Haunted housing bubble: Raimi’s reign in blood

With its projectile nose bleeds and copious amounts of goop and spew of all varieties, Sam Raimi’s return to horror proves that the Evil Dead creator still loves to make a helluva mess. And unlike so many of the filmmakers who filled the genre void while he was off making Spider-Man movies, Raimi hasn’t forgotten the essential elements of the best EC Comics tales. Drag Me to Hell mixes up the creepy and the silly to delirious and very pleasing effect.

Not even another milquetoast performance by the ever-wispy Alison Lohman is enough to put a damper on things. She plays Christine, a bank loan officer whose decision to deny a mortgage extension to an elderly woman (Lorna Raver in a grotesque gypsy caricature that is knowingly un-PC) results in a serious case of demonic harassment.

That Christine’s punishment far outweighs her misdeed makes her a refreshingly ordinary and sympathetic sort of horror heroine. And as absurd as the action becomes, Raimi treats the character’s growing desperation and moral choices with enough gravity to make us care about her fate. The result is pleasingly old-fashioned, owing more to the anarchic cartoons of Tex Avery and the blood feasts of Herschell Gordon Lewis than anything that’s happened in horror since Ash traded in his hand for a chainsaw.