"Sam Raimi's first horror movie since 2009's Drag Me to Hell happily fulfils its goop quota. Stars Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien find themselves, at various points, drenched in vomit, burst eyeball, bug innards, fish innards, and, of course, several power showers' worth of splattered blood. Send Help is another "eat the rich" parable, in which nepo baby CEO Bradley Preston (O'Brien) and Linda Liddle (McAdams), the employee he cruelly passed over for promotion, end up as castaways on the same Thai beach."
"Granted, Raimi's effectiveness as a filmmaker has been blunted by his over-reliance on digital gore effects. It's a fairly damning indictment of how little Hollywood invests in its VFX artists, in both money and time, that so many shots here look worse than they did in Drag to Me to Hell (its infamous possessed goat has aged surprisingly well). Cheap CGI will never exude the same charm and ingenuity as cheap practical effects."
"That said, the bitter aftertaste of green screen can at least be washed down here by the way Raimi's camera still moves, like a mischievous sprite darting from rancid spectacle to rancid spectacle, or by how ferociously the verbal (and, at times, literal) knife fight is played out by Send Help 's two leads. A Raimi horror is, by nature, mean-spirited (there's so much more biting in this film than you'd normally expect)."
Send Help marks Sam Raimi's return to horror with abundant gore and black comedy, featuring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien as castaways on a Thai beach. The story functions as an 'eat the rich' parable about a nepotistic CEO and an overlooked employee forced into violent confrontations. The film leans heavily on digital gore effects, which often look weaker than earlier practical-effects work, though Raimi's exuberant camera movement and the leads' ferocious performances inject wit, viscera, and a deliberately mean-spirited tone into the satire.
Read at The Independent
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