OK, It's been a while. I got interrupted while writing my last review by a trip to Marseille (more on that later).
But first let me write about the movie that I saw over two weeks ago at the Mega CGR.
The first thing that surprised me was how well I could follow the story, given that the dialogue was in French. I had really worried that I wouldn't be able to understand anything the characters were saying, but I estimated I could understand about eighty percent.
A lot of it was simply context. I'd seen the trailer to Drag Me to Hell at least six times while in the U.S., so I knew the basic outline of the plot. More importantly the idea that a movie is a story told in pictures shone through quite well. If you really need to understand the dialogue to know what is going on, to understand the story on a basic level, it is probably a mark that the movie has failed on some level. In this case, Sam Raimi succeeded quite well.
Certainly the horror genre lends itself to visual storytelling perhaps more than other genres, but I think the principle still holds.
That being said, there was just so much about this movie that felt so ho-hum with me. It was about as good as you can get while being a completely formulaic movie on its basic level.
How was it formulaic? Well for starters, it starts with the first principle of modern horror: assume that all psychic medium powers are actually really. By corollary, all those palm readers that you see advertising on billboards actually are the real deal. That's the world of modern horror---the world of pure hokum.
The second formulaic premise of modern horror is to take some well-known or imagined supernatural legend (something you'd find written about in an ancient text with walking goats and pentagrams) and to assume that it is, in fact, real. This is essentially the premise that came out of The Exorcist (1973) (the template for half of modern horror), but in that original we were left with the doubt of what had actually happened, and with the naturalistic cover that maybe it was all in the heads of the people who had died by the end of the film. Modern horror takes no such precautions.
I don't mind this second premise (the reality of a supernatural legend) so much. It makes me remember some of my favorite camp horror flicks from my teenage years, such as Deadly Blessing (1981). But when it is coupled with the first premise (the ubiquitous reality of the power of petty psychic mediums), I find it barely watchable. This is not the universe I live in.
By far the more interesting part of Drag Me to Hell was the examination of postmodern sexual relations, which provides the actual source of the horror. The reason that the young heroine falls into the horror situation to begin with is her denial of her essential feminine priciple of mercy (by turning her back on the plight of an old woman about to lose her home).
Why does she do this? Because she is attempting to compete by the masculine rules of cutthroat competition in a dysfunctional bank. The story does an excellent job of establishing her motivations for doing this. The fatal moment of truth, when she denies the principle of mercy, is built in impeccable fashion.
The source of her motivations is essentially the corresponding weakness of her boyfriend (perfectly cast as Justin Long, the guy from the "I'm a Mac" commercials), who is unable to stand on his own, against his own mother. By extension, this mother in law is utterly stripped of all feminine qualities. Her only desire for her son is that he marry a high-powered career woman.
Thus we have the complete denial of the feminine life principle of reproduction in favor of sterile masculine competitive achievement. The mother-in-law contaminates her son, who is rendered impotent, and by extension contaminates his girlfriend who absorbs these values as the ones she must follow (against her own character nature) and winds up, in true tragic fashion, being dragged to, well, you get the picture.
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