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.