Drag Me To Hell



Sam Raimi-Getting Started

Highly inventive US film director/producer/writer/actor Sam Raimi first came to the attention of film fans with the savage, yet darkly humorous, low-budget horror film The Evil Dead (1981). From his childhood Raimi was a fan of the cinema and before he was ten years old, he was out making movies with an 8mm camera. He was a devoted fan of The Three Stooges, so much of Raimi's film work in his teens, with good friends Bruce Campbell and Robert G. Tapert, was slapstick comedy based around what they had observed from Stooges movies. Among the three of them they wrote, directed, produced and edited a short horror movie titled Within the Woods (1978), which was then shown to prospective investors to raise the money necessary to film The Evil Dead (1981). It met with lukewarm interest in the US with local distributors, so Raimi took the film to Europe, where it was much more warmly received. After it started gaining positive reviews and, more importantly, ticket sales upon its release in Europe, US distributors showed renewed interest, and "Evil Dead" was eventually released stateside to strong box office returns.

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Drag Me To Hell Movie Review

by Charles Robertson

Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Sam Raimi uses a great title to cover up a lacklustre production. When you conjure up visions of hell, an audience expects more than a dead gypsy woman played with panache by Lorna Raver; coughing up fluids over a sweet loans officer from a nice bank. An audience would expect more than some shadowy left-over special effects from 'Ghost'. And while the ending is appreciated, it is not nearly horrific enough. Alison Lohman seems to be in the throes of being dragged to a compulsory visit at her mother-in-law's. Dileep Rao is a treat as the pseudo-liason to the dark forces apparently ready to do the bidding of a homeless gypsy woman. There is a terrific battle to the death between Alison Lohman's character; Christine Brown and the corpse of Lorna Raver's gypsy; Sylvia Ganush. The battle takes place in a grave, where our heroine is almost buried alive. While there are some nice special effects tricks, we wait in vain for the appearance of the fallen angel. Oh, there was some shadow puppet thing, in the window, but, like an Elvis-sighting, it proved to be nothing of substance. If the movie had been called Curse of the Gypsy Woman, I would not have been disappointed. And what does Sam Raimi care? He has and will continue to have a great body of work. From his early murkily-filmed Independent work to his current stamp on a slew of Hollywood films, Raimi makes money, a lot of money as an artist. And what can be wrong with that?

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Alison Lohman-Getting Started

How did Alison Lohman get her start? Alison Lohman is a native of Palm Springs, California. She grew up in a family with no showbiz connections but she always wanted to perform. By age 9, she had landed her first professional, theatrical role playing "Gretyl" in "The Sound of Music" at Palm Desert's McCallum Theater. At 11, Alison won the Desert Theater League's award for "Most Outstanding Actress in a Musical" for the title role in "Annie" and, by age 17, she had appeared in 12 different productions. An accomplished singer, she performed as a featured solo vocalist for Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and the Desert Symphony. As a senior in high school, Alison was an awardee of the National Foundation of the Advancement of the Arts. The offer of a scholarship to NYU's Tisch School soon followed but, instead, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career



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