Review - Drag Me To Hell

I had the pleasure of watching Drag Me To Hell this past weekend.

I was going to switch actually. Admittedly this Alison Lohman or whoever she is, didn't really grab my attention, you know what I mean? She's not outstandingly hot and she's not cute, she's just your average sort of plain moderately pretty type girl who works in a bank and has a decent working brain in her. Spoilers to follow...

So this girl, and I forget the character's name, denies this old gypsy an extension on her house, and the old gypsy curses her. Now by cursing her, I mean, she has a knock-down, drag out BRAWL with this woman, who must be at least 2000 years old, and yet, as someone commented on while I was discussing the movie with them, the old woman takes more damage than a Terminator could survive and just keeps coming. Well, I won't go that far but the brawl is pretty awesome. So then this gypsy takes a button off the girl's coat and curses it and gives it back to the girl, thereby sealing the girl's fate.

Apparently, a Lamia, or "Black Goat" as the spirit is referred to, is going to haunt the bank teller for 3 days and then finally take her soul to hell. I know what you're thinking. THREE DAYS TO PARTY!!!! But, no, apparently this bank teller chick was some fat girl in the past, and isn't really a party animal, so she's all like "No, I want to live and make little boyfriendlets with my rich college professor boyfriend." And the Lamia visits her the first day and it's all like "Arr, Grr, No!"

So she tries to make right by the old gypsy crone and as it turns out, the old gypsy crone has DIED. Which, doesn't surprise me at all, as I said, she was like 2000 years old. One of the funnier aspects of this movie is how the old crone even beats the shit out of this bank teller AFTER she's already dead. Yea, the girl trips, falls onto the crone's body, which then collapses the table leg, causing the corpse to fall onto the girl and disgusting bile comes puring into the girl's mouth and the corpse's hand gets caught in her hair and rips some out. And after that, the corpse's eyes are staring at her balefully.

I'm noticing some themes I want to take an aside on, here, one, that the poor girl literally has disgusting things shoved into her mouth at every turn, I mean, old ladies' arms, fly larvae, vomit, blood, flies, bile, corpse-juice, mud, water from an open grave, and I can't even remember what else. I don't even want to THINK about what her college professor boyfriend puts there, because I'd catch something just thinking about it. The second theme in this movie is that the old lady kicks this girl's ass like 3 times, TWICE after the old lady is dead, so this bank teller girl is no kickboxing champ, you get my drift? Third theme, and this is mirrored by the gypsy woman's young and slightly hot granddaughter or whoever, and I can't stress this enough, this bank teller girl deserves what she gets. I mean come on, she kicked a 2000 year old woman out of her home because she was bucking for a goddamn promotion. Really. Yea, I know. Certainly an unsympathetic choice for a main character, I was cheering the lamia and the old lady on at every turn.

So the bank teller contacts this crazy hare krishna looking psychic dude who tells her to sacrifice a small animal and try and appease the Lamia. I mean, he's obviously way out of his element here, but he at least let's the bank teller know of possible ways to ward off the demon, which is good, we can watch the bank teller jump through hoops before she gets taken to hell. personally, I would have told the girl to try giving me oral sex, that it might scare off the lamia if she had my holy seed in her belly, but I'm a twisted fuck because I know it wouldn't help her anyway and I figured I'd want some before she got away, you know what I'm sayin?

Anyway, so the second day the lamia comes and picks the bank teller up and swings her around and she's all like "Oh god I need to do something fast!" so she kills her kitten. No, that wasn't a euphemism for masturbation, she really does kill her little pet kitten and buries it in the yard. Since the kitten wasn't doing anything to even remotely annoy her at the time, I thought the lamia was being overly nice to her. I mean, come on, all it did the first night was smack her in the eye one time and the second night, tossed her around a room a little. I'm not even that gentle with my blow up doll, let alone a real woman, so I have no idea why this bank teller chick is getting so upset.

So the bank teller goes back to Mr Hare Krishna, who enlists the aid of an old mexican cleaning lady who happens to be a powerful psychic medium. And they do a seance thingy and summon the lamia in an attempt to seal it into this goat so they can kill the goat and thus be rid of the lamia. This results as expected, a really bad ass looking goat that bites the guy trying to kill it, possesses that guy, and then proceeds to wreak havoc on everyone concerned before the cleaning lady can dispel the shit out of it and save everyone. Which leaves them with one option left.

Apparently, whoever owns the button is the subject of the curse. Mr Hare Krishna nearly faints every time he sees it and they decide to seal it in an envelope and make a gift of it to the old lady's corpse. Yes, apparently you can give stuff to dead people. I would say "who knew," but this one time I had sex with a dead sheep and gave it a wicked case of herpes, so I am way ahead of the game here.

So this is where things break down in the story for me. On the way to dig up the old lady's corpse, they drop the sealed envelope with the button in it and get it mixed up with a bunch of papers. Knowing this is the old switcheroo gag that i've seen in a hundred movies, I rolled my eyes. Yea, apparently they get it mixed up with this old dime the bank teller gave her boyfriend earlier in the movie, which is coincidentally also in a sealed envelope (you'd think they'd write, oh, I don't know, CURSED GODDAMN BUTTON on the front of the envelope, but NOOOOOOOO, they aren't that bright), and the girl digs up the old gypsy's corpse during a thunderstorm, nearly gets her ass kicked again by the old dead lady, almost drowns, but finally manages to plant the envelope in the lady's mouth.

At this point in the movie, everything goes right for the bank teller. Her boss calls her from work, lets her know she's got the big promotion and her rival for the job has been fired because of his shady behavior. She's heading off to her rich bf's cabin, and at the train station, her bf pulls out the envelope with, you guessed it, the cursed button in it. Since she never actually gave her bf te button, even though he's now holding it for her, her doom is sealed and she finally gets dragged off the train platform and lands into a gaping hole of fiery hell in the earth and gets sucked down into the blazing bowels of a flaming fiery death pit of hell. I cheered.

In all a pretty decent goddamn horror movie. I jumped on several ocasions, as they use that old, "it's okay, everything's fine now, calm down little one, the bad scene's over and we're about to transition to another OH GOD THERE'S A DEMON IN MY EYEBALL!!!!" trick. Not there was a demon in anyone's eyeball in the movie, they just use surprise and the most godawful disgusting vomitious bile to simultaneously scare the bejeesus out of you and make you turn away from the screen and vomit on your brand spanking new, cherry red stiletto heels. You know, if anyone out there besides me just bought brand new heels. And if you did, do you have ANY idea how to get the smell of vomit off them? They are ruining my Oh-so-sexy feeling.

And yea, I meant to finish this one last week but all hell broke loose in the form of not finishing it before I left work and then memorial day weekend happening. I am easily sidetracked, what can I say.