Drag Me To Hell
Whoa, the tone of this is all over the place, it’s too serious and dramatic for a comedy horror, but too silly for a proper drama. Tries to have it’s farm cake and eat it too. No wonder Sam Raimi moved to Marvel films, where this kind of appeasement to everyone is their bread and butter.
The dramatic half concerns a country bumpkin that moved to the big city, is dating a rich guy, and his family thinks she’s beneath him. He doesn’t, is willing to fight his family, but the parents aren’t willing to cut him off either, so it’s baby’s first drama, but fine. The father is the aloof rich dude, but the mother is an absolute bitch, softened up by them bonding over having an alcoholic parent.
She is vying with another dude for a promotion at work, but her kindness is a disadvantage. When she resists her motherly instincts and makes an old woman homeless, she curses him to have disgusting but silly practical effects boinked into her face. Mostly maggots, embalming fluid, an entire arm (no, it’s not that kind of film).
She gets progressively anxious from the visions, voices, dead apparitions, it affects her life. Killing a cute kitten doesn’t help either, she turns less and less celestial. She even tries to move the curse to her cursee, after death, but it doesn’t work due to some wacky hijinks. She is finally dragged to hell, since her unblemished life was tarnished by a negative credit approval. Capitalism, ho!
The silly half is silly. Ya know, Evil Dead.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.