Bloody brilliant horror, this! Like Evil Dead II, it’s laugh out loud disgusting with a few jumps. Thank goodness for Sam Raimi, because my generation missed the truly decent cinema horrors of the late 70s and early 80s and have had to put up with predictable teen slashers and morally bankrupt Saw crap. Some of them were alright, very good even, but this is what horror films at the pictures should be about. It’s not as good as the old films, but it’s good enough to give I Don’t Bloody Care What You Did Last Summer the shits and that’s all that matters.
This entirely wraps up what I thought when I saw this today.
While the film follows well-known patterns for the most part, Sam Raimi will mostly step in and put a twist in it. Nothing we never seen before, but certainly presented in a unique way that makes it almost feel fresh.
The story is typically straightforward with a predictable end, but a couple of not so predictable moments along the way. Girl gets cursed, finds out she’ll be Dragged To Hell by a Lamia demon, gets desperate to break it and risks losing everything in the meantime. Lohman is excellent; looks gorgeous, but isn’t whiny, while Raimi gleefully throws her around like a rag doll. Justin Long is her boyfriend and is quite happy to be Justin Long. Very good, but doesn’t really have to do a lot. Ted Raimi is fun as Christine’s manager and Reggie Lee is particularly funny as Stu.
Ted Raimi was in there...? Christine's direct superior was played by David Paymer (who is most famously being know for being Shorty that John Travolta was supposed to Get. Which one was Raimi?
I missed Bruce as well, but at least we got to see the director's yellow I-don't-know-what-brand car; the latter also having been present in (almost...?) all of his movies since Evil Dead.
How the heck did raimi think he can get away with this ending? I saw it coming from a mile away. My personal choice would have been to give it to Stu and have him get messed up... Now, I do like the ending in general, actually, it just doesn't work like that today. We have seen too many twist-ending films that we can spot these things very easily. Maybe there would have been a way to make things less obvious, but the sealing of the coin in the beginning seemed so unnecessary that it had to be important ::) And when you know the ending, then the whole part at the cemetery just can't really provide any excitement.
Despite my mild rant about the ending, I still think it was a fresh take on old themes and well worth your horror-loving time.