Tagline: Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future. But in three days, she's going to hell.
 "But I'm a vegetarian!" splutters Alison Lohman's character, Christine Brown when being given pointers on how to rid her life of demonic presence before three days are up. However, as Christine learns soon enough; friend of puppies and other furry animals or not, once cursed, the Lamia (presumably an evil goat-demon from Hell) will find and indeed take her soul at the end of three days.
How does a timid soul like Christine, who volunteers at an animal shelter and cannot say no to one-upping colleague Stu's request to pick him up a sandwich for lunch, land her in hell? Where the Lamia threatens to "feast upon it," as she "festers" in her grave? Very easy. She made the grave mistake as loan-officer to Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver), Hungarian gypsy, of denying her client a third extension on her mortgage. True to her character, Christine does ask her boss, Mr Jacks (David Paymer) to allow the little old lady with one stone eye the facility. But faced with the choice of appearing as aggressive in her dealings as Stu, up against her for the position of Assistant Manager at the bank, or a pushover, Christine chooses the former. Mrs Ganush, putting aside all old-aged dignity, gets down on her knees and begs Christine to help her. But security is called and she is forced to evacuate the premises.
It is as Christine walks toward her car in the blue gloom of the parking lot that she notices that something is amiss. She notices an Oldsmobile parked across from her and hears a phlegmy cough that she recalls having heard earlier in the day. It is then that Mrs Ganush's lace hankie comes a-flying towards Christine and splatters itself across her windshield. From the dark recesses of Christine's car emerges a wild with vindictiveness Mrs Ganush, not to be deterred by anything in her screaming, clawing attempts at tearing Christine to ribbons; even having one of her eyes stapled shut by her victim.
As Christine jerks her car around in an attempt to shake off Mrs Ganush, shoves a ruler down her attacker's throat (only to have it spat back at her faster than a speeding bullet) and finally manages to banish Mrs Ganush from her car, we breathe a sigh of relief with her. But not for long, for the feisty Mrs Ganush manages to tear Christine out of her car, only to snatch a button off her coat and whispers strange (possibly Hungarian) words over it.
Walking back home with her boyfriend Clayton (Justin Long), Christine develops a yen to have her fortune told. Rham Jas (Dilip Rao), her fortune-teller,  sharply asks Christine if she has been messing around with Ouija boards, practitioners of the dark arts or blasphemy in the graveyard. Upon receiving a no to all three, he tells her that she has been cursed, as a dark spirit is evident in the energies that surround her.
This dark spirit, later identified by Rham Jas as the Lamia, proceeds to haunt Christine's every waking moment, as does the spirit of the now deceased Mrs Ganush her sleeping ones. As she coughs up copious amounts of blood on her boss, chucks up a fly at Clayton's parents' dinner table and gets plastered with Mrs Ganush's eyeballs and innards in a lifelike hallucination, Christine decides to enlist some serious girl power and esoteric help. Rham Jas helps her into a séance with Shaun San Dena, who has battled with and lost to the Lamia before. In the wake of the séance, we find Shaun San Dena dead, the Lamia gone (for now,) and Christine finally with the helpful option of passing on her curse to another by gifting them her accursed button.
While Drag Me to Hell is nothing like the darkly funny Evil Dead trilogy, it does have traces of the Raimi humour absent from the director's later offerings such the yawn-fest Rise or the depressingly disappointing remake, Grudge II. This film is peppered with shockers grotesque enough to make one lose their appetite for days; the effects occasionally comical, more gross than scary. While at the end of Drag Me to Hell, one did not find themself saying: "now these are 99 minutes of my life I'll never get back," do not buy this DVD expecting sophisticated horror. Watch it to kill 99 minutes on an otherwise uneventful Friday night. Watch it for the cracking séance scene which at one point made me want to break into an impromptu dance with the Lamia. Watch it if you are a loan-officer yourself, of course. But skip the popcorn, Drag Me to Hell might just put you off food for a while.
– Amina Baig
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOM |
