Saw Drag Me to Hell, a deeply silly movie. It's a supernatural horror/comedy about a blond girl trying to survive a gypsy curse. The film has a few genuinely tense moments (in my cowardice, I brought the volume down a few times) but it's all slathered in a thick layer of ridiculousness. For example, she's being stalked by a creepy old gypsy woman in a garage. She sees the old lady's silk handkerchief wafting creepily to the ground. She turns and THE HANKIE IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER OH MY GOD!!! It's just fabric, a limp piece of cloth, and it's being treated like The Monster. Later on, the hankie is stuck to her face and she's trying to pull it off as it makes sucking and squealing noises because why not?
The film takes itself seriously so far as it is necessary to make the plot feel important, but it's clearly much more preoccupied with scary/silly jokes. There's just way too much goofy inventiveness and gross-out gags. At one point, our hapless heroine gets a bad nose-bleed at work. Her manager comes over to help and she begins vomiting blood. Aghast, she clamps her hand over mouth and, after a tiny pause, the blood then shoots out of her nose with a cork-popping sound. This is more ghoulish than scary, and more ridiculously silly than anything else.
The film is weak in the unimportant plot. There's a lot of little weaknesses in the characters too. For example, the manager is clearly crazy-manipulative, but I think he's supposed to be more paternal. At one point the kind-hearted main character must pick someone in a diner to 'transfer' the curse to. She picks an ill-looking old man but then changes her mind when an equally ill-looking woman joins his booth. Oh, he's married? Why then maybe his life isn't worthless after all.
But the film's mind and heart are clearly not in these scenes. The manager is not intended to be thought of at all. His manipulations are perhaps merely cynical window-dressing in this curse-riddled world. The old man is meant to signify not the girl's callousness but rather her desperate state of mind. The film's problems are no more than those of, say, The Mummy which is a (not-so-)guilty pleasure of many of my friends. This film is goofy, a little scary, and gross-out gory. I liked laughing at/with it.
Edit: Oh, Sam Raimi directed this. Well that explains everything.
For your edification, the car in which the fight/curse scene occurs has appeared somewhere in pretty much every Sam Raimi movie ever made since Evil Dead.
ReplyDeleteI greatly enjoyed how some scenes became suspenseful, then scary, then even more scary, then EVEN MORE MORE SCARY, then tipped nicely into ridiculousness.
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