Premise: Young up-and-coming member of modern society pisses off a member of the old country. Demons, possessions, violence, and downright eerie things follow.
Stars: Alison Lohman (Matchstick Men) * Justin Long (the Mac guy) * Dileep Rao
Story: Banker Christine (Lohman) has a nice life with her milquetoast boyfriend (Long) and is working on a promotion. While doing so, she angers a local Gypsy woman (whether she's Gypsy, Hungarian, Roma, or just straight out of the Army of Darkness, you're not sure) who gets her revenge by placing a curse on the banker. Christine now has three days to get rid of the curse, or the demon summoned to avenge the wrong will take her physically to Hell.
Review: Pure Raimi. From the roving cameras to the eerie violins to the rushing winds to the madcap slapstick that occurs, this is vintage Evil Dead material. The film is a classic-style horror film - strange shit all of a sudden starts happening to an otherwise urbane twenty-something who has a limited time to save herself. Lohman does great work with the acting chops, going from sunshiney-goodness to wicked badass and proves that she can carry a genre film. Indeed, Christine could easily be seen as an inheritor of Ash, Bruce Campbell's character in Raimi's Evil Dead films, in her reactions to the weird happenings going on after her encounter with the Gypsy.
(Whether this odd timing pays off as DMtH plays against Terminator: Salvation, Up, and Night at the Museum 2 in terms of bank, I don't know, but hopefully better things are in store for Ms. Lohman. This is easily a film that would do well against the expected Saw-type tripe that will appear this Halloween season.)
Long, Rao and the rest of the cast are merely supporting characters with little to do except carry scenes and dialogue. The film is a basic character-study (what would any twentysomething do to avoid being sent to Hell?) and plot. It moves quickly, going from ominous to threatening, to grotesque to wicked funny to scary. It's driven by the music of genre regular Christopher Young and reminds one of Raimi's horror trilogy - sudden violins, troubling bass, all playing off sound effects designed for gotcha moments and suspense building.
The movie is literally a shock-and-go supernatural horror film designed to get the pulse pounding - even when you are expecting a shock and it comes straight as predicted, I could literally feel my pulse quicken after the moment. Raimi's body of work includes films designed around this - the aforementioned Evil Dead series - and other genre pictures - Darkman, moments in Spider-Man 2 - and allows the director to manipulate the audience in a manner unlike the more subdued A Simple Plan and Spider-Man 1 & 3.
One can easily see this film becoming a member of the Raimi ouvre that appears every Halloween.
Overall: Good
Other Sites: IMDb * Wikipedia * AllMovie * Rotten Tomatoes
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