5 out of 5

Director: Sam Raimi

Wow. Wowwy wow wowser. Man. Look: Go back and watch Dead Alive. It’s a good movie, well shot, great effects, but it sort of loses it at the end, right, like the overkill just becomes sort of bland? Now go back and review Peter Jackson’s career, from start to now. There’s some fun stuff there, but it’s also fairly uneven, and even though I love Heavenly Creatures, even that is imperfect. Now take another director who started out in the horror mire and has made the transition to big Hollywood. While his style has become more assured over the years, Raimi’s consistent quality and ability to entertain is amazing. Amazing. Drag Me to Hell starts a little shaky, maybe, but only because there’s no time to re-introduce you to this world – let’s just get going. And they do, and they don’t stop. It’s fairly predictable horror fare but MAN is the execution spot on, and yes, you can see the ending coming a mile away but it is paced PITCH perfect. Effing hell, this is exactly why it can still be worthwhile to pay to go see movies, and in less tech-savvy times, this is the type of flick I would’ve dragged countless friends to to watch time and again.