HOLLOW BONES

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones

Fifteen years after Peter Jackson’s international breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures (1994), New Zealand’s virtuoso of the digital spectacular rekindles his passion for fantastical landscapes and the charred innocence of pubescent girls with The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Sebold. 

Steadily attaining a foothold in Hollywood’s upper echelon since Creatures, Jackson has reached the film industry’s twin zeniths: he owns multiple slots among the highest-grossing films along with multiple Academy statues.  Appropriately, his aesthetic has assumed the grandiosity befitting his status alongside the Spielbergs and the Camerons.  Like the former, Jackson has an itch to intersperse small, “personal” projects between his slate of Megabudget Romps, but, like the latter, he’s also developed, stylistically speaking, a crippling sense of magnitude.  During The Lovely Bones, an intimate portrait of a family ravaged by tragedy is pancaked under the weight of PJ’s operatic style and broadly swathed dramatic instincts.  Jackson is clearly a superior storyteller to Cameron, and his King Kong remake beats the hell out of Spielberg’s most recent stabs at spectacle, but he’s lost the ability to fly low and maneuver his lumbering style into coexistence with delicate scenarios.  An auteur in the truest sense, his voice irrevocably booms across, over and through his films, producing an inhospitable environment for anything save Event Films and Summer Tentpoles.  This development is all well and good – and is more likely than not to leave audiences satisfied -- so long as he learns to avoid material such as Sebold’s novel.  

The Lovely Bones, as we’re told in breathy voice over by Susie (played with appropriate gracelessness by Saoirse Ronan), tells the story of how the Salmons family processes their eldest daughter’s unsolved murder.  The film is split in half dramatically: one section is set in a kind of sun-drenched purgatory in which Susie frolics with other murder victims and contemplates the division between life and death, while the remainder takes place in a dreary suburb where her family threatens to unravel after her killing.  Mark Wahlberg – enjoyable, but straining credibility as a middle-aged, middle-class Daddy -- plays the relentless father who refuses to let his daughter’s killer go unpunished.   A forgettable Rachel Weisz is Susie’s flaky mother and Susan Sarandon cameos as the alcoholic grandmother, though both never quite find suitable niches within the film. A subplot involving a romance between Susie’s former crush and a clairvoyant farmer’s daughter never really pays off or generates much friction.

The lone dramatic idea that Jackson and his screenwriters can muster is that the living and the dead must relinquish one another if they’re to find happiness.  Daddy and co. must move on and enjoy what’s left of their own lives, while Susie must refrain from meddling if she is to acclimate herself to the world beyond.  Most troubling about the film is the way in which happiness after death, a somewhat absurd notion crafted here from pure kitsch, is defined.  We spend a good deal of time lolling about Susie’s eternity as she agonizes over what’s become of her family.  It is an afterlife of luscious pastures, gazebos and lighthouses, the culmination of which (once the departed have learned not to fret the dealings of the living) is a blindingly white meadow for Susie and her newfound gal pals to trample through.  Pretty uninspiring stuff, and it all looks like a botched collaboration dreamed up by Thomas Kincaid and Lisa Frank.  One has to wonder if this is Jackson’s ideal resting place for the deceased, or if he’s merely burrowing his way into the metaphysical fantasies of suburban teenagers.  The film doesn’t ultimately say, thus frustrating viewers who attempt to orient themselves within the filmmaker’s jumbled formulations.

Also tragic is the way in which the geography of real tension, the domestic turmoil of the fanatically devoted father and the evading mother, is abandoned in favor of Susie’s paradise of digital de-lites. A born storyteller, Jackson occasionally scares up real juice as the Salmons clan struggles to keep themselves intact while the neighbor who murdered their daughter (the terrifyingly mundane Stanley Tucci) contemplates his next victim.  The opportunities are squandered, however, as Jackson is more concerned with exhibiting celestial reflecting pools and swooping camera movements that would both feel more innocuous in Middle Earth or Skull Island.  The quintessential Jackson shot – the camera arcing in a hovering sweep over the landscape, resembling the POV of a plummeting hang-glider – is disjunctive in this context.  It’s simply too bombastic for the material. 

Those familiar with Jackson’s upchuck classics Meet the Feebles (1989) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead, 1992) might chortle at hearing descriptors like “subdued” or  “unassuming” applied to them, but as excessive as each is in terms of content, there is a much looser, modest quality to their aesthetic and execution than what’s on display in the histrionic The Lovely Bones (1).  Jackson’s ascendant style since Feebles has little retrospective character.  His formerly delicate execution is no longer tenable due to his (well-deserved) stature as the Modern Spectacular’s greatest talent.  From the standpoint of the horror convention crowd, it’s a lamentable forfeit.  But, in this case, the Midnight Movie’s loss is the Multiplex Blockbuster’s gain.     

Beyond Tucci’s marvelously unsettling performance, The Lovely Bones’ chief source of satisfaction is its rough, ambling structure.  Gone is the carefully etched dramatic triangle of Jackson’s recent films, which navigate rather single-mindedly toward massive, conclusive battles.  Though laden with clumsy foreshadowing and banal metaphors -- both visual and literal – The Lovely Bones is refreshing and intriguing during the moments when the story refrains from announcing its intentions so directly, thereby allowing for anticlimaxes and diversions that offer something close to satisfying viewing.  Nestled within a glut of ham-fisted dialogue and cheesecake effects, these could be considered the film’s more novelistic qualities (2).  Still, as with the rest of the film, these virtues are swallowed by Jackson’s thunderous vision. 

The Lovely Bones / USA, UK, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 122 min. / Directed by Peter Jackson / Written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens / Based on the novel by Alice Sebold / Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon / Wingnut Films, DreamWorks SKG 

Notes:

1 – The former is a backstage drama set in a bizarro Sesame Street populated by degenerate muppets; the latter is an inverse Night of the Living Dead, wherein the hero must keep his zombie mother from escaping their home. Though anarchically comic in tone, it may be the bloodiest film ever made, which, depending on one’s point-of-view, may be Jackson’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker.

2 – I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the source novel, though have heard from trusted sources that the most glaring divergence between the film and the book is in the depiction of the crime: in the former Susie is murdered in a bloodless sequence, while in the book she is brutally raped and butchered.  Make what you will of Jackson’s refusal to shoot such a sequence. 

PLASMA RIFLE ENVY

Humanity Covets Alien Firepower in Neill Blomkamp's District 9

As the faux-documentary footage near the beginning of District 9 reveals, years ago a race of large, insect-like aliens visited earth only to be quarantined -- after a failed stint a living amongst humans -- in a Johannesburg shantytown. Unable to return to their mothership, which ominously hovers over the decrepit slum, the “prawns,” as they’re known, are eventually placed under the jurisdiction of a large weapons conglomerate known as MNU. The plot details the moral reawakening of corporate wonk Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, oddly resembling filmmaker Spike Jonze), who is nepotistically placed in charge of relocating the troublesome shantytown residents to a tent-city concentration camp further removed from human civilization.

Following this set up is a messy social allegory in which Van De Merwe is accidentally infected by a serum that slowly transforms him into a prawn. Forced thereafter to live amongst The Other, he conspires with a scientist prawn (the only intelligent member of the race that the film offers us) to steal back the confiscated serum, which also, most conveniently, is capable of powering the aliens’ mother ship back to their home planet – where that is exactly, or what it might have been like, the film doesn’t say. And gradually, after so promising a start, we arrive at the standard paradigm for the racially-charged action picture: abusive white man is forced to live among The Other, realizes his host's humanity, and through his own heroism manages to facilitate his former foil’s emancipation. It’s a tired formula, more than a little offensive, and the innovations to it that this film offers only underscore the cliché’s insensitivity and lack of historical perspective.

The film’s most obnoxious problems rest in its dramatic treatment of the alien race: the film argues that our inhumane treatment of the aliens has led to their barbarism, yet also holds that same barbarism up for laughs, as the poverty-stricken prawns are viewed with derision, save for the aforementioned scientist, more or less the archetypal noble savage. So, which came first: human atrocity or the aliens’ own coarse nature? Neglecting the history of the prawns – or, more precisely, communicating it entirely through munitions – leaves the question frustratingly stunted.

Most problematically, the filmmakers (this is Neill Blomkamp's first feature) and MNU's nefarious corporate suits have a parallel interest in the subjugated aliens, namely their superior weaponry, which, through complex biotechnology, can only be operated by prawns themselves. Thus, within the story, there are black and gray markets for prawn flesh, which criminal gangs seek to ingest and MNU hopes to synthesize with human DNA, both with the goal of facilitating the use of the alien weaponry by human hands. Similarly, the filmmakers covet the extraordinary (and extraordinarily stylish) firepower of the prawns; as Wikus’ left hand becomes entirely prawn, he’s able to gun down corporate mercenaries and warlords with extreme prejudice. The candy-colored laser guns and pulsating explosives in the prawn arsenal clearly resemble the imaginative cavalcade featured in first-person-shooter video games, which boasts increasingly sadistic means of eliminating enemies (1). Human bodies (those of the evil bad guys) are shredded, exploded and lacerated with this firepower, dwarfing the effects of the shotguns and sniper rifles sported by the human baddies. The quest for brutal alien technology would easily make for great science fiction, but the filmmakers’ helpless indulgence in fetishized weaponry deflates any higher thematic ambition, leaving the film with a blown opportunity at its core. Even Tarantino’s most recent self-professed death-trip Inglourious Bastards can’t claim but half of District 9’s body count.

Both the faux-documentary approach (persistent, yet violated as narrative convenience dictates) and the shaky, hand-held camerawork strike against the film, the former amounting to lazy exposition, the latter, ostensibly reinforcing verisimilitude, achieving a confused mis-en-scene. Still, there are occasional bits of well-choreographed, adrenaline-pumping action, but they are rare in the film and scarcely compensate for the objectionable narrative development.

Lastly, the highlight of the film must be the digital rendering of the prawns themselves, which appear as lifelike and textured as any computer-generated creature has ever looked. The seamless situation of these finely wrought beings within a grainy documentary image makes the achievement of Peter Jackson’s Weta workshop all the more impressive. But while Weta held up their end up the bargain in creating a wholly realistic (light years beyond the computer constructs populating Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series) alien race, Blomkamp has ultimately failed in injecting these creations with a commensurate humanity, not realizing that his would-be allegory depends on it.

District 9 / USA, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 112 min. / Directed by Neill Blomkamp / Written by Mr. Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell / Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope and Sylvaine Strike

Notes:

1 - It’s worth noting that there is a tracking shot late in the film which resembles the camera angle of FPS games – gun perched firmly in the bottom of the screen, as the background skirts by wildly – a shot not entirely uncommon in contemporary action pictures, a truly depressing cliché that shows no sign of fading away. Fitting, though, that it would show up in this picture considering Blomkamp was Producer Peter Jackson’s pick to helm the abandoned big screen adaptation of the uber-popular FPS Halo.

RECLAIMING THE HAMBURGER

Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan mine the catacombs of American Agriculture in Food, Inc.

This documentary detailing the coup by which Big Business overtook the American diet does an admirable job in presenting an easily digestible history of agro-business, following characters both tragic (the grieving mother-turned-food-advocate whose son was killed by tainted hamburger) and comic (an organic, free-range farmer fond of non sequiturs) as it attempts to persuade audiences to re-commandeer their eating habits and restore a healthier, more ethical method of sustenance in the national culture.

Executive produced by Eric Schlosser, author of the classic Fast Food Nation, and with Michael Pollan (of Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food fame) acting as special consultant (both appear extensively as interview subjects and narrators), the film has a substantial pedigree, prominently featuring two of the most visible crusaders for the betterment of the American digestive system. And the natural/healthy foods movements could not have better spokespersons: both men are cool-headed and impassionate in their presentation, as well as exhaustive researchers and unequivocal, plain speakers. That Schlosser is seen devouring a hamburger (“Still my favorite meal,” he says) in the first half hour of the film goes a long way toward dispelling notions of elitism on the part of the filmmakers and their subjects. If anything, the work of Pollan, Schlosser and director Robert Kenner is one of outraged populism, and, unlike the work of Michael Moore, just may be effective in changing minds. Their persistence is never offensively articulated, their confidence is always unwavering and their scholarly insights unimpeachable. With a bit of luck, the other columns of the green movement will unearth similarly engaging and effective figureheads instead of relying on automakers and oil companies to bring a diluted version of their message to the public. They may be short on answers, but at this point the asking of their questions is a worthy enough achievement.

However brilliant its two guides, the film itself suffers from hyperextension, as it fails in truly ruminating on each of its proposed topics. Divided into upsettingly brief chapters, the film surveys a riveting amount of material, but merely skims the surface in most of its presentations. Covering everything from immigrants’ rights to federal oversight and the history of McDonalds, the through line of the film is the rise of multinational corporations and the increasingly nefarious tactics they’ve employed to keep us hooked on the shit they serve while keeping us out of the kitchen. Lawsuits, lobbying and loopholes in immigration policy all contribute to the maintenance of the stronghold that multinational food manufactures hold on the chain of food from the field to the table. That this is the subject of a (semi-)major American motion picture is nothing short of heroic, even if the digital effects employed throughout (an unflattering byproduct of Moore Syndrome) are annoying, the basic decency of the work is unquestionable. If mildly clever digital cartoons (including businessmen on a conveyor belt being ratcheted ominously toward Ma and Pa’s farm) make the difference between Joe Six Pack seeing the movie or staying home, then it would be foolish to say they detract from the film itself. They may annoy, but they do not undermine the message.

Those familiar with the written work (or video lectures and interviews) of Schlosser and Pollan may not find much new here, but Food, Inc. functions well as a square-one document, providing enough information and gung-ho spirit for audiences to leave the theater equipped and primed for action. Fittingly, as the film closes, a series of titles implore audiences to act by shopping at farmer’s markets, eating foods in season and contacting their legislators. This section embodies both the virtue and the flaw of the entire enterprise: the zippy graphics swirl, drop, fade and disappear text across the screen like an eager PowerPoint presentation yet convey useful, pressing information. Could be worse, considering the precedent set by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock in the past decade, in which the documentary feature has been the most popular and lucrative that it’s ever been. The braying of their contemporaries only underscores how valuable the practiced oratory of Schlosser and Pollan is to the effectiveness of the film.

As with most recent agitprop documentaries, the best Food, Inc. can do is inspire audiences to pursue a more thorough familiarity with the subject via literature or political involvement and consequently become activists in their own right. A documentary like this pleads for its own irrelevance, and rightfully so.

Food, Inc. / USA / 2008 / Color / 94 min. / Directed by Robert Kenner

KISS KISS BANG BANG

Contemporary Children’s Cinema vs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Unlike just about everything that passes for children’s entertainment these days, 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is both gloriously weird and genuinely mischievous. While nothing in the film offers up the sublime in quite the same manner as Pixar’s remarkable run of animated films of the past fifteen years (the safest bet for a high water mark in contemporary children’s entertainment), this film, about a crackpot inventor, his adorable kids and their customized jalopy (the onomatopoeically christened Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) redeems its utter lack of sophistication through the sheer glee it generates by simply being odd. But just like a small child’s recitation of a personal narrative, the film loses its way easily and often, strains sweetness too often, is prone to gaps in logic, and is occasionally frustrating in its inability to get to the point. That it is also capable of a jouissance nearly unthinkable in today’s market of kiddie entertainment – unforgivably congested with bratty miscreants and cuddly icons-in-waiting bound for fast food containers – mutes its comparatively trivial shortcomings.

Moreover, the film’s utter lack of willpower and restraint gradually become assets; it is as petulant and impulsive as its target audiences, and for this Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should be applauded and revived. In a brassy confluence of style, the film’s authors managed to find common ground between the absurdism of postwar British Humor, the French le fantastique, and Grimm’s fairytales, with American Tall Tales thrown in for good measure. This isn’t to say that each genre is explicitly pursued through the narrative, or that overt stylistic hallmarks can be easily pinpointed, but merely that the filmmakers successfully drew upon preexisting ideas and themes to such a dizzying extent that they produced something as familiar as it was (and is) bizarre.

Children’s entertainment has since dedicated itself to retellings of folk and classical mythology, or attempts at ironic pop hipness. The former works well with apprehensive parents keen on wholesome entertainment (while boasting a patina of esteem), while the latter is intent on blurring the line between entertainment for children and adults (the “something for everyone” family film.) If adults are to enjoy fare like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they are forced to indulge more completely the inner tyke; as such films boast no innuendos or cultural allusions with which to stoke the pop culture-infused data banks of the post-pubescent set. Ironically, it could easily be argued that this strategy ingratiates such films with adults even more so than their entendre-packed counterparts, because an escape from the oppressions of adulthood is one virtue that children’s entertainment has to offer the beleaguered parents of its target demographic. Cast in this light, it’s not hard to understand why a bizarre (and, more importantly, innocent) fantasy like Spongebob Squarepants has experienced such enduring success. Likewise, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a considerable box office success in its day, and while plenty of the snide patter that has since been marketed to children has exceeded its modest financial success, it’s not likely that these works will endure as even minor works in the history of children’s films. Instead, the plastic chotchkies bearing the likenesses of their protagonists will exist in landfills far longer than the films themselves will survive in the cultural imagination.

The plodding first half of Chitty details the life of a hapless, widowed inventor, Caractacus Potts, (played by Dick Van Dyke) and his affectionate, precocious children struggling to make ends meet in rural Great Britain. That Van Dyke’s distinctly American accent is at odds with his children’s cockney delivery barely registers as just one of the film’s thousand inconsistencies. The few satisfactory scenes in film’s first act all involve Potts' inventions, which include an elaborate Rube Goldberg-like Breakfast machine, an overeager hair cutter, a jet pack, and musical lollipops, the very things that provoke and inflame the child’s imagination. These few ingenious sight gags aside, the first hour or so of the film lack much of interest, but as Van Dyke (keeping a promise to his beloved children) restores an old jalopy for a jaunt to the beach, the film comes to life when the full capabilities of the car announce themselves in a scene of inventively staged, rotating rear-projection. As the car spreads wings and takes flight (naturally escaping from pirates), the family (accompanied by the confection heiress Truly Scrumptious [the unmemorable Sally Ann Howes]) find themselves immersed in a fantasy world, and the audience in a wonderfully goofy frolic.

Though handsomely (if often clumsily) directed by British television veteran Ken Hughes, the film’s overall spirit could more properly be attributed to co-writer Roald Dahl, who deviated noticeably from Fleming’s source novel. Dahl’s trademark brand of dark, yet winsome humor permeates the film’s far more interesting second half, though an early scene set in a candy factory calls his Willy Wonka books to mind. Hughes’ realization of his and Dahl’s screenplay benefits immensely from an aesthetic program which relies heavily on techniques borrowed from the various New Waves gaining traction worldwide at the time of the film’s production: grand, unmotivated tracking shots, quick zooms, wide angle lenses and a quicker approach to editing. The aesthetic eccentricity gives the film a roughhewn, chaotic quality that breathes life into even the most tedious subplots while reaffirming the narrative’s more radical impulses. The anarchic glee of the film is equal parts The Beatles’ Help!, and Tex Avery animation. If the film can claim a single inspiration, it would be that of Richard Lester, whose punchy delivery and schoolboy’s wit feel their way into each scene of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with nary a smirk or wink. The film is at its best when its idiosyncrasies pass by unassumingly, suffused with a characteristically dry British grin and a bouncy rhythm.

As the story-within-the-story develops, the Baron of Vulgaria and his wife, the child-hating Baroness, kidnap all the children, the grandfather, Ms. Scrumptious and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself at various points. A collector of wonderful machines, the Baron dispatches two classic bumbling henchmen (variation of the silent film villains fond of tying damsels to train tracks) to procure the car for his collection. The sequences in which our heroes trek through Vulgaria and the Baron’s palace are the highlights of the film. As each of Hughes and Dahl’s creative impulses crescendo, Caractacus masquerades about the palace as a staggering marionette (a ruse designed to distract the Baron) while simultaneously staging a revolt of slave children imprisoned in Vulgarian sewers. The children occupy the palace and assault the distinguished Vulgarian gentry in a gesture of juvenile anarchy reminiscent of the Jean Vigo classic Zero for Conduit. That a film designed for young people can embody the spirit of a classic film without lazy homage intended to tickle the pedantic, cinephilic synapses of older moviegoers, is an odd notion currently, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang succeeds in nodding to the Vigo masterpiece without attempting to supplant it. Hughes and Dahl don’t see the recurrence as clever, another odd notion in today’s climate of aggregate references and juxtaposition. The slightly altered and certainly modest extension of a narrative situation or creative idea apparently belongs to a bygone era, perhaps because it leaves open the possibility that the creators themselves are not in on the joke, or deceptively expect to pass the transgression by a dopey audience. Today, both audience and filmmaker seek to be on the same page, that is, both in on the joke. The self-consciousness of this attitude masks needless, counterproductive guilt, and has done nothing but detract from the formerly easygoing nature of popular entertainment, becoming especially pervasive (and proportionately repellant) in work made for children.

Late in the film, audiences are also treated to one of cinema’s most memorable maniacs: Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher, a villain authentically menacing, yet such a caricatured oddity that he fails to evoke real horror. The performance is worthy of canonization as Helpmann’s wide-eyed snarl provokes squeamishness in even the most hardened adults. Something of a dandy, the long snouted Child Catcher is the court officer responsible for sniffing out hidden children in Vulgaria so they may be apprehended and punished by the evil Baroness. Swinging his noise about in search of a child’s scent while merrily prancing through the streets of Vulgaria, the Child Catcher embodies sexual perversion and cold-blooded innocence in equal measure. A forerunner to both Pee Wee Herman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, the Child Catcher’s anguished squeals – as he is visited by revenge at the film’s end – rival Peter Lorre’s plea for clemency before the makeshift court at the end of Fritz Lang’s M. If the film is granted one legacy let it be this character, who could equally be at ease in an episode of Star Trek, a Tolkien adaptation or a reworking of Alice in Wonderland.

The Child Catcher’s subplot, in which helpless children are tucked away in the attics, sewers and basements of Eastern Europe, pursued by half-crazed monsters, is loaded from a historical perspective, but the goofiness of the overall plot and the film’s pretzelling of time (the Baron’s court borrows elements from at least three centuries of aristocratic European décor and hosts a kind of stateless, pan-European nobility), prevent the adult viewer from pursuing strands of allegory too far.

Sadly, the film sags to lifelessness during nearly of its musical numbers, which grind the viewer’s nerves to tatters through a combination of maudlin sentimentality and poor craftsmanship (a similar blight on the adaptation, three years after this picture, of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Exceptions of note include the title song, which is far too charming to ever be cloying, and one of the later numbers featuring a duet between the Baron and Baroness: as the two skip through a ditty of rosy-cheeked marital affection, the Baron attempts increasingly ambitious methods of murdering his wife – including a vintage trapdoor and a faulty chandelier – who cheerfully reappears ceaselessly as though spun from a Looney Tunes sketch. Had there been a few more scenes of such saccharine/macabre antics laced throughout the picture, it would be an irreproachable masterpiece. As is, warts and all, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang beats the hell out of the competition, even forty years later.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang / UK / 1968 / Color / 144 min. / Directed by Ken Hughes / Written by Mr. Hughes and Roald Dahl, from the book by Ian Fleming / Starring: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Anne Howes and Lionel Jeffries

SELLER'S REMORSE

Alison Lohman as a haunted banker in Drag Me to Hell

A largely effective, enjoyably slimy neo-schlock picture from Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell takes root at dead center in the vast middle ground that stretches between the modi operandi of the two trilogies that have thus far defined him: the stateliness of Spider-Man and the kitsch-horror of Evil Dead here join forces, although it is the relative restraint of the former that supersedes the crazed, dime store ingenuity of the latter. This tipping of the scales will more than likely make the film more palatable for audiences accustomed to the banality of Spider-Man, but it keeps Drag Me to Hell from realizing the potential for inspired loopiness seemingly promised by both title and author.

Taking modest potshots at the U.S. Banking industry and zero-accountability corporate culture, the plot concerns the ambitious loan officer Christine Brown, played admirably by Alison Lohman, who, in an attempt at gaining favor with her callous supervisor, declines a loan to an aging gypsy woman, and is consequently visited by a vengeful, supernatural curse. While encouraged to identify with the plight of the young, essentially decent former-Midwesterner (Christine is carefully portrayed as a misguided pawn in the corporate hierarchy, sharply contrasted with an unscrupulous coworker) audiences are still treated to the perverse, timely thrill of seeing a banker thrown about her bourgie home by invisible demons or spraying a bloody nose all over her superiors. As Christine’s idyllic life in California begins to fray, she grows increasingly desperate, eventually consulting an astrologer and a medium, seen in prologue being defeated by the same spirits decades before, to cast the goblins out, presumably so she can get back to peddling bad loans and romancing an achingly vanilla blue-blood played by Justin Long.

Over its brisk 99 minutes, we are privy to countless leaking and spewing orifices, insect infestations and violent séances, as Ms. Lohman attempts to rid herself of the gypsy woman’s curse, and therein lay the film’s delights: this is jolly body horror, a happily juvenile (though certainly not stupid) approach to the twin anguishes of embodiment and corporate lending. Fittingly, the film is awash in mucus, blood and vomit (often exchanged between hosts), affirming its lineage of exploitation horror. It is disappointingly dissimilar from its forebears, on the other hand, in that its gags are crafted digitally in several key sequences, giving the bodily fluids (along with the other special effects) a digital sheen that removes any trace of menace from the splatter.

Raimi’s career has thus far been a wild-card, cementing for him an image as a more modest variation on Steven Soderbergh’s one-for-me/one-for-them trajectory: reeling between unassuming efforts such as A Simple Plan (1998) and The Gift (2000) to the epically expensive Spider-Man films (2002-07), his jovial wit behind the camera seems to have no permanent generic home base, which is frustrating for the taxonomically-inclined cinephile. Oddly, he has exhibited much more consistency (in terms of classification at least) in the fifty or so films he’s produced, most of which could easily be squared as horror pictures or (wonderfully) gaudy retellings of classical mythology (1). But whether it’s hacksaws or swords and sandals, Raimi’s trademark is a goofy, chortling sense of humor, unabashedly earnest in execution. The signature is sorely missed in his latest film; a lapse that will, with any luck, be remedied in future efforts.

Shockingly, given its pedigree, the film’s attempts at humor are lifeless and undeveloped, not so much funny as fleetingly amusing. It’s uncertain whether or not Raimi saw the high camp of Evil Dead as risky at this juncture in his career, or simply rushed the picture so he could move on to the next Spider-Man installment. The director does make tentative, if unsuccessful, stabs at the goony slapstick of Evil Dead (a key scene at the end involving a disturbed grave exhibits great potential but yields neither scare nor chuckle) but fails to inject the proper amount of lunacy in these sequences, each of which is far too tight, whereas the Dead films were airy and affable while still managing more than a few genuine scares. This film’s seriousness cannot jibe properly with its oddball wit, to the detriment of the overall result. The film could have worked better played either way – as overtly comedic horror tale or unsettling haunting picture – but Raimi finds himself unable to strike the proper balance in this context, a feat which once was his strength.

Ideally, this thing would hit susceptible audiences late at night on cable television, as it functions better as a pleasant surprise that exceeds mild expectation than it does as a mid-career effort by a Hollywood titan ostensibly at the height of both influence and craft. It has the labored charm of a late-blooming cult classic, and it’s not unlikely that it will be considered as such in the future. As of now, however, it clashes when placed alongside Raimi’s bona fide midnight romps, which still exert power enough to fill convention houses and midnight screenings to capacity. Though financially successful beyond expectation, there is little here to inspire fervent devotion among genre fanatics, and it’s possible that the box office tallies will work against the film as it’s scrutinized by future generations of splatter buffs – not to mention film critics.

Taking into account all of the moronic pictures utilizing 3-D technology that have paraded through theaters during the past few years, it’s a pity that Raimi opted out of employing the latest innovations in multidimensional cinema, as this film is one of the precious few that could conceivably be improved by 3-D: the leaky wounds, pus geysers and dislodged dentures would be the stuff of inspired, William Castle-esque schlock if sent hurtling toward audiences. Such a move could have redressed the effects of the aforementioned glossy carrion on display throughout the film, because, unfortunately, it remains the Achilles’ heel of digital effects that they’re inept at portraying the corporeal or simple detritus, instead casting physical monstrosity in texture-less polygons and thereby sapping them of the ability to frighten and unnerve, the coveted results easily achieved by the same practical effects (latex, pea soup and raw meat) used by exploitation mavens for more than half a century. Computers have been a serviceable facilitator of science fiction for nearly two decades at this point, and they are certainly the future of horror as well, but a premature embrace of the technology and its limited capacities threatens to neuter an old-fashioned, spooky picture like Drag Me to Hell until these practices are up to the task. Perhaps all this film needs is time enough for its unconvincing special effects to signify quaintness, thus endearing it all the more to the horror throng. This is unlikely given the bland characterizations and pulled punches endured throughout this conspicuously PG-13 outing, but the throng can dream… and wait.

Speaking of, Dead-ites and Raimi fanatics will no doubt anxiously await the finished product of Raimi’s forthcoming remake of the first Evil Dead film, but Drag Me to Hell is, unfortunately, a spotty, inauspicious warm-up, one that is hopefully not a harbinger of what’s to come.


Drag Me to Hell / USA / 2009 / Color / 99 min. / Directed by Sam Raimi / Written by Mr. Raimi and Ivan Raimi / Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao and David Paymer


NOTES:
 
1 – The former includes The Grudge (2004), The Boogeyman (2005) and 30 Days of Night (2007), while the latter is comprised mainly of syndicated television series such as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), Legend of the Seeker (2008-2009), Hercules: The Legendary Journey (1995-1999), and the forthcoming Spartacus: Blood and Sand. The third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness (1992), which Raimi directed and co-write, combined elements of both genres quite successfully.