Send Help (2026)

Rated R for Sam Raimi style gore and violence.  Since I'm dropping the term "gore", you can assume that there's going to be some death.  I'm not saying who is going to die.  I'm not going to even tell you if your two main characters make it through the movie or not.  I'm just saying that people die.  I can tell you some randos die for sure.  Beyond that, watch the movie.  There's also language and some innuendo, but the R is 1000% for Sam Raimi's love for campy gore.

DIRECTOR:  Sam Raimi

Ah, summertime.  When it is super hard to find time to do some basic writing.  I know.  Most people don't feel bad for the teacher who has summers off.  I can even make you feel less sympathy for me immediately.  The school year ended and we went from there right into a mini-vacation.  What that means is that I'm writing Send Help a little stale.  Not too-too bad.  Just more than I normally would allow.  It doesn't matter.  It's not like anybody reads these.  But I'm going to keep the blog up because that's the thing that I do.  I don't give up on anything and that's probably mostly unhealthy.  Whatever.

Sam Raimi and I need to go to couples' counseling together.  We're both Detroit boys.  And by "Detroit Boys", I mean that we both grew up in similar suburbs of Detroit at totally different time periods.  Still, the fact that Sam Raimi was a local video hero of mine means that I show up for a lot of his movies.  Honestly, I like Sam Raimi.  When I found out that he was going to do Multiverse of Madness (a movie that clearly birthed a relationship between him and Rachel McAdams), I lost my mind.  I think that movie is great.  While a lot of people cried "Meh", I was cheering the whole time.  That's what I wanted out of Doctor Strange and I would be thrilled beyond belief if I could keep getting Sam Raimi Marvel beyond his Spider-Man trilogy. 

But Sam Raimi is in a weird place career wise.  I think he's always kind of been an indie kid (Indie Kid?  Detroit Boy?  What kind of mood am I in right now?) who has been mistaken for a big time Hollywood type.  He's more of a name than a director for hire and he carries with him some real auteur vibes.  But he's not exactly a draw for John and Jane Q. Public.  As such, when he has a movie attached to him, some weird stuff is going to happen.  Sam Raimi often tackles these projects that are super fun to watch in the moment, but aren't necessarily going to be movies that stick to the ribs.  Part of that comes from the fact that he lives under his Evil Dead umbrella.  As a consumer of his work, I don't see that as a bad thing.  I even think that Raimi is a fan of his own work, not unlike Kevin Smith's affection for Clerks. I don't know.  He seems like a cool dude.  Still, that's entirely based on the fact that I want to like the guy. 

As an example of the thing that I'm dancing around, I want to compare Send Help to Drag Me to Hell.  The only time that I saw Drag Me to Hell was in theaters.  Do you know what?  At the time, I absolutely dug it. It wasn't Evil Dead.  Raimi, as campy as he still gets, has reeled it in a ton since those movies.  They're still over-the-top, Three Stooges inspired horror movies.  I get that.  But I couldn't tell you one thing about Drag Me to Hell except for the end on the train tracks.  I know that's going to be me and Send Help.  I'm not even talking about the distant future.  I'm talking about borderline next week.  I'm going to remember a handful of really gratuitous scenes.  If I'm lucky, I'll remember the twist that was telegraphed (I got most of it, not exactly it).  Maybe the ending will stick with me.  But that's what I'm talking about.

Modern Sam Raimi is a guy waiting to do the crazy crap that no one else wants to do.  While I watch movies, I often try to think of how I'm going to write about what I'm watching.  The immediate takeaway is that it is Misery on an island.  (I was going to say Lord of the Flies, but that can go too many ways.) There are a handful of scenes that cement Send Help as a Sam Raimi film.  The plane crash, the hunting of the boar, the intense fight between the two of the main characters, and a handful of cheesy lines that Linda drops all make the film Sam Raimi.  Now, old Sam Raimi would often make entire movies out of the scenes I just mentioned.Like, if you watch Evil Dead II, that movie is frenetic.  He's just embracing everything that a campy horror director would love to dole out.  Heck, he inspired entire generations of campy horror directors.  But now, I feel like he has to play nice between parts of gore that he's waiting to subject you to.

This is probably a sign of maturity.  I mean, as much as I like Evil Dead and the projects that it spawned, those movies are what they are.  Other movies shouldn't be Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy.   They are their own thing and we don't need people coming back to the same well over and over. (Golly, now I feel bad for lumping Sam Raimi in with Kevin Smith because I've accused Kevin Smith of returning to the same wells.)  I do think that Raimi has fun making these movies.  I bet you he doesn't care that the story is kind of so-so because he's having fun making the kind of movie that gets released in cinemas across the world.  Heck, Send Help was the example I gave of people coming out to go see movies.  It did halfway decent at the box office, so who am I to lament that it was kind of forgettable, shy of a few really fun moments.

It's also well directed at times, despite the fact that I seem to be judging it pretty harshly.  Raimi balances a lot of visual motifs in the film, mostly centered aroud mundane objects.  I wish I wrote this fresh because I made a tally of all of the visual callbacks that Raimi makes in the film.  There are the flowers on the cliff (did the rock repair itself?), the engagement ring, Linda's shoes, the knife.  I know that there were more, but it's 12:35 in the morning and I just drove back from Chicago.  I really wanted to get this out while there were no kids asking me to make them food.  Still, those visual callbacks are really nice.  Are they sometimes a bit heavy-handed?  Sure.  But I wish that I could show my film class Send Help just to explain how mundane objects gain a lot of meaning when the director imbues the film with meaning.

Golly, Raimi has to do some pretty screwed up things to get an enemy out of this movie.  Maybe one of my biggest frustrations is the fact that the movie wants us to root for the bad guy.  (HOLD ON!  LET ME FINISH!)  Preston is a monster.  One of the lines that the film drops is that "Monsters aren't born. They're made."  As the film progresses, Raimi manipulates tropes to get you to really hate Preston.  If the trope of the film is that these two are going to learn to depend on each other only to have that idea subverted, Raimi gets a bit of a laugh by tricking us with the same ideas time and again.  Preston is beyond redemption.  The film makes him a butthead, softens him, and then has him betray Linda.  That's fine.  A lot of movies would play that card.  But Send Help pulls that crap multiple times, making it so you have to wonder what Linda is going to do with this guy.  I mean, Raimi embraces his anti-CEO corporate bro messaging pretty hard.  It seems like the film is about empowering this woman.

But Linda is also a monster.  Now, I'm heavily backpedaling because I'm mostly on Team Linda for the film.  I think we're supposed to be.  I expect films to give their protagonists character flaws.  Early in the film, Linda has the opportunity to signal for help.  It creates just the right amount of stakes.  The boat is far away and moving fast.  If Linda really tried to signal that boat, there was only a small chance that she could actually get seen and helped.  Raimi teases that this moment is going to be the damnation of Linda.  We were supposed to have this dramatic irony moment when Preston was going to find out that Linda could have gotten them rescued and didn't.  That keeps Linda as the sympathetic protagonist.  

But that's nothing.  The ending reveal, including the sacrificing of Linda's own morals when it comes to Zuri and the boat captain, make Linda  a full-on bad guy.  It's such an aggressive choice and...I don't know if I like it.  Sure, it's fun to see Annie Wilkes in Misery do her thing.  But I also sometimes just want to see Linda get appropriate comeuppance stopping Preston from his mania.  Instead, Preston has a moment of sympathy and that...bums me out.  Like, that dude deserves no sympathy.  And Linda absolutely took it too far.  Still, there is something incredibly cathartic about seeing Linda get away with it all.  Sometimes, that's the bigger win than good triumphing over evil.  At least that's true in cinema.

It's a good time.  Yeah, I wish it was a bit more memorable.  But for what it was, I enjoyed it.