You can take the boy away from the monster movies, but you can’t take the monster movies out of the boy. Few filmmakers who make their first success with horror movies are ever able to break out of being stereotyped for the rest of their careers – just ask George Romero, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, any of those guys.

After establishing himself as a hot young talent with The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi spent most of the 1990s trying to break out of the horror mold. He did so largely as a producer of junky-but-fun TV shows like “Xena,” “Hercules,” and “Cleopatra 2525.” By now, after the three hugely successful Spider-Man movies, he has to rank as one of Hollywood’s 800 pound gorillas.

So what does he do with all that hard-earned clout? He dusts off an old script that he and his brother Ivan wrote in the early 1990s, just after Army of Darkness, that plays like another Evil Dead movie.

It’s not quite the same plot. In Drag Me To Hell (I admit, it’s a great title) an ambitious but repressed bank loan officer (Alison Lohman) is pursued by demonic forces after being cursed by (what else?) an old gypsy woman. But it’s still the same formula of nasty monsters leaping out of familiar but shadowy places, with a solid dose of Tex Avery in the mix.

It moves in lurches, a collection of set pieces more than a unified whole. There are at least three fake endings, scenes which would seem to bring the story to a conclusion but which we know won’t because (a) the movie would be over too soon and (b) they lack the climactic oomph we expect out of someone like Raimi.

But that last ending really is the end of the movie, and it’s a bit of a cheat. You leave the theater feeling like you didn’t quite get your money’s worth, though you’ll be back for the inevitable sequel.

Along the way Raimi amuses himself with some dry wit, though I’m not sure if we’re meant to think that the gypsy woman’s license plate, 99951, if turned upside down would read “I IS 666.” There is a scene that cat lovers will not enjoy, and a lot of gross-out jokes involving mouths. I don’t know what that says about Raimi’s personal predilections, but guys, if there’s a girl you’re working up your nerve to kiss for the first time, I wouldn’t take her to this movie first.

So why did Raimi even make this? Maybe to put his family to work-aside from Ivan, there’s another brother and three Raimi kids in the cast, and more in the crew. Or maybe he’s just flexing his monster muscles before his next film, a reboot of The Evil Dead. Either way, it’s a best a competently crafted time killer.

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At no time does Hollywood have less respect for story than the summer, when the total world wide gross of a movie stands in direct proportion to the number of special effects shots and direct inverse proportion to the amount of actual plot. (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s what your average producer making a movie for the school recess market believes.) Thinking is for cold weather: bring on the explosions, CGI critters, and pop culture references!

It helps a lot to go in expecting that. Take the marquee- (not to mention definite-article-) unfriendly Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which those of you with kids too young for the new Terminator movie will probably be seeing this weekend.

As I never saw the original Night at the Museum, I am in no position to offer you a comparative analysis. What I can tell you is that while by any critical standard it’s noisy, disposable junk, it is more often than not fun disposable junk.

Since the last movie, our hero Larry (Ben Stiller) has become a success inventing and marketing the kind of crap that gets sold on TV infomercials at 3 am. (time that used to be put to much better use airing old sitcoms, movies you’ve never heard of and test patterns). Apparently he’s doing pretty well, because he has not only offices but a warehouse in Manhattan. No new business can afford a warehouse in Manhattan -that’s what Jersey and Queens are for.

On a visit to his friends at the Museum of Natural History, the ones who came to unexpected life during the last movie, he is consterned* to find they are being put into storage to make way for new special-effects intensive displays. (The irony of a big summer special effects movie about how evil special effects are is not pursued.)

They are stored in the enormous archives under the Smithsonian, and I won’t waste any more of your time detailing how Larry comes to track them there. Suffice to say that the magical Egyptian table that brought everything to life in the last movie has more subjects to work on here, including a villain who wants to use it for world domination. (I’m not sure why movie villains always want to dominate the world, which seems like it would be an awful lot of work and no fun at all, but there you go.)

Said villain is played by Hank Azaria, who uses a voice stolen from Boris Karloff, all soft-spoken aristocratic lisp. I don’t know if this is a reference to the fact that Karloff played the movies’ original undead Egyptian more than 75 years ago in The Mummy. But it’s a wonderful voice and delightful to listen to.

Azaria gets to have fun doing goofy stuff that has nothing to do with driving any story along. And that’s what I liked about the movie. It doesn’t always work – there’s a tiresome bit with Jonah Hill as a security guard that seems to go on forever. But there are fun bits by Steve Coogan as bit-sized Roman centurian Octavius, who’s crowning moment of glory comes with a fearsome squirrel; Bill Heder as one George (Armstrong Custer) that keeps threatening to turn into another one (W. Bush); Eugene Levy as the voice of a gaggle of bobblehead Albert Einsteins; a cameo by Oscar the Grouch; and a funny bit by, of all people, the Jonas Brothers, as – but why should I spoil it for you?

Look fast for scriptwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911,” as the Wright Brothers.

There is also Amy Adams who, as Amelia Earhart, spends the movie in a pair of skin-tight aviator pants that threaten to nudge the movie into a PG-13. It never happens, but it’s something for the fathers in the audience.

There is both more and less of a story in Dance Flick, the latest in an endless line of parody movies that depend on you recognizing references to plot elements from other movies. In this case the target is urban dance movies, and even though that is a genre I have studiously avoided over the past decade, I recognized all the clichés anyway.

So why did I even go to see this? Because it was from the Wayans Brothers, who sometimes manage to make this kind of thing funny. (I admit to liking both White Chicks and Little Man).

The trouble is that, with a second generation of Wayanses now in on what has become the family business, there are so many of them in on it that you just never know what you’re going to get when you see the label “Wayans Brothers”. The director of record here is Damien Wayans, a nephew of the brothers, and the result is a lot more miss than hit. With a PG-13 rating it isn’t as gross as their Scary Movie entries, but a depressing number of jokes are based on familiarity with tabloid celebrity scandals. I could report as a point of reference how the audience reacted, but at the Friday afternoon show I went to there were only two other viewers.

* I know there’s no such word as “consterned.” But if there is a noun “consternation,” then why isn’t there a verb “constern”?

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“What you put in your head is there forever,” says one of the two main characters in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. They are, as I don’t need to tell you if you are one of the many who have read this Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller, a father and his young son struggling to stay alive while crossing a post-Apocalyptic America.

It’s a line that comes up when the father is trying to prevent the boy from seeing a particularly gruesome sight, one of many in the book (and, as horrible as it is, not nearly so horrible as one that occurs a few pages later).

I picked up the book while waiting for a delayed flight a few months ago, read about half of it in the airport, and wasn’t able to get back to it until a few days ago when I needed something to read while waiting for Terminator Salvation to begin. It seemed appropriate (though it also robbed that mindless movie of whatever dystopian impact it might have had).

I’m now about 75% of the way through it, and that may be as far as I get. Its literary merit is undeniable, but it is so awfully, unrelievedly grim that I’m afraid of it. The story can only get worse, and as I generally only have time to read before going to sleep at night, I hate to let it get into my dreams.

This is why I just never got around to reviewing the film Hunger, which concludes a week’s run at the Eastern Hills Mall Cinema today. I meant to: I have a screening DVD that has been sitting on my desk since before it opened. This acclaimed British/Irish co-production, winner of numerous film festival awards, charts in what I understand to be great detail the last six weeks in the life of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who in 1981 starved to death during a hunger strike in a British jail.

I hope anyone who was interested in seeing this movie got a chance to do so, and I apologize for not doing more to bring it to your attention if you didn’t. If you did see it, perhaps you can tell me whether it’s extended depiction of a man’s slow, painful death as excruciating as I have heard. But I’m just afraid to let those images get inside my head, forever.

The film version of The Road, originally scheduled to hit theaters last fall, was postponed for what has been reported as additional post-production work. It was directed by John Hillcoat, the Australian filmmaker who has been a longtime collaborator of Nick Cave (you may have seen their 2006 revisionist western The Proposition). I think he’s a fine choice who is unlikely to water down or sweeten the story any. A final cut was recently seen and praised by Tom Chiarella who wrote in Esquire that, while it is the most important film of the year, “You won’t want to see this one twice.”

I’m not sure if I’ll see it once. Meanwhile, here’s the newly-released trailer which, in the grand tradition of the Weinstein brothers (whose Dimension Films will release The Road on October 16), has been accused by fans of the book of misrepresenting the movie to drag in a more mainstream audience.

Michael Caine faces death in IS ANYBODY THERE?

John Crowley’s Is Anybody There? really packs it in. Crowley and scripter Peter Harness have tried to amalgamate a lot of scenes that are serially, and sometimes almost simultaneously, intended to register vulgarly mordant humor, dreary Brit-kitsch kitchen sink drama, piercingly poignant human dilemmas and delicate philosophical insights. As might be expected, the filmmakers’ attempts to bundle all this together are sometimes awkward and arbitrary.

What’s surprising is how well they get away with it. The most important reasons are the performances of Michael Caine and young Bill Milner and their unexpectedly appealing and affecting teamwork. Caine’s performance might seem to be the vital force in this essentially slight and uneven film, and it is, but it is designed to work in tandem with Milner’s Edward. To the extent a point of view prevails in the picture, it’s the boy’s.

Caine’s Clarence is a used-up music-hall magician sent by social workers in 1987 to lodge at the seniors boarding house run by Edward’s parents (Anne Marie Duff and David Morrisey) near the English shore. Waspishly embittered and dismayed to find himself in this less than genteel, sometimes disturbing group setting, Clarence is ill-disposed to deal graciously with a ten-year-old boy who resents being displaced from his room, first by the lately deceased previous occupant and now by the old magician.

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Donald Faison and Mos Def consider getting new agents.

I’m sure they don’t get paid what they’re worth—hell, you can’t even see their names in the credits—but the unsung heroes of the movie business work in the trailer department. They’re the ones who can rescue some of the production money put into a dog like Next Day Air by finding enough scenes that can be re-arranged into a two-minute commercial that will make you want to spend your ticket money on it. For the same reason they are the curse of us, the viewers, who never seem to learn that a good trailer does not guarantee a good movie. (Remember, after you’ve paid for your ticket Hollywood is done with you.)

Next Day Air concerns the hurlyburly that ensues in a Philadelphia neighborhood when a stoned deliveryman leaves a box containing ten kilos of high-grade cocaine at the wrong apartment. If you’re already asking, “Who would be stupid enough to FedEx that much cocaine?” you are not the market for this movie. You would be even more astonished to see that the drug lord uses not FedEx, or even UPS, but rather a bargain-basement delivery company whose branch in Philadelphia—not a small city, if you’ve never been there—is run by a single woman and her two sons.

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