Send up a flare! Sam Raimi’s back making horror! For Raimi fans, this is cause for celebration. "Send Help" is his first horror feature since 2009’s "Drag Me to Hell." He is also the genius who gave us Bruce Campbell as Ash and created the "Evil Dead" franchise, and for that alone I am forever grateful.
In the press materials for "Send Help," Raimi said he liked the "what if" premise of turning the tables on your abusive boss.
"So many people can relate to a lot of the aspects of it that I think it's a great thing to experience with others," Raimi said.
Which is why he says you need to see it in a theater, where you can share a communal experience and cheer on Rachel McAdams' smart and underappreciated employee, Linda Liddle, with an audience.
Linda is an awkward but highly competent and resourceful employee who is expecting a long-overdue promotion. But her boss dies, and his obnoxious, incompetent son, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), bluntly tells her, "As an executive, I see no value in you."
Bradley wants sexy secretaries and colleagues he can golf with. Not frumpy women with smelly chunks of tuna on their face. But he needs someone smart for an overseas business trip, so he takes her along. But the plane crashes, and they are the only two survivors. Linda saves his life, but Bradley still wants to be the alpha male and tells her, "Let's not forget, I'm your boss. You work for me."
But finally, Linda asserts herself and replies, "We're not in the office anymore, Bradley."
And so the tables are turned, and the fight to survive is on.
"She knows how to survive in the wild. It's her hobby," Raimi said. "He knows nothing about real leadership or self-management. He's a coward and a weakling, and he still tries to be boss. But finally, the truth comes out of who's responsible, who's capable in the real world, and who's not."
Since it’s Raimi at the helm, it’s horror by way of the Three Stooges, and with lots of bodily fluids flowing. And I’ll dare to suggest that "Send Help" is Raimi’s wacky, darkly comic take on 1930s screwball rom-coms — just with more blood and a body count.
I know that may sound crazy, but immediately after watching the film, I was bothered by how Linda keeps trying to get Bradley to both like and respect her, and she even says she wants them to stay stranded on the island forever — but not with the intent of tormenting him, but rather with a goal of a sort of rom-com-y bliss. It made no sense to me.
But in an interview, McAdams mentioned that her friend called it "a demented romp," and it hit me. This sort of plays out like a screwball comedy where a secretary or a dizzy heiress played by Jean Arthur or Katherine Hepburn, is mismatched with a Ray Milland or Cary Grant and they bicker and banter, and sometimes try all sorts of crazy stunts to switch the power dynamic before the guy finally realizes they are made for each other.
Raimi gives us a cute dinner date on the beach, and Linda — played with sometimes perky energy befitting a screwball heroine — tries very hard to make a nice home for them on the island. It's a rom-com formula, but then turned brutal and violent — and with the kind of horror humor only Raimi can supply.
If the plot feels familiar, it’s because the same role-reversal narrative was played out in the second half of the brilliant "Triangle of Sadness," when a storm strands cruise ship passengers on an island and only the bathroom janitor displays survival skills. But in that film, there was a greater emphasis on class.
"Send Help," which Raimi has supposedly had in the works for years, is more about the inequities of the workplace. Raimi gives the story his own unique spin, and it’s great to have him back in the horror genre. Now I have to go back and watch it again to see where Raimi hid his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 (it has appeared in almost every film including his period western, "The Quick and the Dead") and to find Bruce Campbell.
And I want to leave you with the best filmmaking advice I have heard in countless hours of Comic-Con panels, from Raimi in 2006.
