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Don't f*** with old ladies, especially if they have bad teeth and an evil curse up their sleeve. If there's anything new to be learned from Drag Me to Hell, director Sam Raimi's return to horror, it's that loan officers will have hell to pay if they dare to foreclose on your mortgage. It's a lesson that should make everyone stand up and cheer.

The film screened as a "work in progress" late last night at the completely packed Paramount Theater in Austin to a loud, raucous reaction. Some of the finer technical points clearly remain to be tweaked (sound, visual effects, maybe a little editing here and there) and end credits need to be added before its wide theatrical release on May 29. And in its present version, the ratings issue is still cloudy -- PG-13 or R?

But this much is clear: Raimi has made a joyful romp through his personal horror playground and come up with a very entertaining horror-comedy that gets back to the basics. By that I mean creepy shadows on the wall and things that go bump in the night: all the odd, unexplained sights and sounds that keep anxious children awake at night, hiding under the covers. Any inkling that Raimi's soul might have been irretrievably chewed up by the Hollywood studio machinery -- a well-founded concern after the disappointing Spider-Man 3 -- quickly evaporates once the story gets underway.

God knows we have some horror fans on the staff, but we haven't been talking much about Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell. Raimi's return to the horror genre is about an ambitious loan officer (Alison Lohman) who denies a mysterious old woman (Lorna Raver) an extension on her mortgage payments to angle for a promotion. Like any self-respecting home owner facing foreclosure, the old woman responds by placing a powerful supernatural curse on the merciless loan officer. When an evil spirit starts pursuing her, the loan officer appeals to a psychic to help rid her of the curse.

This week, MTV got ahold of a couple of photos from the movie. The most interesting one -- the close-up of Lorna Raver's scary old woman that I've put beneath the cut -- is hopefully an indicator of the kind of movie this is going to be: old-fashioned, straight-ahead, unironic fantasy/horror. I mean, just look at that make-up job. (In the interview at MTV, Raimi actually uses the precise analogy I thought of when I saw the photo: a carnival funhouse ride.) And since there's basically no one better than Raimi at when it comes to straight-ahead genre films, well -- I'm looking forward to next May.

There are three more pics over at the MTV site -- no more of the villainess, but some of the heroine and her boyfriend, played by Justin Long (who, by the way, brings down the house in this weekend's Zack and Miri Make a Porno).

The Hollywood Reporter has some more casting details for Drag Me to Hell, the Sam Raimi horror film everyone's excited about (and for good reason -- it looks to be his first real foray into the genre since Army of Darkness). The news isn't as major as when we learned that, say, Alison Lohman signed on, replacing Ellen Page, or that Justin Long joined her -- the new additions are Cloverfield's Jessica Lucas, TV vet Lorna Raver, and character actor David Paymer -- but more notable are the character descriptions that accompany the announcement, which finally give us some hint of what Raimi has in store for us. (No real spoilers, but if you're the kind of person who likes to go in completely cold, best to stop reading now.)