The Scenester: Drag Me to Hell, talking Up and more

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The Scenester: Drag Me to Hell, talking Up and more

POSTED: Friday, May 29, 2009, 4:00 PM

Filed Under: Movies | Scenester trailer!

Admit it, you want want more from this week's Movies section.

Sam Raimi's return to horror Drag Me to Hell didn't screen in time for publication but that didn't stop the impenatrable Shaun Brady. Here's what he had to say on the matter:

Drag Me to Hell - C+

Sam Raimi may be returning to his genre roots with Drag Me to Hell, but he does so in the manner of someone rolling up to the ramshackle family farm in a stretch limo. As giddy as the Fangoria crowd may be that this isn't another Spider-Man sequel, Raimi hasn't left comic books behind ' he's simply switched imprints, from Marvel to EC. At the same time, he's taking a winking look back at '40s-vintage Universal and RKO horrors, seemingly unaware that Val Lewton atmospherics and the cruel humor of Tales from the Crypt are wholly incompatible. The scare tactics ' gypsy curses, horned demons, creeping shadows ' come wrapped in quotation marks, not witty enough to be satire, too self-aware to actually be frightening, and therefore ineffective even as homage. The whole thing peaks far too early, with a fight sequence in a car involving a stapler and some loose dentures, but the pace slackens after that, lingering for long, dull stretches on the simpering leads (Alison Lohman and Justin Long), punctuated intermittently by gross-out setpieces that diminish in impact and eventually feel like Raimi simply quoting himself (down to a floating demon dancing a brief Bruce Campbell shuffle). Hopefully this is proof enough that an Evil Dead 4 would be a very bad idea.

See movie showtimes and buy tickets here.

More from Movies after the jump'But old lady demons aren't all we've got this week. Surely you read Sam Adams' review of Pixar's Up:

Pixar's movies usually tug delicately at the heartstrings but Up opens with a headlong lunge in their direction. Carl Fredericksen, initially voiced by Jeremy Leary, is an awkward, earthbound tot obsessed with the newsreel adventures of a Zeppelin-borne explorer. While playing airship with the aid of a single bright blue balloon, he encounters Ellie (Elie Docter), an equally gangly, equally obsessed girl, who has transformed an abandoned house into a make-believe aircraft of her own. The montage that follows compresses an entire life into a matter of minutes, from a youthful flirtation to marriage, pregnancy, adulthood and old age, including Ellie's miscarriage and her eventual death. Keep reading'

Director Peter Docter and Jonas Rivera sat down with CP to discuss their old man protagonist and how simple is sometimes more complicated:

Pixar has a track record for making movies marketed toward children, so the idea of a septuagenarian being able to hold a young theater-goer's attention is a daunting one. So Docter and Rivera simply tried to make him as funny and relatable as possible. "We've done it with mice ' well, rats, which is even more extreme. Bugs and fish and monsters and all that other stuff, so why not a man?" says Docter, who adds that Carl is modeled after the likes of ultimate curmudgeon Walter Matthau and Spencer Tracy (the likeness to the latter is uncanny). Rivera calls Carl the "greatest hits of our grandfathers."

Read the rest of our interview with Docter and Rivera here.

Movie Shorts

Enlighten Up - B

Rudo Y Cursi - B-

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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