In Send Help, competent but hopelessly dorky corporate strategist Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is the office punchline, the woman voted more likely to accidentally spit tuna salad on her boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), than receive a long-promised promotion. What the office doesn’t know is that she’s a Survivor superfan who dreams about collecting rainwater in palm leaves and grilling conches over an open flame. Moreover, she’s willing to kill to do it: When a plane crash makes her survivalist dreams a reality, she unleashes her inner Richard Hatch and schemes her way toward staying put.
The most surprising thing about Send Help is how Raimi shifts the audience’s sympathies over the course of the story. Linda superficially recalls many of the director’s downtrodden, working-class protagonists, beaten by a world that sees them as failures. But, once on the island, Linda reveals layers as quickly as she sheds them. After ignoring a would-be rescue boat, she admits that she had a hand in her abusive husband’s death by allowing him to drive drunk. When Bradley attempts to escape their island by raft, Linda paralyzes him with toxins and performs a mock castration to scare him back into line. Most egregiously, when Bradley’s fiancé (Edyll Ismail) arrives on the island, Linda tosses her and the rescue-boat captain (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) off a cliff, then murders Bradley in the mansion she’s been hiding from him, securing her place on the island indefinitely. In the film’s epilogue, set a year after Linda’s rescue, it’s revealed that our hero both rode Bradley’s idea to safety (apparently, a raft was the answer) and stole his dream of becoming a celebrity golfer, in addition to leveraging her survival into a role as a best-selling self-help author.
Linda’s last-minute heel turn is a mirror image of what befalls Drag Me To Hell‘s Christine (Allison Lohman). That movie’s moralistic center argues for more humanity than business rigidity after Christine denies an elderly Romani mystic a loan extension. It’s a mistake Christine never stops paying for. The mystic curses Christine, and with three days to break the curse or be dragged to hell, she slowly betrays the morals she once claimed to hold dear—much like Linda, it’s Christine’s good side that’s been keeping her from moving up the corporate ladder. But after killing her fiancé’s (Justin Long) cat and returning a cursed object to the mystic’s corpse, Christine believes the worst is behind her. That is, until the very last minute of the film, when it’s revealed that she actually missed a step, and is pulled into the underworld anyway. The end.
Drag Me To Hell‘s finale no doubt left a few viewers feeling cheated. But it comes from nearly 40 years of upending the so-called rules of magic. All three Evil Dead movies end with Ash (Bruce Campbell) thinking the day is won, only to find himself holding the boomstick once again. “For God’s sake!” Ash screams as he’s pulled into a time vortex at the end of Evil Dead II. “How do you stop it?” You can’t. Just as Doctor Strange can’t help but grow a third eye in the baffling epilogue to Multiverse Of Madness. Not even Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) can get her man after jilting her fiancé at the altar. (Engagements rarely end in marriage in Raimi’s world.) The last shot of Spider-Man 2 lingers on MJ realizing that she’s signed up for a life of sharing her friendly Spider-Man with the whole neighborhood. Meanwhile, A Simple Plan‘s Hank (Bill Paxton) can’t even use the money that cost him his brother’s (Billy Bob Thornton) life, a suitably dour ending for the pitch-black noir.
Lives are ruined and heroics are for naught in the films of Sam Raimi. Just as he loves to cover his stars in blood, pus, and vomit, he takes a certain delight in tormenting his characters and audiences, preferring to punish the aw-shucks goodness of Peter Parker than the villainy of the Green Goblin. But for all their swooping camera work and Three Stooges slapstick, there’s a harsh reality to his films. He operates in universes that aren’t simply indifferent but also mockingly cruel toward his characters. They can pore through all the old books they want, but that doesn’t mean the ancient texts are correct. With Send Help, he finally relents and allows his hero to come out on top; all she had to do was sell out her morals and deny the audience a clean, happy ending. Linda delivers the film’s final punchline directly to the camera: “No help is coming, so you better save yourself.”
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