Send Help

Aside from 2009’s Drag Me to Hell (one of the horror movies of the century so far,) and a stint spicing up the Marvelverse with some dark and freaky touches, Sam Raimi has been largely AWOL from the genre that made his name. 

Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years. There’s nothing bland in his queasy funhouse ride, a table-turning death match set on a remote island. Or in the wild performances of Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The pair plugs into Raimi’s wavelength with increasingly unhinged commitment. 

McAdams, a comic actress gifted enough to count as Canada’s Olivia Colman, plays hard-working, unsung professional Linda Liddle. She’s been overlooked for promotion at her anycorp employer because she isn’t one of the boys, doesn’t ‘golf’, and in a case of especially bad timing, meets the company’s disgusted new nepo-baby CEO, Bradley (O’Brien), with her lunch on her face. 

But when the company’s private jet flight to Bangkok goes down in a tropical storm, boss and underling are forced to team up on a remote island. Except, she’s a Survivor superfan able to whip up a shelter and handy enough with a knife to turn the local marine life into a sashimi platter – and he’s injured and next to useless. Being a sexist dinosaur, he believes that office hierarchies still apply, even on a desert island.

It plays out like a violent mix of Cast Away, Lord of the Flies, and a day out with Bear Grylls

If you’re thinking that anyone prepared to use the word ‘golf’ as a verb deserves a nasty brand of karma, Raimi and his screenwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon are way ahead of you. What follows is a gloriously over-the-top battle of wits that plays out like a violent mix of Cast Away, Misery, Lord of the Flies, and a day out with Bear Grylls. 

The gender politics are blunted by some broad characterisation – did Linda have to be the clichéd mousy striver when we meet her? – and the ending doesn’t totally deliver on the canny set-up, but the duo’s descent into savagery, marked in booby traps, betrayals and violent improvisation, is all guilty pleasure. A wild boar hunt which ends in a Grand Guignol bloodbath and that plane crash sequence, horrifying yet hilarious, are particular highlights. Raimi is back in business. 

In US theaters Fri Jan 30. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas Feb 5.