Tag Archives: hilarity

Drag Me to Hell

So, you know who I like? Bruce Campbell, star of such fine shows as The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. and Burn Notice, and of such fine movies as Bubba Ho-tep and Army of Darkness. As it happens, he is closely related via both cinema and pre-existing friendship with one of the finest horror directors of the ’80s, Sam Raimi.[1] After what feels like an extended absence, Mr. Raimi has returned to his genre of origin with what is simply the finest PG-13 horror movie I’ve ever seen.

In Drag Me to Hell, a sweetly ambitious loan officer runs afoul of a gypsy and her curse, and is then run through the gauntlet by a tormenting spirit who, in less than four days, will drag her to hell. (Unexpected plot twist there, I know.) As a technical exercise, it is quite close to perfect. From the soundtrack orchestration to the foley artistry, every moment of audio is, er, picture perfect. And speaking of that, the framing of the shots and the unusually relentless daylight[2] are every bit as well done on the visual side of things. But, however good, you didn’t come here for a piece of technical achievement. And that’s just the thing: as an actual horror flick, it is classic Raimi, straight to the hilt. The laughs are hysterical[3], in the most literal sense of the word, over the top in the kind of measure needed to make up for equal measures of jumpy scares and existential, well, horror. Because[4], the underlying message of this movie is that it doesn’t matter how underserving you are. Sometimes, you can piss off the wrong person, and your life will go extremely pear-shaped extremely quickly. That right there is an unpleasant truth that extends well beyond demonic table dancing and workplace sexism.

Really, my only complaint? No Bruce Campbell.

[1] You may be aware of some of his more recent work.
[2] I mean, relentless for a horror movie. A lot of other kinds of movies probably would not be noteworthy on this point, for even more daylight than this.
[3] There are by-God running gags. So awesome.
[4] Aside from a ten second shot of shifty-eyed Alison Lohman at the dinner party with her boyfriend’s parents, in which she signed, sealed, and delivered her ability to deliver black comedy. I am officially a fan of this woman.

Dearly Devoted Dexter

51UeGHq5w4LMan. I am way too far behind right now. It is not pretty. But, so anyway, I read Dearly Devoted Dexter, the second book in the inspired-a-Showtime-series. I’m continuing to enjoy it all out of proportion to how much I think I should, though I believe this one was helped a lot by the series’ plotline divergences after the first book/season. Plotwise, Dexter and his sister and his nemesis Sergeant Doakes team up to face a killer who physically removes just about everything from his victims, while still keeping them alive and in perfect physical health. It’s… kinda creepy! (Well, technically, all of Miami homicide and CSI and whatnot are in on the team-up, but realistically, I mentioned the important people.)

I don’t know if he was written a little differently in the first book, or if I was so busy following along from plot point to familiar plot point that I missed it, but the Dexter in this book is hilarious. Yeah, he’s pretty good at stalking and killing bad people who probably deserve it.[1] And he’s good at realizing that he doesn’t comprehend people and their emotions, though I can’t make up my mind if that’s a character deficit or a choice, despite his claims. But he also constantly lauds his brilliance and ability to blend in among the normal people around him, even though the constant evidence of his descriptions belies it. He makes good deductive leaps, of course.[2] But he also falls into traps I saw coming miles away, apparently because of his not-acknowledgedly-pompous belief in himself. And for someone who does everything exactly right to keep from being picked out as odd by people around him, there are a lot of people who seem to recognize that something is off key, a fact he also rarely accepts. It is on the whole an entirely amusing confluence of unintentionally unreliable narrator, Scoobies mayhem, and disconcerting serial killer mentality.

That last bit is what I a) anticipate enjoying the most in future books and b) feel the most guilty about. Because, apparently, his girlfriend’s children are poised to turn into Dexter: the Next Generation, and of course he is delighted to teach them what to do and not to do, just as his foster father taught him. Instead of being all squicked out by sociopathic pre-teens, I really want to see where it goes. So, um, oops?

[1] If you don’t buy this central conceit of the book, then you are really guaranteed to hate it, and should not read.
[2] It is a mystery novel, after all!

Napoleon Dynamite

I saw Napoleon Dynamite yesterday afternoon. This is good, because now I only have one thing left to do before my trip. This is also good because I really, really liked it. It’s bad, though, because I have no clear idea how to express what about it I liked. I mean, even to myself. It has everything I don’t like in a movie. Deliberately framed shots that scream ‘look, I’m a movie over here!’ Characters in which I have no legitimate interest. Slice of life reality as the setting. A plot resolution that came essentially from nowhere. And yet, there’s some kind of perfect storm thing going on, because I thought that the combination of all the elements was great, such that none of them really even bothered me during the few times I wasn’t actively enjoying myself.

Perhaps it’s because everything touched by Mormons is pure gold.

Probably not, though. I know it was funny, but funny isn’t really enough to make me want to see it again and recommend it to people, by itself. Lots of things are funny. Most things don’t leave me with a goofy smile on my face just thinking about bits and pieces of it, or having a similarly goofy conversation last night with a friend who independently saw it for the first time the same day, with the whole ‘”Do you remember the cow?!” laugh of hilarity while everyone else stared at us’ thing going on. This did, though.

And, yeah, I eventually came to care what happened to a few of the characters. This is unusual, in movies where I don’t care during the first ten minutes or so.

You may note I haven’t described the plot. This is because I don’t even really know what that was, although I know a little better than I know why I liked it so much. In short, it’s about this kid in high school in Idaho, the template upon which high school geeks are drawn, and a snapshot of a few weeks in his life during which Things Change. Which still doesn’t say a lot, since that is (except for the character and duration being specified) that point at which any story should be told, if it expects to be even mildly interesting.

In short: Weird scenario, but funny. Mormons. Good, but I can’t say why exactly. Is this review worthless? I think it is.