This week Pixar’s latest adventure Up opens on movie screens worldwide. It’s another one of the touching and hilarious animated adventures that we’ve come to expect from the studio, proving to be both a technical marvel and gratifyingly cliché-free piece of classical storytelling. But, that’s not being reviewed today. No, while Up may have demanded attention on any other week, it’s going to have to take a back seat this week to Drag Me To Hell. Fans of horror movies and ironic humor have been waiting for Sam Raimi to make another horror flick ever since the director closed the books on the Evil Dead trilogy back in 1992. Well good news people, your prayers have finally been answered.

Raimi has dug deep into his archives and pulled out a screenplay that he wrote with brother Ivan Raimi back when he was deep in the trenches of The Evil Dead franchise. He tells the tale of Christine, a young woman (Alison Lohman) who thinks she’s just one job promotion away from marital bliss with her rich professor boyfriend Clay (Justin Long). Trying to impress her boss, Christine turns down a decrepit old woman’s bank loan. Unfortunately for Christine, the old woman just happens to be a gypsy who curses the poor young lady (Yes, this is an un-PC movie with a clichéd evil gypsy character. Deal with it!). Suddenly Christine finds herself pursued by an unrelenting demon who plans to drag the poor girl to hell within a matter of days. In terms of plot, that’s pretty well it. Raimi treats the flick like a funhouse ride and uses only 10 minutes of screen time for set up before diving into an unrelenting barrage of cheap scares and suspense sequences until the credits roll.

While it would be a stretch to call the movie Evil Dead 4, Drag Me To Hell does fit quite comfortably into Sam Raimi’s patented brand of horror. The guy has a tendency of letting the audience have its cake and eat it to. He at once creates a gloriously cheesy horror movie that embraces all of the clichés of the genre, while also infusing the movie with the tongue-in-cheek wit of a giddy prankster. You’re at once invited to jump out of your seat at Raimi’s well-worn shock gags and laugh at how silly it is to be scared by such a thing. Watching a Sam Raimi horror movie you can always feel the sick joy the director derives from torturing his audience to the point that you can practically hear Raimi cackling with laughter off screen. The beauty of it is he also encourages you to laugh along as well, making the movies an incredibly hilarious experience.

Of course, Sam Raimi is now a blockbuster director thanks to his Spider-man movies and can no longer afford to lose audience members by making a film filled with so much excessive bloodletting that the MPAA will just throw their arms up in disgust. No, the days of Raimi making an unrated splatstick comedy are sadly over. The man works exclusively in the PG-13 world these days as he’s now trying to entertain the masses. While the movie probably could have been improved with a little extra blood and a few severed limbs, Raimi makes the most of his self-imposed content guidelines an pushes the boundaries of the rating about as far as it can go. The movie is filled with bodily fluids of all kinds that are liberally splatted on or drawn out of the protagonist. Alison Lohman may not receive as much punishment as Bruce Campbell got in the Evil Dead movies, but she did clearly spend most of the shoot cleaning off the viscous liquids that Raimi instructed the crew to launch at her that day.