5 Best Movies Like Send Help

“Send Help,” Sam Raimi’s bloody horror comedy featuring a delightfully unhinged Rachel McAdams, is now on VOD. It marks Raimi’s big return to the horror genre and serves as a great showcase for McAdams, one of the best actors working today. McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a mousy office drone who sees her dreams of promotion dashed when her company is taken over by spoiled rich kid Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). The tables are turned, however, when Linda and Bradley survive a plane crash and wash up on a tropical island. Bradley has no survival skills whatsoever, while Linda, an avid reader and fan of the reality show “Survivor,” finds herself thriving. A bloody battle of wits and control ensues between the two of them, with delightfully wicked results.

If you’re a fan of the flick and craving something similar to watch next, I’ve rounded up five films that fit the bill. There were many options I could slot in here, but I tried to make sure the films were horror or horror-adjacent while still maintaining a playful sense of fun. 

Obviously we needed another Sam Raimi movie on this list. The closest thing Raimi has done in tone to “Send Help” is “Drag Me to Hell,” his wacky, over-the-top horror-comedy from 2009. Alison Lohman plays Christine Brown, a bank loan officer who finds herself cursed when she refuses to help an elderly Romani woman (Lorna Raver) having mortgage troubles.

While “Drag Me to Hell” isn’t perfect — Alison Lohman is a rather weak lead, and she retired from acting not long after this came out — it’s so gleefully nasty and silly that it’s hard not to have fun with it all. This is Raimi in pure “Looney Tunes” mode, dropping anvils on heads and sending eyeballs flying into people’s mouths. And you simply can’t beat the movie’s wonderfully twisted ending.

Want more beach-set horror? Then look no further than the beach that makes you old in “Old”! M. Night Shyamalan’s bonkers horror-thriller sends a group of families to a seemingly idyllic beach only to discover that they’re trapped there and the place had some sort of magical power to speed up the aging process. Adults become elderly, kids become adults, and dead bodies become skeletons in the blink of an eye!

Like most of Shyamalan’s modern films, there’s a true strangeness to “Old” that’s very hard to pin down. The filmmaker seemingly has no more interest in anything approaching realism and instead prefers to make movies set in heightened realities where everything and everyone is just a little (or a lot) off-kilter. You’re either happy with that (as I am) or you’re utterly baffled. 

J. D. Dillard’s “Sweetheart” premiered at Sundance but never got a proper theatrical release, going instead straight to streaming services and VOD. That’s a shame, because it kind of got lost in the shuffle and deserved better. A crackling good monster movie, “Sweetheart” stars Kiersey Clemons as Jennifer, a young woman who washes up on an island and has to survive both the elements and a scary monster lurking about.

“Sweetheart” has more than a few tricks up its sleeve, and there’s more to the story than just “woman vs. monster,” but I don’t want to give too much away. I will say that the scene that introduces the monster is pretty damn great, though.

Ultimately, “Send Help” belongs to the “Good For Her!” subgenre. That is, it’s the type of horror flick where the lead character is a tormented woman who has to fight her way through unlikable characters to come out on top. One of the best recent examples of this subgenre is “Ready or Not,” and while a new sequel — “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” — is currently in theaters (read our recent review here), the original is the better of the two.

Samara Weaving delivers a star-making turn as Grace, a young woman marrying into an obscenely wealthy family. Unfortunately for Grace, these rich snobs are also homicidal and they spend the wedding night trying to hunt her down and kill her in a deadly game of hide-and-seek. Funny, bloody, and highly entertaining, “Ready or Not” is a total blast.

Like “Send Help,” Ruben Östlund’s dark satire “Triangle of Sadness” features both class warfare and characters trapped on an beautiful tropical island. But the first half of the film is set on a luxury yacht cruise, where a group of wealthy people act like shallow idiots while the crew works hard to accommodate them. A series of deadly, destructive mishaps, however, soon lands a group of survivors on an island, where the tables are turned and everyone has to fight to come out on top. “Triangle of Sadness” is the only non-horror film on this list, but it’s got a certain bleakly funny grotesqueness that makes it at least horror-adjacent.