The Bad Penny (beta)

Just two weeks ago, we raved about the best movie of the year so far, Sam Raimi’s Send Help. But just as we can’t stop rewatching the deliriously entertaining horror-thriller-with-a-smile, we keep finding more in-jokes (or Easter eggs, if you prefer) with each subsequent viewing.

The most obvious one is the golfing motif, which is not unlike the collectible coin/button storytelling device that Raimi used in his last great horror-comedy, Drag Me to Hell. (The Bad Penny still maintains the latter flick is the better of the two discussed here.) Just as the coin/button completed the narrative circle of Drag Me to Hell with a sinister smirk, Raimi similarly introduces the golf club and brief discussions about golf at the very beginning and very end of Send Help.

Raimi drives (no pun intended) it home in an early scene that Dylan O’Brien’s character, new company CEO Bradley Preston, loves playing golf so much that practices on a putting green set up in his office. It’s easy to make the connection that Bradley’s golf obsession is a reflection of his personality and misogyny: He clearly associates the activity with an upper-class lifestyle. Moreover, his golf buddies are a stand-in for the white-male hierarchy that controls companies such as the one Bradley inherited from his father.

Putting a pretty fine point on the matter, Bradley tells Rachel McAdams’ genuinely sweet (at least initially) Linda Liddle character – who was in line for a promotion – that he’s denying her the expected upgrade because he’s looking for “someone who golfs.” A current employee of the company who just so happens to match that description – and, conveniently, attended the same frat house as Bradley – gets the gig instead, even though he’s much less qualified than Linda.

Without giving away the entire ending of Send Help (the final act brings the movie home magnificently), Linda turns Bradley’s affinity for golfing against him – and, before the credits roll, it’s revealed that she in fact has expert-level golfing skills superior to his.

And then there’s the eye-gouging. Throughout his illustrious career, Raimi has distinguished himself among most other horror movie helmers by prioritizing ridiculously and thus amusingly over-the-top grotesquery. He also values often-times comical gross-outs (c.f. Drag Me to Hell, the Evil Dead franchise) over body counts, empty kills and the lazy gore excesses in trashy horror flicks.

While Send Help is Raimi’s least graphic movie that can still be categorized as horror, or a horror-comedy hybrid, the most eye-popping moment happens at the end of the film, when Bradley attempts to gouge out Linda’s eyeball during a climactic fight scene. The special-effects treatment make the violent act appear almost cartoonish (similar to the CGI used in the last frames of Drag Me to Hell), so Raimi succeeds once again in balancing the gross-out factor with a smirk.

But that still begs the question: Why did Raimi insist on having one of Send Help‘s main characters attempt to gouge out an eye, which we can all agree is a wee bit unconventional compared to an attempted strangling or repeated punches to the head?

This is where Raimi proves himself as a master filmmaker. Think back to the first third of Send Help, when Linda dares to hunt for wild boar in the woods, so she and Bradley don’t starve to death. Mere moments elapse before she encounters one, becomes entangled with it, and – when repeatedly stabbing the animal with a knife doesn’t finish the job – she gouges out its eye and claims victory over the predator.

Given that there are two eye-gouging incidents during entanglements at the beginning and end of Send Help, it’s clear the heinous act serves a narrative function. It’s up to the viewer to determine what that is, exactly. Does Bradley’s eye-gouging imply that Linda has fully transformed from a human being into a beast as she communes more deeply with the nature over the course of the movie? Does Linda’s survival after Bradley’s attack imply that her knowledge of how to survive in nature is even greater than before, where she was merely a fan of Survivor and avid reader of off-the-grid guides? Or is the suggestion that the self-confidence she lacked in office settings but developed on the island has endowed her with super-human qualities?

You be the judge. Just don’t laugh at Linda’s Survivor audition tape if you stumble across it.

This entry was posted on 05/26/2026 at 6:27 am and is filed under Essays, Favorite Films, Features with tags Dylan O'Brien, horror, movies, Rachel McAdams, Sam Raimi, Send Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.