Sam Raimi’s Glorious Return to Schlock-Horror Mayhem

Send Help is Sam Raimi roaring back to the genre like he’s been quietly loading the shotgun for over a decade. 

Daring, dotty, wilfully crazy, and gleefully off‑the‑wall, this 2026 psychological schlock‑horror outing feels like a long, twisted love letter to fans who grew up on The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell. 

It’s exactly the kind of rollercoaster ride you hope Raimi still has in him: gut-churning one minute, hysterically tongue-in-cheek the next, all while maintaining a surprisingly tight grip on character and tension.

The setup is simple, almost classical: two colleagues, played by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, are the only survivors of a brutal plane crash and wash up on a deserted island. 

From there, Send Help becomes less a survival story and more a psychological cage match. 

Past grievances bubble up, trust dissolves, and what begins as a pragmatic partnership turns into a battle of wills and wits, framed by an environment that feels increasingly hostile, uncanny, and thoroughly Raimi-fied. The island itself starts to feel like a character, part playground for his slapstick sadism, part stage for the film’s escalating mind games.

What’s striking is how much fun Raimi has with the material without ever letting it feel lazy. The camera is in constant motion, whipping, zooming, Dutch‑tilting with that familiar Raimi bravado. He punctuates the isolation with visual gags and horror beats that lurch from grisly to absurd in a heartbeat, reminding you why his style is so instantly recognisable. 

A simple campfire argument morphs into an operatic showdown of shadows and sound design; a tense scavenging mission turns into a delirious set‑piece of bodily humiliation and bad luck. It’s schlock, absolutely, but it’s schlock engineered with expert timing.

Rachel McAdams anchors the film with a performance that’s both emotionally grounded and game for Raimi’s macabre humour. 

She maps the character’s arc from strained professionalism to raw, frayed paranoia with nuance, while embracing the physical comedy and grotesquerie Raimi throws at her. Dylan O’Brien proves a perfect foil, oscillating between charming, brittle, and deeply unnerving. The film’s real surprise is how effectively it builds out both protagonist and antagonist: their shared history, buried resentments, and shifting power dynamics become the core engine of the horror.

This character work is where Send Help really distinguishes itself from being “just another island freak‑out.” 

Raimi and the script give both leads enough shading that you’re never fully sure who’s right, who’s wrong, or who’s more dangerous. Allegiances in the audience are designed to wobble. That constant re-evaluation keeps the film emotionally engaging while the scares and gags do their work. 

You’re laughing, recoiling, and, crucially, you care what happens, even as the film leans hard into its most outrageous moments.

The tonal blend is classic Raimi: gross-out horror riding shotgun with Looney Tunes logic. 

Limbs bend the wrong way, injuries are both horrifying and perversely funny, and the island’s dangers are heightened just enough to feel like they’ve stepped out of a deranged comic book. Yet underneath that cartoonish surface, the psychological pressure never lets up. 

The “battle to make it out alive” isn’t just about food, water, and shelter; it’s about sanity, guilt, ego, and the lingering poisons of workplace rivalry and unspoken grudges.

As a comeback to feature-length horror after Drag Me to Hell and his work on Ash vs. Evil Dead, Send Help feels like a statement that Raimi still understands exactly what his audience wants: inventively staged mayhem, gonzo camera moves, and that tricky balance where you’re never sure whether to scream or burst out laughing. 

This film delivers all of that while adding a genuinely solid spine of character development and psychological tension.

For longtime Raimi followers, Send Help is a fine and fitting entry, a reminder that his particular brand of deranged, kinetic horror comedy hasn’t dulled with time. It’s daring, unabashedly schlocky, and proudly weird, but also sharper and more character-driven than its premise might suggest. 

In an era of over-polished, self-serious genre films, Send Help feels like exactly what its title promises for horror fans: a rescue mission back to the kind of wild, inventive, personality-driven horror only Sam Raimi can deliver.

Showing in cinemas from January 30.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie