Although Drag successfully captures the innocence-gone-wrong feel of the Seventies horror films (partly because they appear to have actually told the set designer that the movie was set in 1978--the protagonist even has a sunburst clock on her wall!), it fails to match the depth of the best of them. Rosemary's Baby is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant the devil's baby, sure, but more than that it is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant. Nothing in Drag Me To Hell ever has any resonance with the rest of life.
Unfortunately, although Drag successfully captures the strange mixture of approaches that made EDII insanely great, it fails to update the formula in any meaningful way.
Had it been made in 1978, this would have been a great movie. Drag looks back on a high point of the horror genre...but it says nothing more than "weren't these great?". And they were, but they're already there. It's not clear to me what the need was for a new one. Unfortunately, Drag provides little more. This movie was well worth seeing. It's probably one of the best movies I've seen this year. But in the future, if I want to watch an intelligent, creepy horror, I'll watch The Stepford Wives, or Alien. If I want the perfect mix of goofy and gorey, well, I'll watch The Evil Dead II.
2 comments:
I agree with you that DmtH is 70s Catholic Horror although I don't think I would have gone straight to Rosemary's Baby in looking for a comparison...
I quite liked this movie though. Did you like it? From your review, I would think you didn't.
Apart from one really annoying glaring flaw (it has to do with how all envelopes look alike, and if you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about), I thought DmtH was a quite good horror comedy, very much in the tradition of EDII, as you pointed out, as well as (much more recently of course) Dead Alive. I'm kind of a sucker for gore-infused physical comedy.
I'm a little surprised by it's solid critical reception (93% on Rotten Tomatoes, 86% among top critics), just because it was promoted as a horror movie and it's completely unscary.
I agree with Dave's thoughts--it's 70s horror without the value of 70s horror, and this is exactly what I liked about it (I think Dave liked it, but could do without it?).
It was simple, sweet, predictable, consumable, and at no point was I enraged to see my favorite genre despoiled with attempts to Be Extreme. It was fun, and now we have a new food for Halloween: harvest cake.
Like Lydia, I liked the gore. In fact, I liked all that was cheap and easy here.
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