It's not that I can't understand why a regular moviegoer would dislike the film, because I do (even I have trouble with Alison Lohman's uneven performance at times), but when self-described Raimi fans say they hated it, I'm baffled. Or at least it does for me I knew a few folks who don't like the film and I feel sad for them, as they are denying themselves pure cinematic joy from a guy who was clearly relishing being back on a small production again, without a dozen producers telling him what to do (*cough* Venom *cough*) and the pressure of living up to two of the (then) ten highest grossing movies ever. Yes, this can lead to the occasional less-than-graceful shift in tone, but Raimi's glee from behind the camera practically becomes visible onscreen, keeping it from ever being an issue. So what did he do? He made Drag Me To Hell, which embraced his passion for both slapstick and gooey liquids in equal measure - a rare horror comedy that seems determined to split that bill evenly. Despite his financially iffy track record, he secured the lucrative Spider-Man gig and gave Sony its biggest hit ever, followed by two very successful sequels, and after doing those films more or less back to back he could presumably walk into any studio in town and get something greenlit because the marketing could rest on "From the director of the Spider-Man trilogy" on the trailers and posters. It was this "See what he can do with nothing - now imagine what he can do with lots and lots of money!" thinking that led him to the studio system in the '90s, where his output was generally well-liked but rarely successful at the box office (oddly, his biggest grosser before Spider-Man was For Love of the Game, a costly dud that almost no one would recognize as one of his films without reading the credits). Like fellow surprise blockbuster-maker Peter Jackson, Raimi got his start making cheap movies with his friends, letting his talent speak for itself instead of hiding it behind big stars and all the 3D visuals $200m+ budgets can provide. Even better, that film would prove his long time away from such fare didn't leave him too rusty to live up to the expectations one might have for such an event. But this time traveler with fairly useless information could calm that horror fan by telling them that, in 2009, right between those two blank check, family-friendly productions, he would at long last return to the horror genre to make a relatively low budget spiritual successor to Evil Dead 2 titled Drag Me To Hell. Likewise, if you were to tell them that at a certain point in time (now) that the only film he had directed in nearly a decade was a mega-budget Wizard of Oz sequel, they'd be even more incredulous hell, I've witnessed it myself and I still have trouble believing that one. If you were to tell a horror fan in the '80s or '90s that Sam Raimi would go on to make one of the most expensive films of all time (2007's Spider-Man 3, for the record - its final cost was just under $300m), they probably wouldn't believe you.
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