I am a wild party!

As we have been doing for well over a year now, the girlfriend and I go out to the movies every Tuesday night to take advantage of Cineplex theaters’ “Big Ticket Tuesdays” promotion. It’s a simple matter of getting a free drink and popcorn to go with our movies, but it’s a valued tradition, and I dread the day that it comes to an end. But this week was different! We went to two movies! She’d amassed more than enough points on her Scene card for two free tickets, so we took advantage of the freeness (you don’t get a free popcorn and drink on Tuesday if you use your points on a ticket) on Saturday night and hit the theater for the second time that week.

On our usual Tuesday date night, we went to see the highly-anticipated “The Hangover”. As huge fans of The Office, we (or at least I was) were pretty psyched to see Ed Helms go at it in a big screen production, and he did not disappoint. Even though he was playing a completely different character (the straight man, actually), you could still see so much Andy Bernard in him. But then again, just as much props go to his co-stars, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis, who were equally awesome. The woman has a gigantic crush on Cooper, and the crowning moment of the film (for me) was when he got the shit kicked out of him by a naked, effeminate Chinese man.

If you hadn’t figured this out by now, “The Hangover” was absolutely the funniest movie I have seen in recent memory. In fact, I’m willing to label it the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. While the beginning plods just a little bit to get the premise going, it still keeps throwing jokes, slapstick, and one-liners at you to get things going. Once the pace is set, the humour is cranked up as high as it goes, and I pretty much did not stop laughing until long after the movie was over. Whether it was Cooper consistently forgetting there was a tiger in the bathroom or the drive-by tuxedo shop, there was always something hilarious (and usually outrageous) going on, and I just can not praise this movie enough.

“The Hangover”, in the end, I think would be best described as exactly what people kept telling me “Superbad” would be. I thought “Superbad” was excellent, but I never saw exactly why people found it impossible to stop talking about how great it was. But that’s exactly how I feel about “The Hangover.” I would gladly go see it again and again, like a late-nineties woman would “Titanic.” I can absolutely see myself falling asleep every night watching this movie much like I did with “Bender’s Big Score” for several weeks. Though now that I think about it, I doubt I’d actually be able to sleep while laughing so hard.

On Saturday night, she decided that it was time we see “Drag Me To Hell.” Now, after seeing the Evil Dead trilogy, I’ve always been able to give Sam Raimi the benefit of the doubt, but after “Spider-Man 3” it got a lot harder. “Drag Me To Hell” did not register well with me the first time I saw the trailer. I just got the impression of another dull horror movie that would fail both to frighten and entertain, like so many I’ve seen recently (“Quarantine” and “The Unborn” to name but a few). I was not looking forward to it.

Oh dear lord, how I was wrong.

“Drag Me To Hell,” in a word, was terrific. It was classic Sam Raimi, only with about a jillion times more budget to work with. While the story, setting, characters, and pretty much everything else were about as far removed from anything Evil Dead as you can get, I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the spirit of that series throughout the entire movie. It was a joy to watch from beginning to end, and I’d gladly recommend it to anybody who enjoys a hearty laugh with their creepiness.

That said, this movie was not the serious, dreary horror flick that the trailer plays it off as. It’s actually incredibly funny, with a few scary parts in between the plot and humour scenes (Alison Lohman’s face in the final scene will stay with me forever and be in my nightmares for the rest of my life). But the “horror” is just a device to bring in plenty of slapstick and gross-out comedy. And not in the terrible Wayans parody movie way, either. The fight scene between Lohman’s character and the old gypsy woman is a riot and is worth seeing the entire movie for. The part where the gypsy woman loses her false teeth and starts gumming Lohman is quite possibly the funniest and most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. When the demon is summoned into different characters near the ending is one of the most ridiculous scenes in the movie, but is entertaining and hilarious the whole way through.

The story is a bit flimsy, but you won’t care once the credits start to roll. You’ll walk away and talk about the parts that made you laugh the most, and you will feel entirely satisfied. The trailer and commercials do a terrible job of showcasing this movie. “Drag Me To Hell” is not a serious horror film. It is a lighthearted story of a cursed girl that never ever even thinks about taking itself seriously and even occasionally pokes fun at itself. It’s also about having as many disgusting things end up in the main character’s mouth as humanly possible. I loved it, and I gladly welcome Sam Raimi back into my good books for making it for me.