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.

Read More...

As part of my 12-step recovery program to stop gabbing nonstop about Watchmen (I'm currently on Step 8, where I make amends to everyone I forced to watch the "Architects of Fear" episode of The Outer Limits), I'm happy to bring you news of other comic book movies that haven't been made yet.  By the time March of 2009 rolls around, I hope to have gotten to at least Step 11, where I can look at a smiley-face button without crying.

Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire has agreed to keep slinging webs for at least two more movies, for an unprecedented $50 million deal that includes profit-sharing and family leave time to hang around with his daughter, the only-slightly-ridiculously named Ruby Sweetheart Maguire.   Strangely, it was the family leave time, not the gargantuan paycheck, that was almost the dealbreaker; Sony was ready to walk and restaff the role when CEO Amy Pascal gave in to the demand, saying six months was too long for any parent to spend without family leave.  Which should come as a surprise to the majority of working mothers, none of whom make $50 million per anything.  To put the figure into perspective, this is the same amount of money Alex Rodriguez makes per year to not win the World Series, or roughly $1.5 million per minute Maguire spends doing a disco strut onscreen like he did in Spider-Man 3.

Read More...

In a desperate attempt to write about a comic book adaptation other than Watchmen, we’ve been combing the web for news about Dark Knight (which, despite the title, is merely the next Batman sequel and not an filmed version of the legendary Frank Miller mini-series). Luckily, the geeks of the nation have not let us down. The Library Journal reports that Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, a lifelong Batman fan who has a cameo in the film, will be donating all his earnings to the Montpelier public library. (Leahy is a Democrat. We’re just sayin'.) Variety reports on a new Hollywood trend to source visual effects to a handful of maverick French design companies, who are valued for their blend of technology and aesthetics; one of the companies profiled is Buf, which did the VFX for Spider-Man 3 and will also be handling Dark Knight. And Empire magazine interviews Michael Caine, who praises Heath Ledger’s Joker as "stunning" and says he's the only actor who could follow Jack Nicholson into anything but a nightclub. — Leonard Pierce