Great, another film I have been wanting to see ever since I came across the trailer. Well, so much the better if the film seems to be good .. will just have to find a way to stomach Lohman..

That sounds suspiciously, um, religious of you, MaryAnn.

Buzz from geeks is good on this one, and I'm extra curious now. But I have to say, I doubt it will do well, because...well as I said, I AM eager to see it, and yet the trailers still look dreadfully dull to me. I can only imagine how ho-hum they look to mainstreamers.

Still, my wife is sadly going to get dragged to see it. (She's pretty much a geek herself, but I don't think she ever really 'got' Evil Dead...)

**SPOILER ALERT**

the midnight showing was packed. as far as i could tell, everyone was having a blast with this movie. there was a little more audience participation than i can usually tolerate, but it was kinda ok in this case. i don't remember a sustained audience uproar as energetic as the one that occured when the lamia (sp?) started dancing over the fire. great stuff.

If i shared Raimi's juvenile sense of gross out humour, i would've enjoyed this film a lot more. But what saved this film for me was the way the script celverly kept pushing Christine to do more and more evil things to stay alive.

I give it a 6/10. If you're an Evil Dead fan, just go ahead and add 3 more points to my rating.

I loved the movie, but don't see how Christine deserved to be cursed at all.

While it is true that she was not entirely an angel, it is also clear that she was not wholly vile or unredeedmable either. Raimi suggests that she has some compassion and some guilt feelings -- she is a vegetarian out of concern or animals and she eventually comes clean to Clay about her actual role in denying the payment extension. And, really, even if she was genuinely selfish, so what? I guess if someone thinks that a person might deserve to be burned and eaten and ripped apart for all of eternity because that person is a bit morally underdeveloped, I guess I don't know what to say about that judgment.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nice to see Raimi getting back to his roots (kinda). The button was a nice "Casting The Runes" touch. The centerpiece act in the house where the medium attempted to break the spell of the lamia was terrific -- and reminiscent of "The Devil Rides Out" in its ever heightening sense of foreboding before all Hell broke loose. Of course, you knew Christine wouldn't get off that easily. Alison Lohman sure was a good sport to allow herself to get slimed left right and center. Could that have something to do with Ellen Page dropping out at the last minute? But where was the obligatory Bruce Campbell cameo?

For once I agree with you. I enjoyed the film. I thought it added the sudden surprise, just enough disturbing/disgusting images, and yet found a way to work in enough humor to make this an excellent horror film. I almost didn't see it because of the title, thinking it might be a low budget presentation, but I saw how it was certainly appropriate. I consider it a must see and in the theatre atmosphere on the large screen was the best.

In a WNYC interview recently, Raimi said the movie was about the sin of greed, that he thought we were all guilty, and that he wanted his audiences to feel that there are consequences to being greedy. At least that's what I think he said, I was doing something else at the time, so I may have got it wrong.

I thought this was a fun film, but I thought it was more like plaigerism of his own Evil Dead series than pushing any sort of envelope or horror genre.

This was "Evil Dead 2 Goes to Cali." Christine is a lot like Ash. Nice, sweet, a little naive, and loves her partner completely. Then a lot of shit goes down and she has to fend for herself. The dancing demons and close-ups of terrifyingly ugly old women is the same as well. It creeps into Army of Darkness territory with all of the one-liners.

I felt like I was watching Alison Lohman (whom I do love) spit out lines that were meant originally for Bruce Campbell, who would have rocked them better.

I also thought all of the grossness was simply compensation for the fact that it was PG13 instead of rated R.

It was a rollicking good time like an amusement park ride, but hardly anything new since he mined his own films. But I will say that I found it particularily redeeming that the movie did test the bounderies of Christine's character in a way that most horror movies or any films do not. She was an average woman. I think most of us might have been tempted to spare our jobs over someone else.

She wasn't a bad woman but she wasn't exactly a good woman either and that was the most interesting part of the film.

Actually this is a conventional horror film--unless you define conventional to refer to stuff like that story Neil Gaiman once wrote about a serial killer's convention. Indeed, it's a mashup of two conventional horror films--Thinner and Night of the Demon*. And of course the end is straight out of E.C. comics--which is as conventional as you can get.

Does this mean it's not entertaining? Of course not. Indeed, I would be very surprised if this film didn't turn out to be a very popular rental around Halloween.

That said, one can't help but wonder if it would have made for a darker--and more satisfying--horror film had it dwelt more on the obvious question--what wouldn't you do to save your own life?--than the more conventional "look how bad those bank people are" approach.

As it is, I can't but wonder how many of the critics who have been moralizing about how poor old Christine "had it coming" are all that superior in the morality department themselves. But that's a question for another day.

However, if I read one more online lecture on the evils of greedy capitalists from the same people who compulsively brag about all the nice stuff they have...well, let's just say it's a good thing I'm not a gypsy...

* Okay, Night of the Demon is also a classic, but it's still pretty conventional by modern standards.