Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Mud and Guts
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

Many directors search for, but few find, that elusive intersection of chills and chuckles where Sam Raimi built his early reputation before being swallowed by the cultural weight of the “Spider-Man” franchise. When he made “The Evil Dead” in 1981, he was just 22, an ebullient boy whose movie thrummed with the excitement of its creator. Back then his stampeding camera, over-the-top imagination and cheeky way with foliage felt new and invigorating, a kick in the pants for jaded horror fans and a wake-up call for genre filmmakers.
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At a time when horror is defined by limp Japanese retreads or punishing exercises in pure sadism, “Drag Me to Hell” has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots. More jolting and juicy than the typical PG-13 offering, the movie has a perfunctory plot that centers on Christine (Alison Lohman), a tenderhearted loan officer at a California bank.

Eager to prove to her boss (David Paymer) that she can toughen up in time for a demanding promotion, Christine denies a mortgage extension to a milky-eyed crone with yellow fingernails and matching sputum (a gleefully disgusting Lorna Raver). Later, in the menacing blankness of an underground parking garage, the old woman expresses her displeasure. Flying dentures are only the warm-up.

This early set piece, a breathtaking blur of energetic body slams and artfully deployed office supplies, is much too cartoonish to be repellent. (Only Mr. Raimi can make granny-bashing hilarious.) Emerging from the melee cursed by her elderly foe, Christine spends the remainder of the movie fending off an evil demon and the concerns of her milquetoast boyfriend (Justin Long), an earnest professor tired of returning home each evening to shattered furniture.

As her character arcs from sweet-submissive to deadly determined (and her wardrobe from business chic to mud-drenched T-shirt), her director rushes through a disastrous dinner party and a demented exorcism with giddy velocity, accomplishing more with curling shadows and billowing drapes than with an army of computer-graphics specialists. And if he seems a little too fixated on orifice abuse — Christine’s mouth and nose are repeatedly invaded by things that spurt and slither and suck — his visuals never feel punitive. Mean-spiritedness is not his way.

Swift and sure, “Drag Me to Hell” unfurls in vertiginous, comic-book frames, like a long-lost issue of “Tales From the Crypt.” Neither small humans nor smaller animals are exempt from the carnage, which is orchestrated (by Mr. Raimi and his screenwriting sibling, Ivan) to recall memorable moments in horror-movie history. The most chilling of these is the sight of the old woman’s car (played by Mr. Raimi’s own 1973 Oldsmobile), idling in the parking garage like the malevolent Plymouth Fury of John Carpenter’s “Christine.”

As for Ms. Lohman, she suffers the indignities of the genre like a champ, morphing from mouse to hellion as her expiration date approaches. And while no one will mistake her journey — whose title sounds like a desperate plea from the director’s fan base — for a masterpiece, the movie has a crackpot vitality that breaches our defenses.

In films like “Darkman” and the thematically similar “Spider-Man 2,” Mr. Raimi revealed a gift for merging the human and the fantastic, sustaining poignant love stories in the midst of horror and revenge. His talent is greater than this, but for now this will do.

“Drag Me to Hell” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A feast of flies, phlegm, fisticuffs and embalming fluid.

DRAG ME TO HELL

Opens on Friday nationwide.