Drag Me To Hell Review

With its resurrected corpses, revenant ghosts, skeletons in the closet, and endless remakes and sequels, horror is arguably the most nostalgic of genres, always looking back even as it moves forward - and in Drag Me To Hell, nostalgia is served in a double helping. Even if the story unfolds in the LA of today (following a brief 1969-set prologue), Sam Raimi is harking back to the curse-driven plotting and EC Comics morality of the 1950s and 1960s (right down to the jaw-droppingly unreconstructed depiction of 'gypsies'), while also revisiting the joyously over-the-top take on B-movie frights that he pioneered in the 1980s with his Evil Dead trilogy.

Self-conscious about her accent, her figure and her rural background, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is more experienced as a bank loan officer than her arrogant colleague Stu (Regie Lee), but is less likely to win the coveted assistant managership because she is too nice to her customers. She has been in a loving relationship with boyfriend Clay Dalton (Justin Long) for a year but is still treated with contempt by his well-heeled mother (Molly Cheek). It is always easy to get behind an underdog - especially one who is self-made and sweet-natured - and so Christine has us rooting for her from the start. Which is just as well, because she is about to take her first step towards the dark side.

Desperate to impress her boss (David Paymer) and against her own better nature, Christine decides to turn down a mortgage extension request from elderly, infirm Mrs Ganush (Lorna Raver) - only to find herself on the receiving end of a terrifying curse that will see her stricken with orifice-invading flies, nosebleeds from hell, cakes come to life, and horrific visitations from the implacable demon Lamia, before, in three days' time, being dragged permanently down to the fires below. Despite the protestations of a sceptical Clay, Christine turns to spiritualists Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) and Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) in the hope of averting her imminent damnation, and discovers just how far she is willing to go to keep the devil from the door.