Update #1: 41 Fresh reviews in, Up has gone Certified Fresh! That’s 10 for 10 for Pixar. Drag Me to Hell lost its 100% Tomatometer on late Tuesday, but still looks well on its way to achieving CF status.
If a movie’s box office returns were always directly proportional to its Tomatometer, then this
would be the most profitable weekend of the year. Two major new releases
are entering multiplexes this Friday and both are drawing astoundingly
positive reviews: Up, the latest from animation powerhouse Pixar,
and Drag Me to Hell, director Sam Raimi’s
long-anticipated return to horror.
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Bean counters have
expressed concern that Up may be commercially unviable, with
its lack of strong merchandising presence and a thematically complex
plot, which details a 78-year old’s
fantastical journey to South America with a preadolescent stowaway. But critics have rushed to its defense, with
the usual adoration for Pixar.
“Cute in the human way of the animation master Hayao Miyazaki,” writes Roger
Ebert ahead of Cannes. (Up had the honors of
opening the festival.)
“Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, Up is the studio’s most
deeply emotional and affecting work,” adds Richard Corliss for Time.
Even Arizona Daily Star‘s Phil Villarreal, typically among the first to
post a Rotten Pixar review, calls Up the studio’s “pinnacle” and that the first 15
minutes are “some of the finest filmmaking I’ve seen in my life.”
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So as the suits wring their hands over how much cash Up can generate,
will Drag Me to Hell get lost in the shuffle? Trailers and commercials
have advertised Alison Lohman’s gypsy-curse plight as straight-laced
American horror, consciously aware that the public at large is notoriously
fickle with horror-comedies. The last time the subgenre grabbed any headlines
was with Shaun of the Dead and that was in 2004.
Drag Me to Hell will have to leverage Raimi’s knack for seeding cult classics
and get people in through word-of-mouth, which the initial reviews are strongly suggesting will
happen.
The movie is “scant of plot and barren of subtext, the pic is single-mindedly
devoted to pushing the audience’s buttons,” writes Variety‘s Peter Debruge. “And
who better than Raimi to do the honors?“
“The man is still able to tap into the creepy, the nasty, the violent, and the
unpleasant … while always maintaining a wonderfully welcome tongue-in-cheek
attitude,” notes horror aficionado Scott Weinberg for Fearnet.
Screen Daily‘s Brent Simon allays fears that Raimi has gone soft with a
PG-13 rating: “It’s unlikely that most horror buffs will feel cheated. The
director gleefully dispenses with the usual sacred cows (neither children nor
kittens are safe), and also leans on wild gross-out moments to goose his
audience.”
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We average about one spectacularly-reviewed horror movie a year and one
spectacularly-reviewed Pixar movie a year. It’s almost a shame they have to go
head-to-head in one weekend, but potentially we’re going to see a wide audience
at the theaters this weekend: the young, the old, and all the icky
gorehounds inbetween.
