This is great news!  I can’t tell you how much I’ve been hoping that Raimi would get back to doing horror, and decent horror at that.  Not to mention the bad Spiderman 3 karma that he needs to balance out!  Does The Chin make an appearance?

I didn’t see him, which is kind of strange, now that I think about it, because there’s at least two minor roles he could have played.

Want to be shocked?  Apparently, this movie is only PG13.  I fail to see how they pulled it off, because it’s fucking scary.  But I guess by avoiding nudity and refusing to do much more than bloody the lip of the protagonist, they got away with it.  I wouldn’t call it a psychological horror film, but it toes an interesting line. (While stepping right over more traditional lines, and then following that up by spitting on the very existence of those lines.)

Groovy!

Man, I feel like that one person who can’t see the hidden picture. I saw this yesterday with a friend and we were both underwhelmed, though he appreciated it a bit more than me. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t think it was scary at all and I’m a huge Evil Dead fan, and loved Raimi’s Darkman and even The Gift. I will say that I liked it a little better when I realized I wasn’t supposed to be scared through any of this and was just supposed to laugh (the random anvil in her shed? really). Though I was disappointed Raimi used the PG13 trope of loud sound to jar the shit out of you but after a while, even that didn’t work and I was just sitting back, watching Christine be the new Bruce Campbell, who was sorely missed through all of this,
though the Classic was still in there.

*POSSIBLE SPOILER*

I did appreciate the dark turns the character took, I was especially surprised by the cat and was excited to see what she would do with the button but I predicted the ending as soon as she was in the car and had hoped that, like the cat, Raimi would allow a main character to go there (at least with her evil co-worker), but alas, he didn’t.

*END SPOILER*

Justin Long is highly underrated, he did a great job as the prey in the original Jeepers Creepers. I’d put DMTH behind Army of Darkness in my Raimi collection, though it is far better than most of the Asian horror remakes Ghost House has put out. And it’s far better than anything Eli Roth has done lately.

(And yeah, as long as you don’t have more than two or three “fucks” and no nudity you’re in the clear for an R rating. You can have the gore as long as it’s not realistic, that’s how a lot of sci-fi movies with human on alien violence can get away with the ratings.)

The payoff for me with the loud sound trope was the handkerchief on the windshield, though.  It made it all worthwhile when that handkerchief lands with a sound effect like it’s a box of rock hitting a windshield.  Hilarious.

I’ll add:

*SPOILER*

The kitten thing is something a bunch of reviewers dwell on, but to my mind, it was just a turning point like Ash cutting his hand off was in Evil Dead II. It’s shocking, but it’s just the beginning of the character’s transformation into an anti-hero, where you find yourself both rooting for her and kind of hoping that she does go to hell.  It was really clever how the moral depravity that she’s embraced rests not on showing her killing the kitten, but on the way she lies to her boyfriend about it.  At that point, she’s gone beyond just trying to survive.

But it’s funny to me that choice is what bothered people, and they skip over the attempted goat murder, the grave digging, and even the fact that she honestly considers sending a colleague to hell because he stole an account from her.

* END SPOILER *

One of the things I like was the way Raimi dropped hints that the whole thing could be a scam—the escalating demands for money and that sort of thing.  There were other elements that made it pretty obvious that the demon was a real demon, but just enough hints to the contrary to keep you on edge about whom to trust.

Oh her choice didn’t bother me, I was utterly surprised they got away with it, cause she’s the main character and all and we are supposed to like her, that was one moment in the movie I loved cause it was so unexpected and shocking. I just thought that, with that set up, and once we got the *final* option for her, she was actually gonna Go To There, seeing as they set her up with the back story that she was

***SPOILER****
formerly fat and a farm girl hick who her boyfriend’s parent didn’t like, especially after that disastrous dinner, was probably gonna give it to her boyfriend, realizing that she would never fit in with his family and at that moment it was down to him or her. I can’t remember where I heard the quote but a character choosing between a good option and a bad option is boring, a character choosing between a bad option and a worse option is interesting and to me, that would have totally shocked the hell out of me if they’d gone there, and you still could have had a coda where she still goes to hell anyway.

Then again, I fall in love with endings that don’t tie up everything in a nice and neat bow for the audience (see: Jeepers Creepers, The Descent-British version only) however, this was the expected and somewhat fitting end for her character cause of the cat and the attempt at the restaurant and the grave robbing, and for starting the whole mess to begin with by not giving the woman the extension.
***END SPOILER***

However, I SO wanted either the old woman or that goat to scream, “I’ll swallow your soul!” just once. :D

I was completely uninterested in seeing the film until the ads started using the magic words “Sam Raimi.”  I may still wait for video since I’ve turned into a gigantic baby about horror films (ah, for the days I could go see a double feature at the New Beverly) but it definitely sounds like it’s worth seeing.

His films have always been pretty morally complex, even in the days where he didn’t have the money or the experience to quite pull it off.  The Quick and the Dead has these great performances by Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe and Leonardo Di Caprio, all of which get sucked into the giant black hole at the center of the film that is Sharon Stone.  That’s one of the few movies where I couldn’t wait for the star to get off the screen so we could get back to the subplot. 

What’s with the hate on for PG-13 horror movies?  The American version of The Ring scared the ever-living crap out of me when I watched it on video and that’s PG-13.  But, then, I always get much more freaked out about movies where the threat is a Bad Afterlife and not a Bad Death.  If you have a Bad Death (like, say, Hostel), you’re just dead.  A Bad Afterlife never ends.

Oh, and I’m guessing that The Chin couldn’t get time off from “Burn Notice,” which is doing pretty well for USA.  There have been a couple of other movies he wasn’t in, especially when he was working in New Zealand.

The Chin doesn’t make an appearance, but the ‘73 Oldsmobile has a big role.

One point Amanda, film trailers aren’t made by the directors, but for the studios and distributors.  this frequently results in advertisements that fit what the marketing department thinks will sell, but has nothing whatsoever to do with the film itself.  It’s always fascinated me, because it shows how simple music and editing choices can change the impression one has of the film.

Consider the following, the original Blue Velvet trailer, followed by a fan made alternate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbb5-WZ1VSw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf-Gn0bXPCc

Or the original Dirty Dancing, compared to the “david lynch” version (ok, two david lynch based things, these are the best examples of modified trailers I could think of.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCwgwO5fA00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvuCOlkO4E

The point I’m trying to make is that you should always be wary of the impressions you get from trailers, as they are unreliable as previews for the actual movie (despite that being their purpose).

Zed, those were great. Some body also redid The Shining as a romantic comedy.

And because other companies make the trailers, that’s why there are scenes in trailers that aren’t in the movies which can be frustrating and there was a discussion about that on io9 today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs is the classic example.  I’ve often wondered if the people who made a particularly inappropriate trailer knew exactly what they were doing and were motivated by a hatred of audiences rather than profit.

“I can’t even think of another horror movie I’ve seen built around a female protagonist that treated sex as a complete non-issue.”

What an odd remark.  In no more than one second I can think of two super-duper-famous horror movies that everyone on the planet has seen where this is true: “Alien” and “Silence of the Lambs.”  And I bet if I put two seconds into it I could think of some others (“Suspiria” comes to mind, although Suzy Bannion is a rather passive protagonist.)

Zed, I’m afraid I don’t see where I said that directors make trailers, which would have been weird, since I know they don’t.

deebs, you got me on “Silence” and “Aliens”, but I think I get a pass for not thinking of them, because they’re horror movies that pass themselves off as a thriller and a sci-fi film.

But are you seriously trying to argue that Dario Argento doesn’t use sexual objectification to introduce the subtext of sexual violence to raise tension in “Suspiria”?  Really?  What next, trying to argue there’s no virgin/whore subtext in “Halloween”?  I love “Suspiria”, but the subtext of sexual violence and the transgressive thrill of enjoying it is never far from the surface of that movie.  It’s Argento’s personal joke to himself that he uses his own hands and a strong POV from the killer to wryly comment on his own sexually violent fantasies being played out onscreen on the bodies of the nubile victims. 

He’s pretty unapologetic about the way he leans on the misogynist trope of setting up pretty women to kill because of their prettiness.

I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don’t have to justify myself to anyone about this. I don’t care what anyone thinks or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject.

Honestly, half the reason I like him is he doesn’t play off the misogynist subtext in his movies as anything but what it is.

In no more than one second I can think of two super-duper-famous horror movies that everyone on the planet has seen where this is true: “Alien”

True in one sense, but if you want to go Freudian, Ripley is going after an alien penis that impregnates men.

First, I loved the movie.  I also had pretty low expectations, but once I saw the reviews it got I couldn’t wait to see it.

Regarding horror movies with female protagonists that treat sex as a non issue, I think both the Ring and the Grudge would fall in to that category.

Now on to the spoilerific:

I was a little surprised by the kitten thing, but only because I thought she would go buy a live chicken or something, instead of just killing the closest thing at hand.  My girlfriend however totally called that one, she started whispering “here kitty kitty” as soon as the animal sacrifice was mentioned as a possibility.  I loved how they played the whole “I used to own a cat” line for laughs.

I was surprised that it took as long as it did to get to the ownership loophole.  The first time the seer said the demon would come for the owner of the object, I was saying “looks like it’s time to make a donation to good will.”  Does that make me evil?

I did think it was an interesting premise.  Not only does God and hell exist in the movie universe, but God is kind of a bastard that lets some people condemn other people to an eternity in Hell.  Oh, and God is really legalistic and determines the execution of the curse through ownership of an object, which can then be transferred.  I wondered are there any rules on how this curse gets used.  Can I curse someone for cutting me off in traffic, or does the transgression have to rise to a certain level before I can invoke the curse?  Are corporations recognized as people?  And if so can I condemn the ones I don’t like to hell?  What if I just transfer ownership of the cursed object to the corporation?  Does it suck up all the employees?  What about the stock holders?  Or do the employees just lose their jobs and the stock holders their money?

The whole cursing people to hell thing reminded me of the anime Hell Girl, though in that in exchange for the person being immediately dragged to hell you had to agree to go to hell also when you died so at least there were some checks and balances. 

Just some random thoughts, but I really did think it was a ton of fun.

You’re absolutely correct about “Suspiria,” I don’t know what the Hell I was thinking.  The movie’s chock full of hot women violently killed.  Hell, Argento’s misogyny is so palpable he addresses it himself in “Tenebre.” 

Anyway, you’ve probably seen George Romero’s “Day of the Dead,” so how about that as a solidly genre horror movie built around a female protagonist that treated sex as a complete non-issue?

I didn’t think there was a god necessarily implied in the movie.  Just demons.

And since everyone else is picking on deebs I’ll point out that The Silence of the Lambs is all about sex, gender and sexual politics.  Not just the obvious one of the villain wanting a sex change, but the scenes where Clarice is excluded and patronized by men based on her gender.  Remember that scene right at the beginning where she gets onto an elevator full of men, and her head is no higher than their shoulders?

*SPOILER*
And, please, the entire sequence in the basement where the audience is stalking her from the villain’s POV?  Her relationship with Lecter?  You could make a good argument (and I think I tried to in a paper in undergrad) that the whole film is a play on Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (which even she says is much too simplistic, but it’s an intriguing starting point).  If you read the book, there’s a whole romance between Clarice and one of the entomologists that was not included in the movie, because it would distract from the romance between her and her two surrogate dads.
*SPOILER*

I always recommend Men, Women and Chainsaws for a reasonably jargon-free look at slasher movies.  To circle back to the main topic, she has a whole chapter in there about how gender gets played with and reversed in supernatural horror films like The Evil Dead.

What an odd remark.  In no more than one second I can think of two super-duper-famous horror movies that everyone on the planet has seen where this is true: “Alien” and “Silence of the Lambs.” And I bet if I put two seconds into it I could think of some others (“Suspiria” comes to mind, although Suzy Bannion is a rather passive protagonist.)

Would “REC” (remade as “Quarantine”) count?  I’m not sure the main character, Angela, would count as a protaganist though - everyone in the film was pretty much a chew-toy.

Speaking of remade trailers...

I wondered are there any rules on how this curse gets used.  Can I curse someone for cutting me off in traffic, or does the transgression have to rise to a certain level before I can invoke the curse?  Are corporations recognized as people?  And if so can I condemn the ones I don’t like to hell?  What if I just transfer ownership of the cursed object to the corporation?  Does it suck up all the employees?  What about the stock holders?  Or do the employees just lose their jobs and the stock holders their money?

I wanted to know why, if this old woman had the power to summon a demon from hell, could she not use some of her mojo to drum up money to pay the mortgage. Too bad there’s not a demon for helping you with bank loans.

Oh, and deebs and Amanda and any other Argento fans out there, I can recommend Maitland McDonagh’s Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds for some interesting (and, again, jargon-free) analysis of his films.  There’s a lot of interesting pop psychology stuff in the Italian versions that was cut in the US versions so that you could get to the killing faster.  It actually made me want to watch Argento, and I don’t really like Argento (I’m more of a Bava girl).

Good call on that one.  It’s true—-I wasn’t thinking about some outliers. Mentally, I was comparing this movie to horror movies that depend so much on a female protagonist’s femaleness, and all its implicit vulnerabilities, which are almost always sexualized. Which makes sense, since horror relies on uncanny reflections of people’s real anxieties to get its juice, and the sexual objectification of women is a biggie.  It’s in the same vein as “Halloween” and “Rosemary’s Baby” (which works as a commentary on said sexual objectification of women, but it has to make the rape explicit to do that).  Christine is all big-eyed and vulnerable, but Raimi turns that upside down, and there’s not really any sexual violence hinted at, but she turns out not to be that vulnerable, either.  It’s functionally the same joke as in the “Evil Dead” series, but feminized.  You expect the hero’s ordinariness to render them especially vulnerable to ratchet up the fear—-and with women, you expect vulnerability to be sexualized to the point where rape is the subtext—-but what you get is a hero is so aggressive about saving their own ass that they become an antihero.  It’s a neat trick, so I don’t care if it’s the same one he’s used before.

The real question isn’t, “Why would this woman use her mojo to curse someone?” in my mind.  The haunting question of Raimi’s oeuvre is, “Why would Ash play that damn tape in Evil Dead II when he knows for a fact what happens when he did the same thing in the first movie?”  Answer: Look at this scary/funny demon shit!  I’m usually a fan of dismantling some of the plot holes in movies, but schlocky horror gets a pass because it doesn’t even pretend to try.

Of course, the answer to my question, now that I think about it, is, “Because Ash subconsciously needs to have demon antagonists, so that he has an excuse to throw off snarky one-liners.”

I wanted to know why, if this old woman had the power to summon a demon from hell, could she not use some of her mojo to drum up money to pay the mortgage. Too bad there’s not a demon for helping you with bank loans.

It’s actually a very common trope in witch/magic stories that the sorcerer/witch can’t create money.  It’s like sunlight and vampires:  the explanation why vampires have to stay out of the sun can vary, but it shows up in almost every vampire story.

Amanda, sorry if it seemed like I was calling you out or anything.  I’ve seen the whole “trailers made it seem like x” discussion before, and just reminded me of the fun fact.  The price of being a former film student.

Speaking of clever horrors that don’t rely on sexualized female victims and cheap violence, I can’t recommend enough Dark Water, a chilling psychothriller / horror made by the Japanese director of Ring, Hideo Nakata. Although direct violence in nearly absent during the film, it’s quite possibly the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It builds on the theme of family breakup and maternal abandonment (and love), and features the most frightening child ghost ever.

Yeah, “Silence of the Lambs” is all about gender and sexual politics, but not in way that objectifies women, which is what I took Amanda to mean by “sex as an issue.”  By the same token, “Day of the Dead"and (to a lesser extent) “Alien” also deal in gender and sexual politics—how could they not, when they focus on a woman in a very “masculine” milieu in a traditionally male profession?  One the other hand, it sounds like “Drag Me To Hell” isn’t intended to be rich in social commentary, so Christine lucks out and—unlike Clarice, Sarah, and Ripley—doesn’t have to deal with asshole men, just with asshole demons from, I presume, Hell.

It’s actually a very common trope in witch/magic stories that the sorcerer/witch can’t create money.

What is interesting is that amoungst shamans and traditional healers, there is a tradition of not being in it for the money, unless pressured by other members of the family for the ‘greater good’ of said family.

That’s what makes for a scary subtext for Old Whateley in “The Dunwich Horror”, Lovecraft implies that unlike the traditional sorcerer, he could make gold using his wizardly ways.

Horror movie without sex?  That’s easy, it’s Stigmata.(one of the few movies where the Christian God doesn’t seem to be a total asshole)

Fallen is another horror movie that isn’t reliant on sexuality, ‘least I don’t remember it being so…

/me is reading The Edge of Reason by E. Snodgrass, seems to fit in this thread’s theme…

it’s so far beyond even the most aggressively sexist “punish the sexual woman” reading that it’s unlikely to set off the lizard brain misogyny that most horror movies rely so heavily upon

Not only that, but the movie strongly suggests that Christine makes her fatal choice in response not just to her own ambition, but to the need to work that much harder to get ahead because her male boss and coworker don’t treat her like an equal (the sandwich thing).  That, and her food issues, made me think the film’s pretty aware of sexism.

Want to be shocked?  Apparently, this movie is only PG13.

I saw it today, and these people in front of us brought their kid!  She sounded pretty upset during the spoiler-which-has-been-mentioned-several-times.

It’s actually a very common trope in witch/magic stories that the sorcerer/witch can’t create money.

That’s because the stories that point out the obvious wealth-generating power of dark and evil magics get suppressed by the ~NO CARRIER

deebs:

I could have sworn, though, that Ripley’s character in Alien was written for a man first, before Sigourney Weaver was assigned to it.

Ah, yes.  From Wikipedia:

In the original script, the ship has an all-male crew, including the Ripley character (though the script’s ‘Cast of Characters’ section explicitly states that “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women”), which would be played by actor Tom Skerritt, but later, character re-casting made Ripley a woman, because producer Alan Ladd, Jr., and script-doctors Walter Hill and David Giler had heard rumors of Fox working on other titles with strong female leads.

So that might be part of why there wasn’t that much in the way of sexual foofaraw for Ripley.

Xtinas—that’s a cool fact.  I figured that the reason the film was much less concerned than “Silence of the Lambs” or “Day of the Dead” with the protagonist’s gender was simply because the movie as a whole was much less concerned with characterization, not because it had never cared about gender complexities in the first place.

Yeah, “Silence of the Lambs” is all about gender and sexual politics, but not in way that objectifies women, which is what I took Amanda to mean by “sex as an issue.”

What’s interesting is that when the film came out, I remember seeing two absolutely irate reviews from Ron Rosenbaum and Andy Klein (who’s mostly local to LA) because they felt the film was pornographic.  Specifically, they felt as though the film used the tropes and imagery of pornography to sexualize the corpses and the crimes.

Combine that with Laura Mulvey’s theory and the way the film punishes the viewer who gets a little too into that final stalking scene and you can come to some very intriguing conclusions about how some male film critics view films.

I’m surprised Raimi got away with as much as he did while still managing that covered PG-13 rating. Despite flashes of ingenuity, however, that movie didn’t really ‘do it’ for me.

It’s a cliché for the protagonist in a horror movie to make decisions that run counter to his or her continued survival. Raimi doesn’t have his anti-hero do that here. Instead, he has her making all kinds of potentially successful survival decisions, most of them unethical. (SPOILERS AHEAD!)

She survives on the job, and gains a promotion, by ignoring her own conscience and doing things by the numbers. She attempts to survive the demon’s onslaught by grabbing the first living thing she can get her hands on - her trusting cat - and killing it. She recognizes it would be dangerous to summon this thing, but is willing to have another woman risk both this life and the hereafter to escape her own curse. She’s genuinely tempted to inflict her curse on some random old guy at the diner. (I expected her to think initially about people who had hurt her personally, but no: her first instinct was to target a stranger - the weakest, frailest stranger she could find. Only afterward did she start thinking about ‘desert.’) 

Ultimately, I couldn’t be sure if the main character was an anti-hero or merely a lesser villain.

“Yeah, “Silence of the Lambs” is all about gender and sexual politics”

Damn, and I thought it was just about a guy who likes to eat people!

On a related subject, anyone seen “Manhunter”? It’s a “Prequel” of sorts, made by Michael Mann of Miami Vice fame. Not as well made as “Silence”, but as a purely psychological thriller, even scarier IMHO. I mean, seriously, that movie gave me nightmares ...

Mnemosyne—Well, if you start up with Laura Mulvey you can turn just about everything into something seedy.  (As an undergrad I wrote an “A” paper on Mulvey and John Ford’s “Stagecoach” and I didn’t believe a word I said.)  What I remember from back when “Silence of the Lambs” came out was some (probably hyped) reports of outrage from gay groups about the portrayal of homosexuals in the film (that would be the character of Buffalo Bob—even though his sexuality was never portrayed as anything but massively confused.)

Maybe it’s just because I hang out with lots of expatriated European radicals and that most North Americans don’t have a lot of history (politically) with the Romani, but me and my (Basque) friend’s first reaction to the trailer was ‘oh, old gypsy woman curses blond Aryan girl, how fucking racist… and THAT’s never been seen before *rolls eyes*’. It’s like if in every horror movie, every elderly black man was a Petro vodoon practicionner.

(Which, admitedly, seems like it was the case in lots of movies back in the days…)

Yeah, deebs was right.  I was more talking about the way that horror movies use the fantastical threat of horror to tap fears but mostly fantasies about rape to attract a specific sort of male audience.  Of course, sometimes they can evoke rape while being genuinely interesting and scary, or at least so fucked up it rises above and becomes interesting again (Dario Argento), but most shitty horror movies lure in audiences with the promise of showing hot women as sexual objects, and then murdering them in retaliation for being so delectable.

my take on “Susperia”—Argento’s general unavoidable trouble w/ women notwithstanding—is that you end up sympathizing with the protagonist pretty heavily, specifically because she HASN’T done anything wrong. she’s not even particularly sexualized by the events in the plot (it’s more like she’s just sexualized by being filmed) ... but I think it’s worth noting that the protagonist in the film is a relatively confident, intelligent young woman whom the audience is never asked to doubt or hate or judge ... while all the antagonists are stuffy old matriarchs with laughably backwards ideas about gender roles etc.  they try to punish the heroine into conforming with their outdated ideals of femininity, she responds by venturing into the heart of the beast and burning that shit to the ground, and the audience has a cathartic reaction (and we get a “happy ending”) because we’re on her side.  yes?

... I mean, there’s no denying that Argento clearly has some unhealthy aggression against women, and the film also DOES ask you to enjoy seeing women get murdered. but I think there’s more going on to it than just that, intentionally or otherwise.

Well, if you start up with Laura Mulvey you can turn just about everything into something seedy.

Exactly, and that’s why Mulvey has, to a certain extent, disavowed that essay and said that her analysis in it was extremely simplistic compared to the way she thinks about film now.  So even the person who came up with the idea of The Male Gaze doesn’t think it’s as simple as all that.  It’s just fascinating to me that some critics looked at a movie that was very consciously playing with the idea of “the male gaze” to the point that it was used to increase suspense in the final basement sequence and freaked the hell out.  (I’m trying to avoid spoilers even though everyone on the face of the earth has probably seen the film by now, but I can be more specific if needed.)

I wish I could find one of those reviews but all I can come up with is someone else’s critique of Rosenbaum’s review.  This is probably the nut graf:

The first time I noticed this peculiar blindness in Rosenbaum’s criticism was in the aforementioned review of The Silence of the Lambs where he wrote that the film is “not merely stupid, repulsive, sickening, and hateful. It’s worse. I think it’s evil.” Basically, Rosenbaum took the two-minute scene involving the autopsy of one of Buffalo Bill’s victims and used it as a lens through which to view the entire film. His reading of the scene, however, was blatantly incorrect. Rosenbaum claimed that although the scene made him retch, Demme intended it to be titillating and that viewers would fall for the supposed titillation were not Rosenbaum there to save them from it. But why did he assume that what made him retch would give everyone else a hard-on?

Can you tell I have two film degrees?    I can ramble on about this stuff all day.

>>>>The Chin doesn’t make an appearance…

Yeah, I was disappointed by this. A Raimi film without a BC cameo feels like a hot fudge sundae without the cherry.

The boyfriend and I loved it. He is a huge Evil Dead fan so that is no surprise.

**Spoliers**

Loved that it ended with her going ti hell, we both thought she would give it to the boyfriend. We felt that was the most obvious choice once you realize she probably has the coin in the envelope.

I’ve seen some comments complaining about the ethnic/racial stereotypes in this film—Romany, the Indian fortuneteller, the other fortuneteller who I’ve seen described variously as Spanish or Turkish? I really have no idea and can’t tell from trailers. Can someone who’s seen this give a critical reading on where this falls on the WTF scale? (It’s not like I won’t see it anyway, or like it’s so easy to find any entertainment that isn’t kind of WTF, but it’s nice to know what to expect, especially if I’m going to drag friends with me to hell.)

“Can someone who’s seen this give a critical reading on where this falls on the WTF scale?”
(Some minor spoilers below)

The Indian guy you can kind of forgive because he’s actually running a shop and trying to earn a living off a public with certain expectations.  Once they’ve got the character still rocking the swami act after convincing the main character that he’s the real deal, it gets a little more uncomfortable.  That having been said, his presentation is not really out of keeping with the godmen who make international documentaries from time to time.  If you were feeling generous, you could read it as the director trying to portray a man who takes his calling seriously and does so in keeping with the traditions of his native culture. 

The Hispanic medium—it’s implied that she’s Mexican—is first introduced 30 years before the main action starts, trying to save the young son of a poor Mexican couple from the same curse the main character is under.  She’s approached by the main character because of her experience with this specific monster, and her motivation goes back to the little boy she failed to save.  There’s no real reason she had to be Hispanic, though, and the character’s treated as something exotic, so it’s not like anybody’s winning points for a sensitive handling there.

It’s something of a throw-away gag when the one white character with any supernatural inclination shows up; it’s ambiguous whether he actually can see things or he’s just got a case of old-man rage.

The “gypsy” characters?  Whoo, boy.  You do feel sorry for the old woman who lays the curse on the main character.  And the portrayals are cartoonish to the point that, for a U.S. audience, they just come completely unmored and make straight for Deadite territory.  (It’s helped along by the fact that half the non-spirit-based assaults on the main character are committed by an unanimated corpse.)  Trying to tie the characters to a real ethnicity is something of a struggle; it’s so over-the-top that they might just as well be evil fairies or undead sorcerers.  I mean, it’s on the level with the “Running of the Jews” bit from the Borat movie.  But the first time you see the curse, it’s on a little boy and over a stolen necklace, and I imagine that, as cartoonish as the caricatures are, none of them would be out of keeping with the trappings of modern anti-Roma activity.  And, you know, attacking a pretty, young, white, blonde woman.  So, yeah.

“her first instinct was to target a stranger - the weakest, frailest stranger she could find.”

See, I interpreted that as her going from stranger to stranger and weighing what she’d be taking from them not just in terms of the obvious “sending them to hell” thing but in terms of life.  The middle-aged guy with the happy family’s a no-go, the happy young couple’s a no-go, but then she sees the ancient guy who seems miserable, alone, obviously in failing health, just staring out at the world with dead eyes…and immediately deflates when his face lights up at the sight of his equally ancient, fragile, beaming wife tottering back with a slice of pie.