31 Fates Worse Than Death! (#8: Drag Me to Hell)
10.24.09 By: William Goss
Alright, there's going to be spoilers from the get-go, but if you're a good Horror Squad reader, you likely caught Sam Raimi's so-called "spook-a-blast" in theaters or recently on home video (and enjoyed the, um, heck out of it).So this entry could go one of two ways. We could concern ourselves with Christine (Alison Lohman), whose gypsy-spurning behavior results in a three-day-long curse. She is bashed around her house, given the mother of all nosebleeds, forced to kill her kitten (and for naught, it turns out), embarrassed before her potential in-laws, driven to pawn most of her possessions, whacked with a sizable gravestone, and then -- in spite of all her best intentions and elaborate schemes -- dragged down to hell for some good old-fashioned eternal damnation.
OR we go with Christine's boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long). He is forced to see his love fall prey to forces that he -- the psychiatry major and eternal skeptic -- fails to comprehend, embarrass herself before his parents (who weren't so keen on her to begin with), and then see her dragged to hell before his very eyes. How do you explain that away? How do you even live with that? Is that not an equally damning Fate Worse Than Death?
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Reader Comments (1 of 1)
Kimberlyat 10-27-2009
I hated this movie with a passion. I think having to sit through another viewing would be a fate worse than death.
Chris Bowyerat 10-28-2009
Glad I'm not the only one. I didn't find it nearly as funny as most others apparently did (save for one brilliant moment; you can probably guess which), didn't really find it consistently scary (the sudden noises lose their effect pretty quickly), and I just found the whole thing to be needlessly manipulative and in bad taste. It reveled in the fate of its characters a bit much for me.