After spending years in the Marvel machine and chasing big-budget spectacle, Sam Raimi has returned to what he does best: gleefully nasty horror-comedy that makes audiences squirm and laugh in equal measure.
Send Help, which hits theaters this week, reunites Raimi with the gonzo energy that made Evil Dead II a cult classic. The premise is deliciously simple: corporate underling Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) gets passed over for promotion by her smug boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). When their private jet crashes on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Thailand, the power dynamics reverse spectacularly.
McAdams thrives in survival mode. O'Brien does not. Carnage—both physical and psychological—ensues.
Critics are calling it McAdams' best comedy performance since Mean Girls, which is saying something. IndieWire's Alison Foreman awarded it an A-, praising Raimi's "gruesome ingenuity" and describing the film as "ghastly without being grim." That's the sweet spot Raimi has always occupied—violence that's cartoonish enough to be funny, but committed enough to have stakes.
The Variety review notes the film shares DNA with Triangle of Sadness, another recent class-reversal satire. But where that film was coldly European in its precision, Send Help is gleefully American in its excess. Raimi doesn't do subtle social commentary—he does workplace revenge fantasies with bodily fluids.
And honestly? After years of Prestige Horror™ that's more interested in Elevated Themes than actual scares, it's refreshing to see a director who remembers that genre movies should be fun. Raimi has never been embarrassed by genre conventions. He leans into them, cranks them to eleven, and trusts his actors to sell the absurdity.
The film reportedly features what critics are calling Raimi's "finest puke gag since Drag Me to Hell," which is high praise indeed. One reviewer describes the film as having "the gruesome ingenuity from his breakout debut, The Evil Dead, fused with the pop-comic precision" of his Spider-Man work.
There's a criticism to be made here—Raimi leans more heavily on digital effects than the practical gore that defined his early work. The man who once made Bruce Campbell fight his own possessed hand now relies on CGI for the gross-out moments. That's a shame, because practical effects age better and have a tactile quality that computers can't quite replicate.
But that's a minor quibble in what sounds like a genuinely entertaining return to form. After Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness—a movie that had Raimi's fingerprints but was ultimately a Marvel product—it's good to see him making a Sam Raimi movie again.
The film's January release date would normally be a red flag. Studios dump bad movies in January. But 20th Century Studios seems to understand what they have here—a crowd-pleasing genre film that'll play well with audiences looking for something fun and nasty after the holiday season.
And in a year where so many movies feel algorithmically designed for maximum inoffensiveness, there's something valuable about a filmmaker who still knows how to provoke. Raimi has always understood that horror-comedy is about control—how to make audiences comfortable enough to laugh, then uncomfortable enough to gasp.
Send Help opens January 30. Bring a strong stomach and a sense of humor. You'll need both.
