The Fly-- And Return of The Fly

While my family was up to it's usual weekend meshugas I set our DVR up to record Drag Me to Hell, the Sam Raimi horror film I had heard a lot of good things about. My plan was to watch it after everyone else had gone to bed-- not that it was guilty viewing, but I didn't think they'd like it. (No-- a guilty viewing experience would be something like buying The Human Centipede: First Segment on on-demand pay-per-view. I can neither confirm or deny I did this... at least until the cable bill shows up.)

Well, you really don't have secrets if you have a DVR: everyone can see your upcoming selection lit up with a big red dot on the cable guide, and they ask you all sorts of penetrating questions about it, so much so it's just better to give up the pretense and watch the damn movie with your family.

I needn't have worried. Sam Raimi made a delightful little horror flick, a nice admixture of his very singular filmmaking strengths: humor, horror, body-cavity violations, and fast-paced slapstick. I think he was trying to show up those punks out there with their torture-porn Saw and Hostel films and the yawner remakes of 80s slasher flicks how it's done.

Drag Me to Hell can even be called a bit of a high-brow effort. It's the very timely story of Christine Brown, a bank loan officer who refuses to extend the mortgage of an old Gypsy woman, and gets cursed to hell for her trouble. So it's a bit like Thinner (1996) but with better effects. But an alternate reading is available: do we believe our eyes and the special effects and take her supernatural harassment as real, or is simply her mind crumbling from overwhelming guilt? It's a lot like Mullholland Drive (2001) in that respect.

There's a wonderfully creepy motif running all through Drag Me to Hell: a fly. it shows up in the intro flashback, later when the curse settles in the fly re-appears, doing stuff like flying up Christine's nose while she sleeps.

So the film ends and I put on an episode of "Breaking Bad" we haven't seen yet. It's called "The Fly" and it involves the two main characters' episode-long pursuit of the titular insect, which is loose in the lab and threatens to contaminate the batch of meth they're making.

Funny how things line up.