Drag Me To Hell

I was almost embarrassed to watch this movie, I was not impressed by what I had seen in the trailers and figured it was going to bare a horrible resemblance to House of the Dead by Uwe Boll, and no one wants that. Very quickly I realized that this movie had a lot more to it than I thought. What did it for me was the vibe the movie held, somewhere between Tales From the Crypt and Evil Dead. It’s real charm was in the fact that it acknowledged what it was and had fun with the genre without taking itself seriously.

We open to a brief preface to the curse which has been placed on a young boy who stole a gypsy’s necklace. Doomed to be dragged to hell, nothing can stop the demon attached to person who has suffered the wrath of a very angry gypsy.

40 years has passed since the fate of the thieving boy, and we meet our next victim Christine Brown, a loan officer who is applying for the Assistant Manager position and has to show her stuff to beat out her brown nosing co-worker. When a crusty old woman in desperate need of a manicure and a fresh set of dentures comes to beg for an extension on her mortgage, Christine decides to grow a pair of balls and denies the extension. But waiting for Christine after work is much more than a pissed off Eastern European with a milky eye. The old broad attacks Christine and takes a button from her coat and curses it before giving it back.

Shook up from the attack, Christine asks her boyfriend Clay to take her to a fortune teller where she learns that there is a dark spirit attached to her. With some skepticism they leave and Christine goes home where once alone she begins to experience strange sounds and shadows which only intensify the longer the curse is upon her. Returning to the fortune teller it is revealed that she is followed by a Lamia that will torment her for three days before taking her to hell for eternity.

Christine is desperate to remove this curse and soon begins to lose control as the torture intensifies and Christine resorts to more and more vile acts to save her soul.

The movie was well done and impressed me more than I thought it would. It mixed the perfect amount of frights with just a pinch of camp that will leave you shaken and laughing. If there’s one thing you will take from this movie is that a toothless gypsy will take every opportunity she has not only to put a curse on you, but to gum your face as many times as she can in 90 minutes.