With My Heroine and Eric Rohmer's Fighting Skills, We Can...

Drag Me to Hell (2009)
directed by Sam Raimi
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

A good candidate for a future revision of Los Angeles Plays Itself - "Not even branch manager David Paymer could afford the monthly payments on the house in Echo Park that Alison Lohman's tormentor tears to shreds" - Drag Me to Hell is what the murdered pets call "good fun." Special effects have gotten worse in the last twenty-eight years, but Sam Raimi could sell regurgitated embalming fluid to a socialite, so let him sell a haunted handkerchief to me. Horror movies, even more than romances, should always have women as their heroes. No one makes a muddy, flooded burial plot look better, and no one else can convincingly muster the requisite fearlessness needed to defend powder blue coats and pale yellow sundresses against the everyday endings that make the course of life so sad. That would re-write The Evil Dead, of course, but a man like Bruce Campbell can always find his way in the world.