By Dylan Masvidal | Staff Writer
Does Sam Raimi have a place in modern Hollywood?
By no means is that a question of age or audience fatigue, but of practice.
Studios aren’t too interested in the maximalist anymore, and they especially don’t care about rewarding those who kept them afloat.
Post-“Drag Me to Hell” Raimi returned to familiar franchise territory with his style caged and shackled, leaving fans wondering if he’d ever be free to return home.
Now, finding solace in his horror roots, “Send Help” is the answer I’ve been looking for: with just one-fourth of a sandbox, he’ll tear the house down.
This boisterous sneer of a film is Raimi symbolically coming out of retirement.
Budget constraints have him back in his comfort zone, gleefully taking from his good ol’ bag of tricks.
You have a coveted R-rating, a tightly campy script courtesy of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, as well as a reunion with frequent collaborator Bill Pope to man the cinematography.
There’s one piece of coal he unfortunately couldn’t make a diamond out of, though, the distracting CGI.
The VFX department seems to have been held together by popsicle sticks and an Elmer’s glue stick, resulting in digital choices that can’t even be defended through the movie’s gonzo approach.
If it’s not a wild boar looking pre-rendered, an overabundance of CGI blood in certain scenes warrants a cringe or two.
Images coated in digital dog food were something I anticipated from the trailers, hoping Raimi was hiding his dazzling chaos from the audience in the real thing.
My suspicions were proven right.
About 10 minutes in, there’s an extreme close-up of Dennis Haysbert’s sniffing nose that was all the confirmation I needed of “Send Help” being a true-blue Raimi experience.
The inevitable plane crash sequence is his unfettered hysteria in full effect, making sure the audience can hear every unpleasant sound and gaze at each terrorizing moment.
Paying homage to Jaws was also a tremendous flex.
We could be here all day gushing over his trademark POV shots, expertly planned crash zooms and match cuts that will have you drooling.
Of course, “Send Help” is no different from classic Raimi tales, where the actors losing their minds alongside the filmmaking is crucial to giving the story its distinct identity.
And by god, is the mental chess game between Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien not absolutely riveting.
McAdams as Linda Liddle is scary good, so much so that I’ll be genuinely frustrated by her omission from year-end lists because she’s “hamming it up”.
Tell me how it’s easy to effortlessly go from making a whole theater howl from laughter to covering their eyes at the possibility of what grisly act she could commit next, all while being charming enough to never lose sympathy.
This makes for an excellent juxtaposition with O’Brien’s Bradley Preston, a guy nearly impossible to root for even when the story gives good reason to.
He’s a total slimeball who spits his gum out into the wind before hopping on a company jet, whines and demeans at every turn and shares a bratty cackle with Mandark from “Dexter’s Laboratory”.
I loathe Mandark; he makes my blood boil.
Once the power dynamics get knocked upside down on the island, their relationship is a series of jack-in-the-box cranks, except the melody slowly turns into a cacophony of agonizing screams and what appears is a sharpened kitchen knife.
Choosing who to back in this ultra-violent episode of “Survivor” eschews morality and becomes a case of who’s more justified in their insanity.
Raimi crafted a bona fide crowd-pleaser that oohed as much as it aahed.
A proper reintroduction for one of America’s most essential auteurs.
“Send Help” is not a return to form; it’s a bloody reminder.
8/10
About Post Author
