There are horror movie directors, and then there is Sam Raimi, a man who has never met a camera move he didn’t want to thrust directly at your face. After crawling out of the cinematic swamp with his scrappy, genre-redefining Evil Dead films and delivering cult hits like Crimewave, The Quick & the Dead, and Darkman, Raimi set the tone for two decades of superhero movies with the Spider-Man trilogy. He made his way back to horror with the criminally underappreciated Drag Me to Hell, but went back to traditional, big-budget Hollywood filmmaking with that Wizard of Oz prequel starring James Franco that has been collectively erased from human memory. He eventually wandered back to tentpole land with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a film that contained flashes of classic Raimi chaos but was clearly wrestling with the studio executive-mandated notes of the Marvel industrial complex, trapping him like a Deadite inside a very expensive fruit cellar.
He lovingly gave us the small-screen continuation of Evil Dead with Ash vs. the Evil Dead for three wonderful seasons, but there has been a Sam Raimi-shaped void in desperate need of filling since 2009 (no shade to Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, I do love you) on the big screen. But now, the horror maestro celebrates his return to the genre that made him a superstar after 17 years away with Send Help, a gloriously unhinged tale of survival that doubles as a reminder that no one else on Earth can do it like ol’ Uncle Sam. Blending horror, slapstick, buckets of bodily fluids, and animals with faces out of a child’s nightmare, Send Help is a gleefully nasty horror-comedy that gives Rachel McAdams carte blanche to go full goblin mode.
Building off of a script from the screenwriting duo that gave us Freddy vs. Jason and the last proper Friday the 13th film, Damian Shannon & Mark Swift present the story of Linda Liddle (McAdams), a mousy strategy and planning manager in desperate need of dry shampoo and someone to talk to that isn’t her pet bird, who quickly learns that the major promotion she was promised by her boss before he died is not happening now that his shitheel son Bradley (a beautifully smarmy Dylan O’Brien) is in charge of the company and can give the position to one of his statutory-rapist-in-training former frat bros.
Despite the aptitude Linda possesses that keeps Bradley’s company from falling apart, he is viscerally put off by Linda’s lack of social prowess and penchant for eating tuna fish sandwiches in common areas (he does have a point with that last part). As an olive branch — or, more likely, a chance to exploit her work ethic and take all the credit for her genius — Bradley invites Linda on a business trip with his lackey army of kiss-ass douchebros to help close the deal with a Bangkok client. Unfortunately, the plane crashes and kills everyone on the flight, save for Bradley and Linda. The young CEO is hurt in the crash, but his leg injury is the least of his worries. Bradley is helpless, hapless, and devoid of any practical skills. Surprise, surprise, being an absurdly wealthy nepo-baby coasting off of your father’s success won’t keep you alive.
Meanwhile, Linda is such a hardcore fan of the reality show Survivor that she’s even auditioned, has gone on solo backpacking excursions to faraway lands, and knows exactly what to do to keep them both alive. She builds them a shelter, she hunts for food, she collects fresh water, and she treats Bradley’s wounds. He would be dead without her, and they both know it, but this little bastard refuses to accept that the power dynamic has shifted.
Okay, Bradley. Game on.
From the second they arrive on the island, the twists and turns are a little predictable if you’ve watched enough “stranded on a desert island” films, but because McAdams and O’Brien throw everything they have into the roles, it’s impossible not to get excited to see how it all plays out. McAdams, in particular, is beyond deranged and hammers home to anyone watching that she’s the kind of actor who can do anything, even if “anything” means decapitating a wild boar for food with a makeshift weapon or projectile vomiting directly onto someone’s face. Linda feels like a “Good for Her” heroine in the making, but Send Help refuses to deliver a message so simple, and instead forces the audience to reckon with the conundrum of figuring out who to root for when life-or-death circumstances show us their true faces.
Is this Raimi’s magnum opus? Nah, not really. But it is hilariously gross and made with the confidence of a director who remembers exactly what he’s good at. Welcome back, Sam Raimi. We missed you.
