Film review: Film of the week - Drag me to hell

DRAG ME TO HELL (15) ****

DIRECTED BY: SAM RAIMI STARRING: ALISON LOHMAN, JUSTIN LONG, LORNA RIVER, DIALUP RAE

PITCHED somewhere between the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Three Stooges, Sam Raimi's deliriously enjoyable Evil Dead trilogy was a riot of blood-drenched sight gags, ghost train jumps, vomit-comet camera work and, thanks to star Bruce Campbell's willingness to do nearly anything on film, a remarkable testament to the entertainment value of putting your protagonist thoroughly through the wringer.

Happily, Raimi's new film pretty much follows that template. Marking a gleeful return to the kind of schlock-shock horror comedy that launched his career, the Spider-Man director is still virtually peerless when it comes to delivering a funfair-style assault on the senses.

Unlike The Gift, his last foray into the realm of the supernatural, Raimi is completely off the leash here, delivering ghoulish fun with a hoary old plot that gives him enough leeway to serve up a series of sick, slick, expertly executed scares. Eyeballs get popped, insects are ingested, teeth get coughed up – along with blood, embalming fluid and even, at one point, a cat – while rulers, spades, staples and blades are put to imaginative use fending off evil.

Stuck in the middle of all this is the actress Alison Lohman, who proves a worthy successor to Bruce Campbell by willingly throwing herself around the set, servicing Raimi's slapstick approach to the genre with plenty of determination and good humour.

She plays Christine Brown, a sweet, hard-working, non-confrontational loan officer in a small Los Angeles bank, who is starting to get the feeling that she might be lacking the ruthlessness to get ahead in life. A country girl at heart, she's feeling especially low when we're first introduced to her. Not only has she just learned that the sneaky, sycophantic new guy at work is in the running for the promotion she's quietly had her eye on, she accidentally overhears her boyfriend's mother running her down over the phone for lacking the drive to make something of herself.

All of which causes her to go against her better instincts one morning by refusing to help an elderly gypsy woman called Mrs Ganush keep her home by granting her an extension on her mortgage payments. Big mistake. Taking umbrage at being shamed in public, the old woman promises to make Christine pay – and it's a promise she soon makes good on by attacking Christine in her car as she prepares to leave for the evening. Combining spooks and splat in the first of many refreshingly meaty set-pieces, Raimi diligently cranks up the tension with some creepy and deceptively simple visual tricks, before unleashing the full force of his film-making arsenal in the subsequent in-car smack-down, featuring Christine and Mrs Ganush knocking seven bells out of each other.

Played to glorious, gross-out perfection by Lorna Raver, the latter makes for an amusingly hideous villain. With her long, brown fingernails, cloudy glass eye and chiselled false teeth, she ups the film's ick factor considerably, especially as she vomits over Christine, gums her face and puts a curse on her, condemning her soul to hell in just three days' time. Thenceforth Christine finds herself in a race against time to save her soul, fight back against this old crone and possibly improve herself along the way.

As Christine is plagued by nightmares, gruesome delusions, not to mention a goat that seems to be the gatekeeper to hell, Raimi and Lohman have plenty of fun, transforming her from meek innocent into pro-active horror heroine.

What's great about this, though, is that Drag Me to Hell turns out to be a modern fright flick that doesn't trade in the misogynistic overtones of torture porn. The gore here may occasionally turn your stomach (in a good way), but it isn't relentlessly sexualised; it doesn't rely on exposed flesh, or young women being butchered with big knives to juice the audience.

Lohman – a beautiful actress reminiscent of the young Jessica Lange (a role she effectively played in Tim Burton's Big Fish) – gets us on Christine's side and keeps us interested in her by digging deep and discovering new levels of resourcefulness, not stripping off and running around in her pants.

The latter is something Raimi realised was unnecessary a long time ago. Though his castigation during the Video Nasty debacle of the early 1980s was mainly the result of the hysteria of the times, rather than the tone of his tabloid (and government) targeted Evil Dead films, Raimi did quickly regret the inclusion of a scene in the first film of a woman being sexually assaulted by some trees. Made when he was just 19, he put its inclusion down to bad judgment on his part, an inability to realise that causing gratuitous offence like that would actually work against the entertainment value of a film that in every other way was a gloriously over-the-top, deliriously entertaining, and fairly harmless splatter-fest.

A few more film-makers could do with learning that lesson. They could also do with studying the way Raimi places a premium on actually delivering some inventive and entertaining scares in Drag Me to Hell, rather than simply finding ever more grisly ways to kill people on screen (the easy option for a horror film), or neutering the shocks for the sake of a less prohibitive rating. Drag Me To Hell proves it's possible to satiate gorehounds and scare them and make them laugh. It's a descent into the underworld that, for once, is worth taking.