There's a moment in "Oz the Great and Powerful," Disney's much-anticipated prequel to the 1939 MGM classic "The Wizard of Oz," where a character falls to the floor, in the midst of a witchy transmogrification into something evil. Off-screen she remains until suddenly, with a heart-stopping smack, a huge green hand pops up and out of the screen (in glorious 3-D), and the clawlike fingernails scrape across a marble tabletop to the agony of any moviegoer's ears.
It's only here, halfway through this oh-so-Disney fable, that we sense the man behind the curtain, director Sam Raimi, who — like that other fabulist, Peter Jackson — got his start working in horror of the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping kind. Raimi's had an eclectic three-decade run at moviemaking, ranging from shoestring indie to Hollywood blockbuster, but few who saw his dismemberment-heavy debut "The Evil Dead" back in 1981 would have predicted that he'd someday be working for the Magic Kingdom.
When a director's career entails a tectonic shift as massive as that from X-rated splatter to family-friendly fare, it's safe to ask: What is a Sam Raimi film? Does the director have a signature style — the "vision thing," as George Bush used to call it — or is he merely a gun-for-hire, bringing his considerable skills in stylized fantasy to whomever's signing the checks?