The last Saturn Award winner for Best Horror Film was surprisingly good

A few days ago, I finished a little project that I’ve been working on for the past several months, that is, watching all of the Saturn Award winners for Best Horror Film, in order.

I wrapped up this project on the day before yesterday when I sat down to watch the 2009 winner, “Drag Me to Hell.” Honestly, I hadn’t heard of this movie before seeing it on the Saturn Award list of winners and was pleasantly surprised by its quality.

This movie was directed by Sam Raimi, who wrote the screenplay for the film with his brother, Ivan Raimi. Many of you will be familiar with the Raimi Brothers for their “Army of Darkness” movies, the first of which won a Saturn award in 1993.

“Drag Me to Hell” was released on May 29, 2009 and starred Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, David Paymer and Dileep Rao.

For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, it’s about a young bank clerk (Alison Lohman), who turns down an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) for a home loan. To get her back, the gypsy puts a curse on the bank clerk, who will literally dragged to hell by the devil if something’s not done to break the curse. The bank clerk, aided by her psychology professor boyfriend (Justin Long), goes to a fortune teller (Dileep Rao), in hopes that he can give her some advice. From there, the three work together to take off the curse, but the clock is ticking, and they’ve only got three days.

This movie was a lot better than I expected it to be, and actually contains some outstanding, edge-of-your-seat horror moments. The only thing that I didn’t like about it was the number of cartoonish moments in the film. All of a sudden, in the midst of a tense scene, you’d see something that looked like it came straight out of “Beetlejuice” or… well… “Army of Darkness.”

This movie also smacked heavily of Stephen King’s book and subsequent movie, “Thinner,” which is about a male gypsy who places a curse on an unsavory and morbidly obese lawyer. In that book/movie, the gypsy curses the lawyer after he kills the gypsy’s daughter in a car accident. This curse causes the lawyer to rapidly lose weight, until he wastes away to nothing, despite his best efforts to pack on the pounds.

In the end, I enjoyed this movie, and I gained more than a little satisfaction in knowing that I’d officially watched all of the Saturn Award winners for Best Horror Film in order.

To recap, those movies included “Blacula” (1972), “The Exorcist” (1973), “Young Frankenstein” (1974/1975), “Burnt Offerings” (1976), “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” (1977), “The Wicker Man” (1978), “Dracula” (1979), “The Howling” (1980), “An American Werewolf in London” (1980), “Poltergeist” (1982), “The Dead Zone” (1983), “Gremlins” (1984), “Fright Night” (1985), “The Fly” (1986), “The Lost Boys” (1987), “Beetlejuice” (1988), “Arachnophobia” (1989/1990), “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), “Army of Darkness” (1993), “Interview with the Vampire” (1994), “From Dusk till Dawn” (1995), “Scream” (1996), “The Devil’s Advocate” (1997), “Apt Pupil” (1998), “The Sixth Sense” (1999), “Final Destination” (2000), “The Others” (2001), “The Ring” (2002), “28 Days Later” (2003), “Shaun of the Dead” (2004), “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (2005), “The Descent” (2006), “Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (2007), “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (2008) and “Drag Me to Hell” (2009).