Drag Me to Hell

Director Sam Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name
(the Evil Dead trilogy). Playing a bank loan officer, Alison
Lohman bears the brunt of this film’s supernatural humiliations.
Lohman’s Christine Brown is putting the finishing touches on her
self-reinvention as a young professional: eye on a promotion, renting
hillside real estate in Los Angeles, and heading toward marriage with
an upmarket boyfriend. One day, smothering her conscience to impress
her boss, Christine refuses to take pity on an ancient Gypsy woman
about to lose her home (Lorna Raver, with a malevolent dead eye). The
woman hisses a hex, and Christine’s life plan is derailed by a chain of
diabolical interventions. A visit to a psychic confirms that Christine
has had a demon sicced on her, and, if it isn’t appeased in time,
she’ll get the title treatment. Still, her getting bonged on the head
with a cross for forgetting the Golden Rule doesn’t indicate a
particularly nuanced moral vision. Does Raimi — who began his
career on a shoestring in the Tennessee woods and now commands $300
million bonanzas — actually believe professional ambition
should be punished with eternal damnation?