This movie is a freaky deaky, audience-eating, gleeful, mad-ass, freak-out trash and it knows and revels in it. It takes pigs-blood baths in how much fun it’s having at being just pure unadulterated, unapologetic b-movie trash. But a B movie that’s made with smarts, style, skill, and joy.

I haven’t had THIS much fun at a horror movie in years – it’s a really good scare-machine that’s just as happy making you laugh wickedly at something on screen or cringe in delight because it so artfully sets up something awful that’s about to happen… and then lets it happen and its every bit the freak-out moment that it was setting it up to be.

The movie is basically a palette cleanser for Sam Raimi who started his career in this kind of movie (Evil Dead). But he’s been working in mainstream Hollywood long enough (Spiderman) that I think he wanted to take a step back and get back to his lower budget roots. And it worked.

Drag Me to Hell is a smart, sick movie made with a budget. It’s what I want when someone tells me to lighten up, it’s just a summer movie. Yeah, I’ll say, but it doesn’t have to be lowest common denominator – it can still be smart, well-acted, well-produced junk if its going to be junk – not just junk because no one gave a shit making it so long as people spent their money.

The movie is PG13 and earns its R rating. It only avoids an R, I think, because its so self-knowing and cheeky about its gore and its gross-outs – you know the audience seeing this is going to have FUN with its ick so I think that tone somehow landed it a PG13. Or, hell, maybe its MPAA hypocrisy and the guy who made Spiderman can have his PG13 if he wants it.

The thing is, I’ve been talking about gross-outs and laughs, but the movie really is kind of scary too – some good shock jump cuts and surprising moments – it earns its scary badge at the same time its earning its freak-out weird badge, its sick joke badge, etc.

Score: 86