Judging from last night’s screening of Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to the horror genre gets the sort of reaction you’d imagine the director was after: screams of terror dissolving almost instantly into self-mocking laughter at having fallen for the director’s tricks yet again. This is a movie that goes bump in the night – if you want your date jumping into your lap, it’s the perfect choice for a night out. But let’s not get carried away equating its modest charms with the demented energy and deranged inventiveness of Raimi’s early work, most notably Evil Dead 2.

Actually, “charms” is not a great word choice, unless you find the prospect of a wizened Gypsy removing her rotting dentures in extreme close-up charming.

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Sam Raimi gets back to basics with Drag Me to Hell, serving up the type of comic-horror mayhem that defined his career-making Evil Dead trilogy, and which is here infused with a shrewd, gleeful strain of current-events topicality. Though equipped with the PG-13 rating that inevitably makes horror fans wary, Raimi’s film pulls few punches in the nastiness department, its action coated in spurting bodily fluids emanating from nasty orifices, and dressed up with plenty of rotten skin, fetid corpses, and demonic insanity to satisfy genre purists. It’s not the quantity of ickiness that makes Drag Me to Hell a madcap, go-for-broke entertainment, however, but the energy Raimi brings to his material, the director orchestrating his over-the-top gruesomeness with such joy that it proves infectious, each subsequent jolt-scare (replete with accompanying turned-to-eleven sound effect) and gross-out maneuver perfectly pitched to be both frightening and hilarious. That balance is considerably tricky to achieve, and unlike in his leaden, overstuffed Spider-Man 3, Raimi effortlessly pulls it off, with his swift pacing, whip-smart edits, and hyper-goofy cinematographic zooms, pans and twirls transforming the proceedings into a delirious haunted house carnival ride.

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The Star Trek reboot won’t be in theaters until May 8, but Paramount is already going forward with a sequel. The studio “has hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof to pen the screenplay. J.J. Abrams, who directed and produced the latest chapter, is onboard to produce the follow-up alongside his Bad Robot partner Bryan Burk. No decision has been made yet on whether Abrams will return behind the camera for the sequel,” Variety reports.

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are Going the Distance. That’s right, Drew Barrymore is making a romantic comedy. You can only get this sort of shocking news right here at the Morning Deal Report.

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We all know that Kate Hudson is on a mission to find out how many multiplexes she has to stink up before studios will stop paying her to do it--perhaps in some kind of ultimate homage to her mother, the star of Protocol, Wildcats, and Overboard--but did you know that she's also destroying your chance for romantic happiness? It's true! Scottish researchers have concluded an enquiry into effect of exposure to the cliches of formula romantic comedies, and the results are not encouraging. "We have this idea," says psychologist Bjarne M. Holmes, "that out of six-and-a-half billion people, we're somehow going to meet our predestined soul mate, who happens to live in the same neighborhood or work in the same place. I love how that always happens." (If this were a romantic comedy, Dr. Holmes would be the wisecracking best friend played by Joan Cusack. Tip your hat.) The Los Angeles Times reports that "In the study, recently published in the journal Communication Quarterly, Holmes and fellow researcher Kimberly Johnson selected 40 top-grossing romantic comedies released from 1995 to 2005 -- including such titles as What Women Want and You've Got Mail -- and analyzed their content, cataloging each scene of romantic action such as gift-giving, kissing, declarations of love, weddings, involvement with exes and even acts of deception in the pursuit of love."

In the process, they seemed to find "a correlation between the preference for such entertainments and the students' curdled concepts about love." People who watch enough of the things seemed to take as gospel some of the more dubious "messages" that are repeated over and over in movie after movie: the "predestined soul mate" concept; the always helpful idea that the strongest relationships are those built on lies and deception, and even that these relationships, after a brief spell of soul-searching, will only grow back stronger after your loved one discovers that you understand him so well because you've been reading his mail and also that you're now really the long-lost Princess Anastasia; the clinically idiotic concept that your partner should be able to divine your deepest thoughts through some kind of lover's ESP, which means that your relationship would be sullied if you stooped to actual, straightfroward communication; the inexplicably popular notion that men and women are totally different species and that the secret of romantic success is to crack the gender-based code of behavior that governs each of us. (This last one has apparently gotten a big boost from He's Just Not That Into You, despite the fact that it is universal knowledge that anything that comes out of Justin Long's mouth has got to be horseshit.) Researchers also failed to find a single successful marriage that involved an incident of one partner blurting out a lengthy declaration of undying love to the other in full view of a bemused crowd while breaking up their wedding to an unamused third party or after a mad chase to the airport.

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We’re all about the new and exciting features here at the Screengrab, so here’s another one for your dining and dancing pleasure. Those three of you who have succumbed to my repeated shameless plugs for my book Hick Flicks may recall the 24-hour hillbilly horror movie marathon I inflicted upon myself and my four-legged life partner Maury the Wonder Chibeagle in the interests of cinematic scholarship and medical science. I don’t think I have another 24-hour marathon in me, but I’m willing to pull the occasional all-nighter in the interests of furthering my research and edifying you in the process. Let’s kick it off with a subject near and dear my heart: Bigfoot movies.

As you three Hick Flicks readers may also recall from the book, the 1970s were the heyday of Sasquatch Cinema, but the last year or two has seen an unexpected revival of the genre. After spending the night with a handful of the latest Bigfoot movies, I think I’ve figured out why.

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Hollywood loves John Lennon.  It loved him when he was alive, and ever since he had the good taste to die and stop being such a crazy troublemaker, it's loved him even more.  Playing Lennon in the movies is almost as profitable as playing Elvis in Las Vegas; as you'll see below, there seem to be no less than two professional actors who more or less make their living portraying the charismatic ex-Beatle.  Still, the gig isn't without its problems; only a few years after his death, Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, helped produce a (mediocre) TV movie called John and Yoko:  A Love Story.  All seemed to be going well until it was discovered that Mark Lindsay, the near lookalike they'd cast to play Lennon, was actually named Mark Chapman -- which, er, just happened to be the name of John Lennon's assassin.  Friday, New York and L.A. will see the premiere of The Killing of John Lennon, Andrew Piddington's big-screen directorial debut, which tells the story of that Mark Chapman, but which doesn't actually feature anyone playing John Lennon; here's a few worthwhile films that do.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)

Although many have tried, the fact remains that nobody does a better job of playing John Lennon than John Lennon.  Moreso than any of the other Beatles, Lennon's combination of unassuming good looks (in contrast to the pretty-boy cuteness of Paul McCartney) and genuine charisma (as opposed to the merely amiable Ringo Starr) made him almost as compelling a figure in real life as he was on record.  Richard Lester's irresistably fun day-in-the-life pseudodocumentary is a great showpiece for Lennon's natural likeability, even if Ringo tends to get the funniest lines, and it also serves as a virtual blueprint for rock star vehicles; it continued to be echoed on down through the years, with even movies like 1997's Spice World following its basic premise and format.  Lennon would make a handful of other movies before his murder in 1980, but nowhere else is it as obvious why the public so took to the Beatles back in their heyday.  No subsequent hagiography, conjuration or commentary could possibly do a better job than A Hard Day's Night of illustrating exactly what it was like to be there, and why John Lennon became so important to his generation.

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It can't have been long after the first documentary film was made that some enterprising wise-ass with a cut-rate kinetoscope hit upon the idea of making a fake documentary. After all, since it's an age-old comedy trope that reality always outstrips satire, it only makes sense to create satire that apes reality as closely as possible.  Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story opens wide this weekend, and there's plenty of reasons to believe it'll be a fine entry into the mockumentary canon; it's directed by Jake Kasdan, co-written by the red-hot Judd Apatow, and stars the talented and eminently likable John C. Reilly (as well as a boatload of potentially amusing guest stars, including Jack White as Elvis, Frankie Muniz as Buddy Holly, and, as the Beatles, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman!).  We figured it might be a good time to bring up some of our other favorite pseudo-documentaries, and, as an extra challenge, do it without mentioning any of the films of a certain Mr. Christopher Guest.  (To top it all off, I'm not even going to discuss Albert Brooks' amazing Real Life.  Well, except right then.)

THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH (1978)

Yes, Screengrab readers, there actually was a time when goofing on the Beatles wasn't the most played-out thing a human being could do!  That time was about thirty years ago, when Monty Python alum Eric Idle penned, starred in, and co-directed this made-for-TV movie about the rise and decline of the Prefab Four, the most famous band ever to come out of Rutland. George Harrison liked it enough to funnel some money into producing the film, even though he's savagely parodied as Stig O'Hara, the group's dullest member, who doesn't appear to speak any English, accidentally sues himself, and is eventually replaced by a wax dummy. It features a few other Python members as well as some Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time SNL alums — the only filmed collaboration between the two groups — and as such, contains more than its share of hilarious dialogue and situations. What really elevates it above the level of standard rock 'n' roll pseudo-documentary is the music, written entirely by co-star (and former Bonzo Dog Band front man) Neil Innes. The songs so closely resemble Beatles originals that it's easy to miss the absurdly funny lyrics.

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