The Toothless Granny From Hell

Dang, but it seems like Sam Raimi has not helmed a non-arachnid related project in about a zillion years. "Drag Me To Hell" is a nice little return to cheesy excess from the fella that brung us "Evil Dead" and "Darkman." Gorehounds will bitch and moan about the PG-13 rating but Raimi knows what buttons to push and which particular streams of viscera can spout out of which particular orifices without getting into trouble with the ratings overlords. Its something of a cat and mouse game really. To say this is a tame outing - just enough Grand Guignol to get the myspace crowd into the multiplex - would be missing the point. If you wanted to compile a list of the various spews and splats of "Take Me To Hell" a more restrictive rating would not seem far off the mark, at least on the page. It's the small judgements that make the difference. Not lingering too long on the dead kitten or too closely on the blood splatter helps to keep the gross-out factor in check. An unrated directors cut would seem like a natural for the DVD release but I don't think it's really going to improve upon anything.

The A.V. Club review by Scott Tobias puts it nicely:
"That PG-13 rating may sound like a liability for a director who once hosed Bruce Campbell with torrents of blood shooting out of the walls, but Raimi makes a sly asset of this limitation. Just like other PG-13-rated horror movies, the film relies on shock effects instead of blood, but Raimi pushes those effects to a full-on visceral assault."