Skip to main content

31 Days of Horror Movies - Day 10

 

We have officially crossed double digit entries and our PG-13 showcase continues with a modern cult classic that is both hilarious and spooky! If this is your post, here is the first entry of our "31 Days of Horror" Recommendations, including our gimmick for this frighteningly fun endeavor!

 

Day 10 - Drag Me to Hell

Our second Sam Raimi entry in the list and one that pushes the PG-13 limits to its grossest, yet deliriously entertaining, limits. Raimi's Drag Me to Hell is like a carnival of fun horror movie tropes wrapped in a story about the mortgage crisis and a morality tale about the power of greed. Drag me to Hell, complete with borderline Looney Tunes antics and Raimi's trademark sense of humor, is a return to form for Raimi after spending nearly 10 years in the Marvel world with Spider-Man. What makes Raimi's film so deliriously entertaining and wildly outrageous is that he takes the horror seriously but never forgets to have fun while doing it; basically its like being in a great funhouse of horrors with the director of Army of Darkness as your tour guide. Alison Lohman as Christine rises up to the challenge and delivers a completely committed performance that fits perfectly with the wacky tone that Raimi is shooting for with the film. What other movie is going to give you a story about a Romani woman wanting a loan extension for her house and then cursing the bank loan officer that denied her said extension with a truly frightening demon? The mix between horror and comedy is present throughout Drag Me to Hell in a way that might give uninitiated to Raimi's tone complete whiplash, but if you know what you're in for then this thing is a spooktacular blast. Lorna Raver, Justin Long (of Barbarian fame), Dileep Rao, and a scene-stealing David Paymer all know perfectly well what the tone of the film should be and more than deliver in spades. Featuring genuinely horrific and suspenseful sequences that showcase Raimi's ability to create tension, Drag Me to Hell also has absurd moments of dark comedy that would make The Three Stooges proud. In other words, a worthy successor to Raimi's own 1987 transgressive classic, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. 


*All of the recommendations that we make can be found at the El Paso Public Library Catalog!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

31 Days of Horror Movies - Day 16

  We are officially less than halfway through with our list! Yay! As you all have probably noticed we are fully in R rated territory and today's pick is a genuine slasher classic, not to mention a phenomenon that is still going strong 27 years later!  Day 16 - Scream (1996) The late, great Wes Craven was one of the masters of horror and Scream (1996) remains one of his crowning achievements. Following the Jason Lives model, screenwriter Kevin Williamson and Craven team up to deliver a film that practically revolutionized horror in the process. Having changed the face of horror in the previous two decades ( The Hills Have Eyes , and A Nightmare on Elm Street ) Craven does it again with Scream by crafting a movie that both references and adores horror but isn't afraid to criticize it. The story of Sidney Prescott and her fight for survival against the deadly Ghostface killer has all the trademarks of a fantastic Craven film, including incredibly suspenseful sequences, a terrify...
Post a Comment
Read more

31 Days of Horror Movies - Day 31

  HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  We have officially made it! If you've been watching along with us and choosing all our recommendations, then thank you! There's nothing else to say, other than without any further ado... here is our final pick! ( Cue the JC score ) Day 31 - John Carpenter's Halloween "The Night HE Came Home!" Of course it was going to be John Carpenter's classic! The alpha and omega of slasher films is the quintessential Halloween watch. The story of Michael Myers, or as he is better known in the film as The Shape, stalking a babysitter has basically become classic. A true watershed film and a benchmark for the genre, Halloween not only changed the game but it spawned countless of imitators leading to the entire slasher subgenre boom in the 1980s. This is another one of those films where direction is everything - Carpenter takes a page from Hitchcock's textbook and allows suspense to become the key ingredient of the film. Originally titled "The Ba...
Post a Comment
Read more

31 Days of Horror Movies - Day 18

  How do we follow up one of the greatest remakes of all time? Simple by recommending another classic that has truly stood the test of time from one of the most influential directors alive. Since yesterday we looked at unfriendly aliens, today we will switch things a bit by looking at some of the scariest entities of the genre... ghosts! Day 18 - Guillermo Del Toro's El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone) "¿Que es un fantasma? / What is a ghost?" With that simple question, Guillermo Del Toro starts, arguably, his scariest film. The story of a young boy who discovers terrible and unforgivable secrets at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War is one of the great works of Gothic horror. Called by Del Toro as a "companion" film to his 2006 Academy Award winning Pan's Labyrinth , The Devil's Backbone  is a classic ghost story that balances drama and horror with elegance and dazzling filmmaking. Just like all of Del Toro's work, Backbone ...
Post a Comment
Read more