If you missed the Drag Me to Hell boat (you know, it's the booze cruise over the Styx that you pay your way onto using the two bits slapped on your eyes by loved ones when you croak), then here's a quick rundown for ya. Remember that Stephen King flick Thinner? The one where the fat lawyer guy runs over a gypsy because his trophy wife was planting some road head on his Lil' Abner, then the other gypsies cursed him to waste away via starvation, no matter how much food he ate? Well, Drag Me to Hell has the same basic plot, only without the fat people, cancer pie, or Joe Mantegna corning it up as a greaseball mafioso stereotype. Cornier than pig shit that one. Instead, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a hard working, loan approving, bank type worker who's struggling with the ovaries Osiris cursed her with as it relates to her job. See, there's an assistant manager position open in her office, but despite having been a good little drone of the financial district for years, she may not get the job. Her major competition is the bank's resident new guy: a smooth talking, fresh-out-of-the-frat-house, bag of crap, brown nosing scrotum hugger named Stu. Because he's a callous dick on wheels who will do what it takes to bring in the bucks, Stu's enjoying a comfy lead in the Promotion 500.

Desperate to prove that she's just as capable at making the big decisions as any bearer of the third leg, Chris puts on her big girl pants and tells an old lady looking for a third extension on her mortgage to go stick a handful of ribbon candy up her wrinkled old granny poon. Unfortunately for Christine, she picked the wrong old lady to slap around with her shiny new set of balls. When the creepy eyed, denture-fied, decroded gypsy broad (yep, she's a gypsy!) has to be dragged from the bank by security, she curses our lady Chris for publicly shaming her. Sure, our working class heroine never forced old lady Ganush to drop to her knees, beg wildly for a third mortgage extension in front of the entire bank, or physically attack Miss Brown, thus requiring the need for security to rescue her from the big bad octogenarian in the first place. But just because none of this is actually Christine's fault doesn't mean it's not, you know, entirely Christine's fault... Things go from bad to worse though, when Chris notices granny Ganush's car (a very familiar looking '78 Oldsmobile... *wink*wink*) in the bank's parking garage. The wacky gypsy shows us that she spends her Monday nights at the Bingo parlor in the bad part of town when she throws down with little miss protagonist in a parking lot free-for-all that would give New Jack a Steely Dan in his BVDs! Windows are smashed, faces are clawed, dentures are mutilated, one mental protuberance (Google it mofo) gets a retirement home blow job, and Christine pulls her gangster card when she gives the cranky geezer an old fashioned Swingline smackdown!

During the scuffle, Christine's concern for her own physical well-being distracts her from the most important rule about tangling with a gypsy: don't let them steal any of your shit. Not a lock of your hair, not a drop of your blood, not your over-sized Texas shaped belt buckle, not your monocle, not the gold-plated fish scaler you won when you were 8 for placing 2nd in the annual crappie derby, not anything. So what does Christine do? She lets Ganush swipe one of the buttons off of her coat, then sits there watching as the crazy old fart puts a curse on the damn thing. Way to go Chris. Have you never watched a horror movie about gypsy curses before? Did you learn nothing from the suffering of Larry Talbot? Or Officer Toody in that episode of "Car 54, Where Are You?"?! Christine, you ignorant slut... Like I said, the AARP's Miss April puts the whammy on one of Chris's buttons, so now she's gonna spend the next three days being haunted by the black goat demon Lamia before the Lam cracks open the Earth beneath her and... here it comes... drags Christine to Hell. She might just make it out of this with her soul intact though, with the aid of her high-pants college professor boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), a fortune teller named Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), a medium named Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) who has a beef to settle with the Lam-a-Lam-a-Ding-Dong, a blood sacrifice, a bumbling sidekick, a live goat, and $10,000. It's a road map for waaaaaaaaaaaackiness! That, or Little Miss Brown's gonna end up spending the rest of eternity with a giant red fist covered in spikes turning her rectum into ground beef. Ouchies. Oh well, at least if she does leave this Earthly plane, she wouldn't need to share an existence with Paul Blart: Mall Cop. What the fuck is a "Blart" anyway? It sounds like a sound effect that pops up when Adam West punches his mailman, or the shortened word for "bloody fart". Either way, Kevin James deserves both.

Whatever happens to the lovely young lady's tormented soul, it's one very Raimi romp from start to end. The classic Evil Dead elements are in play, including high energy moments of madball demonic possession; gross-out moments so extreme you're not sure if you're supposed to cringe, laugh, or do both; and an off-camera menace that torments its victims by taking the form of shattered windows, rattled pots and pans, nightmarish hallucinations, and Satanic shadow puppetry that will make you leave your lights on till morning. One surprise weapon from the Raimi arsenal that doesn't make it into Drag is the man's signature p.o.v. shots. When you go into an episode of the Wacky Sammy Show, you expect the man to strap his camera to a 2x4 once in a while and run it around the set for a few laps! Well, now that he's bleeding all that fancy Hollywood money what with his Ghost House production company and all, I guess it's more likely that he'd strap the camera to a 2x4 made of platinum and have one of his interns do all the lugging around while Raimi strapped a saddle to the kid's back to ride around on, but whatever the case, I look forward to said Raimi staple. Speaking of Raimi staples, unfortunately there's no Bruce Campbell cameo this time around either kids. Nope, not even a two-seconder like he put in at the end of Intruder or Darkman. Turns out Brucie Bruce was offered a part, but he was too busy shooting episodes of "Burn Notice" to make it. A little disappointing, since The Chinned One has been as much an "Easter Egg" of Raimi's flicks as little brother Ted or Sam's beloved Delta 88! Oh well, at least those last two made it in... though Ted's was an off-screen cameo, so I'm still not entirely sure that even counts.

Beyond the fanboy expectations though, how does the actual movie stand up? The story feels a little generic for genre buffs, but keep in mind that besides being made over the last year, the story itself was written before Thinner made its celluloid birth, so 17 years ago a story like this may have felt a little more "unique" despite still not being absolutely original. Not to spoil it, but the last twenty minutes feel more like an episode of "Tales From the Crypt" than the mind-blower a lot of us were hoping for. Trust me though, it's still a party in your brain and everyone is most assuredly still invited. As stated, much of the Raimi charm and style is still there to teabag your senses unapologetically and make you ask for more. The visual effects aren't traditional corn syrup and make-up effects like some of us may have preferred, but the computer generated spookshow we do get is slick as shit and your eyeballs may burst into flames from time to time, so the World Combustibles Safety Quorum suggests that you keep a fire extinguisher on hand at all times just in case.

The acting is actually quite good. The funny part is that I just reviewed Alison Lohman's first film sometime last year! Know what it was? Trust me, for the sake of her career and your own well being, you're better off not knowing. Justin Long actually surprised me with how un-obnoxious he can be when he's not playing one of those "hipster doofus" roles he normally takes. He's better off as the "young professional skeptic" guy... or, for those who saw Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a deep voiced gay adult film actor. Nothing makes the title of a guy fuck flick funnier than hearing Justin Long say it with that voice. And Lorna Raver? She makes unholy gypsy grandma Mrs. Ganush sympathetic at first, but abjectly FUCKING terrifying from then on. The make-up folks definitely helped, but she's a savage, psychotic little senior citizen! I'm sorry to see all of her prior roles were just minor parts in TV shows, when she should have been playing blood-thirsty old lady parts for the last decade instead! In addition to a crazy gypsy she could be a child boiling old witch, a retirement home succubus, a demonic cross guard, or a flesh-eating Wal-Mart greeter! They all work!

So, although not the mind-blower most of us were saving our allowances for, Drag Me to Hell is still great. Not epic, not legendary, not bound to spawn a trilogy that will have horror fans worldwide forever misquoting it, but still really really good. Sure, it took Sam 17 years to bring us another horror flick, but if "quality over quantity" yields results like this, I'm more than satisfied at the end of the day.

Now I'm looking forward to the Raimis' Drag Me To Hell follow-ups: the "small time street fighter seeks fortune and fame" feel good tough guy flick Kick the Shit Out of Me, the animated children's story about farm animals in love called Kiss My Ass, and his highly anticipated mockumentary about the adult film industry Oh, Fuck Me... yeah, that whole joke tripped over its own feet and pancaked on the pavement all for the sake of tacking on another paragraph. This is what happens when you don't answer to an editor: unchecked abuses of power that go nowhere and serve no purpose. Just go see Drag Me to Hell, okay? Thank you.