ScreeningNotes’s review published on Letterboxd:
Or, How (Not) to Succeed in Business: Halloween Edition
Pure, essential Sam Raimi. I went through this entire movie thinking it was from the mid-90's—which isn't to say that it looks bad (quite the contrary), it just looks purposefully dated and (as a result) super campy. It's derived from that quirky element of Sam Raimi that lead to the famously misunderstood dance in Spider-Man 3. It's the kind of movie where 90's CGI looks right at home. It has a possessed, talking goat. (And this amazing moment already mentioned by sydney.) I wouldn't call it a horror-comedy, but I definitely laughed through a good amount of it. That's also not to say that the horror is completely undermined—there's still plenty of uncomfortable tension and some great nightmare-fuel imagery—but if you go into this expecting straight scares you'll probably be disappointed.
That said, what I really loved about Drag Me to Hell was the alienated point of its enunciation. The main character is someone who (like me) doesn't quite fit into the world around her. This alienation most often manifests itself in an oral anxiety (which can itself be read as a struggle with eating disorders), but I just totally identify with the condescension she gets from every quarter: from her boss, from her coworkers, from her boyfriend's mother, etc. You feel awkward in social situations and people think you're just an awkward kid and that you ought to be able to kick it, but it feels to you like you're stuck with a piece of harvest cake that has an eyeball in it squirting jelly at you and you don't know what to do about the goat man banging on the door that nobody else can hear. It's obviously a pretty surreal depiction of this kind of social anxiety, but the emotion at the core of it is something I really get at a profound level.