'I beg you and you shame me?'
Loan manager Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is desperate for a promotion, so when elderly Mrs Janush (Lorna Raver) comes into the bank pleading for an extension on late mortgage payments, Christine turns her down in an attempt to show her boss she’s capable of making tough decisions.
Later that night as Christine’s leaving work, she’s attacked in her car by Mrs Janush. She manages to fight her off, but the old lady’s not done with her yet. On the way home, Christine and boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) walk past a physic shop. Something draws Christine in, and she asks the fortune teller Rham (Dileep Rao) to read her palm. He tells her that a dark spirit has attached itself to her.
Christine has three days to escape the curse, and the now-dead Mrs Ganush is going to make those final three days a living nightmare. Clay is the classic horror movie boyfriend who refuses to believe Christine and tells her all the horrible things happening to her are all in her head.
Drag Me to Hell is a wild ride. It’s very, very gross. There’s chin-gumming, flies going up noses, fire-hydrant blood spray and embalming fluid gushing out of a corpse. It is a comedy horror though, so it’s so over the top it’s not that scary. There’s even a talking goat. OK, the goat’s possessed by a human spirit, it can’t actually talk. I don’t know how that works.
It’s also...problematic. The portrayals of the non-white characters fall into racist stereotypes. Mrs Janush is Romani, so what we have is a movie about a cute blonde white girl being subjected to a curse by a filthy gypsy with rotten teeth and dirty fingernails. The people that try and help her could fall into the Magical Person of Colour trope (this trope is usually more specific, referring to a Black person, the ‘magical negro’, but here they are an Indian man and Hispanic woman).
Christine never really seems to accept that she might have made the wrong choice. Over her final three days, she blames her boss and the bank but doesn’t shoulder any of responsibility herself until it’s way too late. Even then, she only does it because she thinks she’s safe. We are given some context to Christine’s drive for success; like Clarice Starling, she grew up po white trash on a farm, her dad’s dead and her mum drinks. Clay’s snobby parents don’t think that she’s good enough for him because she didn’t go to an Ivy League school.
Christine pays the piper in the film’s few minutes and if you ask me she deserves it purely for killing her little kitten in a daft blood sacrifice. But as a YouTube review pointed out, Mrs Janus can banish people to Hell, but she can’t pay her mortgage?
Content warning: the kitten dies, grave desecration, floppy corpse kisses.
Final thoughts: It's a bit of a disappointment from the man that bough us The Evil Dead.
