I've never been a fan of PG-13 horror, though not for the same reasons as most who decry the rating.
It's not that my cup of blood need to runneth over until the silver screen turns crimson. No, for me, the problems with the rating are more of the crowds it attracts. That rating gives young teens an opportunity to strut and preen in the theaters, in a battle of wills where each attempts to loudly display their horror fortitude by snickering, talking, yelling, and texting while the film spools on.
It does not take a psychiatrist to tell you this behavior masks their hidden fears, but it does diminish the theater-viewing experience for those who love to soak in the sudden legitimate screams of terror from their fellow patrons.
Director Sam Raimi, after dabbling in such mainstream fare as the Spider-Man series, comes home to roost in his horror roots and is determined to silence those little peacocks by startling them into submission with the PG-13-rated Drag Me to Hell.
The film is a welcome return from the man who had audiences alternately gasping and guffawing so many years ago with his Evil Dead films. They are films that are so obviously in the director’s mind when he was filming Drag Me to Hell with its many moments of jolts, and violence straight out of a vintage-era Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
Allison Lohman stars as Christine Brown, a chipmunk-cheeked loan officer struggling to make her way up the corporate ladder. In an attempt to impress her boss (the much-missed David Paymer), Christine denies a loan to a crazy-eyed gypsy woman who places quite a nasty pox on the young girl. She soon has hellish visions and actual encounters that envelop her life, most of them involving a rotting variation of the same gypsy woman attempting to vomit some sort of substance into her mouth.
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