Sam Raimi knows how to make a disgusting joke land, and we enjoy his mix of horror and physical comedy. The scripts sometimes exhaust their ideas early, but his timing gives us good reason to stay.
Fi1m perspective
In Send Help (2026), Linda's encounter with a boar is disgusting and funny. We laughed, then felt uneasy at how much she seemed to enjoy herself. Raimi gets the reaction before giving us time to question it, using a sudden camera movement and a well-timed impact. He is good company for anyone who enjoys horror with a nasty sense of humour, although the scripts do not always give him enough to do.
The rapid zooms and rushing points of view belong to a style established with The Evil Dead (1981), and help explain why comic-book material suited him. Spider-Man (2002) put that energy to work without forgetting the characters. The overfilled Spider-Man 3 (2007) showed how readily it could become clutter. After the trilogy, Drag Me to Hell (2009) brought him back to horror, dark humour and practical effects.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which he co-wrote with Joel and Ethan Coen, exposes another weakness. Some of the dialogue is so carefully worked that it no longer sounds spontaneous. The performances and elaborate sets make the film worth an evening, but the script gives us too little reason to worry about Tim Robbins's Norville Barnes. Paul Newman's ease makes the effort in the writing all the more noticeable.
In Send Help, the crew understands how to make his physical comedy work. Cinematographer Bill Pope lights the office in flat grey and the island in hard white sun, so every scrape registers. Production designer Ian Gracie makes Linda's shelter a practical arrangement of wreckage that quietly mocks her boss's uselessness. Composer Danny Elfman supplies brass, shrieks and sudden silences; editor Bob Murawski cuts on the shrieks, giving the impacts their comic timing.
The digital blood lets them down: its splashes look added to the picture rather than part of the action. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's screenplay also keeps telling us that bosses are awful, long after the point is clear. Raimi can time the next shock, but he cannot make that observation any more interesting. Try Send Help for Rachel McAdams and the ugly jokes, provided a little queasiness is acceptable evening entertainment.
Biography
Sam Raimi is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He was born on 23 October 1959 in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Raimi is best known for writing and directing the original Evil Dead trilogy (1981–1992) and directing the Spider-Man films (2002–2007). His other directing credits include Darkman (1990), Drag Me to Hell (2009), Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
He has produced films including 65 (2023), Send Help (2026), on which he also served as director, and Evil Dead Burn (2026). Raimi co-founded production companies Renaissance Pictures and Ghost House Pictures.
