#sam-raimi

#sam-raimi

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate's Scaredy Scale is here to help. We've put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things-some viewers can't stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can't stomach arterial spurts-

On January 30th, Sam Raimi's Send Help arrives in theaters, and Variety reports that the horror auteur's return to B-movie glory is tracking to make $14-$17 million its opening weekend. That's not huge, but Send Help is in better shape than another new release: The Amazon documentary Melania, also opening this weekend, is predicted to earn around $3 million. As Variety notes, making more than $1 million theatrically could be considered pretty good for any kind of non-fiction movie that isn't a concert film.

When it comes to director Sam Raimi's films, you have to go into the theater understanding that you're about to experience a piece of cinema that vacillates between being absolute batshit and utterly sublime. Though Send Help is much more grounded than the projects he's best known for, like The Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell, it's a quintessential Raimi film that makes no pretense of hiding how unhinged and disturbing its story is going to be.

It's a movie whose entertaining initial premise and shrewd satire are finally damaged by Raimi's need to juice everything up with spurious horror flourishes for the fanbase, on-brand gore eruptions that aren't really scary and undermine the film's believability, turning everything into silliness. The poster and promotional materials promise a horror film, but that isn't really what this is. But what is it?

In the trailer, audiences meet Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) and Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), two colleagues who survive a plane crash and find themselves stranded on a deserted island. Forced to rely on each other, they face both physical and psychological challenges that test their limits. What begins as cooperation soon turns into a darkly humorous and tense battle of wills.