Curses! Broiled Again!- "Drag Me To Hell"

A young bank loan officer has a problem no bailout can solve in the new Sam Raimi horror flick "Drag Me To Hell."
When a comically gnarled old gypsy woman comes into her bank pleading for help to stop the foreclosure on her home, Allison Lohman lets career ambition trump her conscience and refuses to help.
The old hag puts a curse on her and then everything goes to hell.
Then she enlists a storefront psychic to help her escape eternal damnation.
Director Sam Raimi knows his way around the horror genre.
In one scene I noticed creaking floorboards, rustling wind chimes, unexplained wind gusts, a creaking gate, and the flashlight that's always on the fritz.
But as anyone who's seen the Evil Dead trilogy knows, Raimi knows how to milk uncomfortable situations for laughs.
One of the funniest sequences uses animal sacrifice as a demented punchline.
And I particularly liked her somewhat ed woodian struggle with a hanky from hell inside a moving car.
But for me the film always seemed to be on the verge of becoming a real hoot, but it never quite got there.
For one, Allison Lohman is too weak a heroine to make much of an impact. And when the script calls for her to get tough near the end it feels forced and fake.
The ooga booga shocks start to get repetitive after a while.
And the film rams some of its sequences right down our throat.
This all leads up to a conclusion I found strangely unsatisfying. I laughed yes. But what should have been a diabolical good time ended up a little disappointing.
"Drag Me To Hell": C+