like [insert (heh) movie here] cater to actual porn, this movie pretty much caters to SFX, static prop, animatronic prop and foley artist porn. No squelch is left unturned, no skin-rippling expense spared, and definitely no bodily fluids ignored. To be quite honest, there really is no plot, and because the script just wanders from set piece to fork-swalling eyeball cake to set piece, the "donor of important information" character usually present in horror movies has to take a back seat to the gastroenterital pyrotechnics.
Inception's Dileep Rao plays this character, a psychic, with baffling realism, but you'd wish he would have been allowed to get off his arse and dispense some much-needed Demon Banishing For Dummies, rather than choosing to do so after a shitload of damage has already been done.
Still, it wouldn't be Raimi either, without a little bit of mild social commentary, and here, we see the extraordinarily meek, mild-mannered, downtrodden, pushover former fat farm girl threaten to transmogrify into a selfish, dishonest, power-abusing, violent shadow of her former self.
And this fits in nicely with a theory I read concerning the title - why "Drag Me" instead of "Dragged" to Hell? The notion that she might have the ability to control her situation, rather than indulge in every other damaging, self-destructive, dangerous, cruel option serves to illustrate that the choices we make can affect others, and while you might not be screwing over a old lady who is secretly a gypsy ready to curse you if you don't approve her credit card application/give her extra crumpets with tea, you're still screwing someone over, and thusly, you're screwing yourself over. The idea that Christine would want to work in a place that encourages treating its customers as expendable cattle is tragic in itself, and her road to damnation may have already started when she made that decision, with the subsequent events simply being a formality of sorts.
You may not want to delve too deeply into any subtext if you're watching this movie, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Raimi is no stranger to Biblical references, and the moral here, while welcome, is about as heavy-handed as you can get.
One thing's for sure: I will probably not be able to eat cake for a long time. And if you knew me personally, you'd know that that's a big deal. I'm a pretty strong advocate of cake.
The story begins with Christine (the ever-enigmatic Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a rather teal-infested bank, going through the motions of her daily duties and eyeing the empty Assistant Manager's desk that seems to be on display for our benefit. She wants the job, but has to compete with a brown-nosing, hard-talking, customer-denying colleague who has only been there a week. A few more minutes of exposition tell us that while she has an awesome, caring, intelligent, successful boyfriend, she feels that her modest farm-girl, fat-girl background is holding her back (something with which her boyfriend's parents - but not her boyfriend - seem to agree).
So naturally, the moment she decides to try out being an asshole for a day is when a poor, frail old woman with the saddest eye (one is fake) you've ever seen walks into the bank and begs her for a third extension on her mortgage payment. Keeping true to her natural good-willed character at first, she asks her boss if they can help her. He tells her sure, but a denial would make the bank a hefty profit, and show upper management that she is capable of making Assistant Manager-type tough decisions.
Taking it upon herself to essentially crush the old lady's dignity and take her house away from her, she wimpishly denies her the extension. The lady tries to reason with her, and then actually falls down on her knees and begs. When the answer is still no, she lunges at Christine and security drags her out.
Congratulated by her boss, she is suddenly tasked with taking home important papers to work on, and now has a serious shot at this promotion. But out in the car park (why doesn't anyone park out on the street in these movies?), she gets attacked by a napkin, and the old lady really does beat the shit out of her.
Several kicks, hair-pulling, and gummy face-eating (yes, I'm serious) and some surprisingly adept hands-free car maneouvres later, Christine finally kicks her out of the car and slams the door. Instead of actually driving off, she shouts, "Ha, I beat you you old bitch!", sits back, and waits for the crazy old bint to rise up Jaws-style with a brick and smash her window to smithereens. Grabbing a button, she utters some spooky-sounding Slavic words and then swans off.
Yay, it's over!
Okay, not quite. Now that a curse has been spoken, the brothers Raimi (Sam wrote this with his brother Ivan shortly after Army of Darkness) now have free reign to do the impossible. Or, should I say, the special effects department.
I'm not sure whether I was grossed out more by the scene when the demon is spewing insects on Christine's face, or that in which Christine yanks on a nearby rope in her garage that drops an anvil on the old lady's head causing her eyeballs to pop out and splat all over her face. On second thought, I'm pretty sure it might have been the scene in which Christine accidentally crashes the old lady's wake, trips over her open casket, thereby pulling her corpse onto her and causing her to projectile vomit into her mouth. I'm pretty sure I put down the blancmange after that.
Yes, the violence is cartoonish, even more so than actual cartoons, but when you're dealing with the subject matter of going to Hell, you might as well lighten up a little.
God (no pun intended) only knows that this didn't happen with the camera filters - the filmmakers manage to make summer in San Francisco look drearier than an October morning in West Sussex. Add to that Christine's typically Californian blondeness being muted by her mawkish, bland fashion choices, and you have pretty much stripped all the joy out of the film, with the only moments of colour paired with the more ominous moments (such as Christine's red lipstick and yellow dress in the dinner scene).
It wouldn't be Raimi without some farce, and let me tell you, this movie has it in spades (a room-spraying nosebleed, Faustian violins, an open grave-cum-makeshift swimming pool etc). But the true guffaws come during the movie's obligatory séance scene, in which a goat (a HUGE one, by the way) becomes possessed, has its eyes turn a funny colour, talks, bites people, and generally exhibits the kind of comical behaviour of a farm animal suffering Tomacco withdrawal.
While movies like Hostel and Saw cater to torture porn, and movies like [insert (heh) movie here] cater to actual porn, this movie pretty much caters to SFX, static prop, animatronic prop and foley artist porn. No squelch is left unturned, no skin-rippling expense spared, and definitely no bodily fluids ignored. To be quite honest, there really is no plot, and because the script just wanders from set piece to fork-swalling eyeball cake to set piece, the "donor of important information" character usually present in horror movies has to take a back seat to the gastroenterital pyrotechnics.
Inception's Dileep Rao plays this character, a psychic, with baffling realism, but you'd wish he would have been allowed to get off his arse and dispense some much-needed Demon Banishing For Dummies, rather than choosing to do so after a shitload of damage has already been done.
Still, it wouldn't be Raimi either, without a little bit of mild social commentary, and here, we see the extraordinarily meek, mild-mannered, downtrodden, pushover former fat farm girl threaten to transmogrify into a selfish, dishonest, power-abusing, violent shadow of her former self.
And this fits in nicely with a theory I read concerning the title - why "Drag Me" instead of "Dragged" to Hell? The notion that she might have the ability to control her situation, rather than indulge in every other damaging, self-destructive, dangerous, cruel option serves to illustrate that the choices we make can affect others, and while you might not be screwing over a old lady who is secretly a gypsy ready to curse you if you don't approve her credit card application/give her extra crumpets with tea, you're still screwing someone over, and thusly, you're screwing yourself over. The idea that Christine would want to work in a place that encourages treating its customers as expendable cattle is tragic in itself, and her road to damnation may have already started when she made that decision, with the subsequent events simply being a formality of sorts.
You may not want to delve too deeply into any subtext if you're watching this movie, but sometimes I just can't help myself. Raimi is no stranger to Biblical references, and the moral here, while welcome, is about as heavy-handed as you can get.
One thing's for sure: I will probably not be able to eat cake for a long time. And if you knew me personally, you'd know that that's a big deal. I'm a pretty strong advocate of cake.
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