Abigail

Abi Ending

Abigail
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
and Tyler Gillett
Ireland/USA/Canada 2024
Universal
UK Theatrical Print

Warning: Spoilers, unless you already saw the trailer.

Well, that’s about the fourth time in the space of as many weeks when I was thoroughly surprised with my cinema experience... in a good way (and that doesn’t happen a lot). So I saw the trailer for Abigail a month or so ago and, honestly, it almost put me off seeing the movie. However, I’ve been slowly getting back to the cinema post-covid and I thought I’d see this one. Even though said trailer was so clichéd and some of the ‘witty vampire dialogue’ was way older than most of the actors in this film. And it just looked like a terrible time at the cinema.

But it wasn’t. My expectations were very much exceeded when I started watching the film and got drawn into a kidnapping caper gone wrong, as various characters played by such great actors as Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, William Catlett, Kevin Durand and the late Angus Cloud, are sent to kidnap the titular little girl of the title, Abigail, played by Alisha Weir. Their safe house while they wait things out for their main man to come through with the ransom money is a luxury mansion but, suddenly, one of their team ends up decapitated. Is there someone in the house who wants them all dead? Probably because the security shutters all come down and they are locked in with the main threat of the film... also Abigail.

Okay. so, if you’ve seen the Abigail trailer then you’ll know that she is a young girl with a love of ballet who also happens to be a centuries old vampire gal. And her kidnappers, brought there by her own machinations, are her hobby food supply. So, as soon as everyone wakes up to the fact that she’s the main problem, it becomes a game of cat and mouse with everyone trying to kill the vampire before she eats them all.

Now, there is a cringy line of dialogue in the movie, which I wish they’d cut out of the film. I’m talking specifically about the line where Abigail says she likes to play with her food... honestly, how many times have you heard that one before? However, the whole movie is nicely put together and so I can forgive it a lot. They had me from the start with the use of Swan Lake on the soundtrack and, it was especially nice to hear it on the opening credits of a Universal movie again. It’s an obvious nod to the music used over the opening titles of the 1931 Todd Browning version of Dracula (reviewed by me here) and it kind of won me over from the start.

My only other problem with the film again stems from the trailer. For the first third of the movie, the directors play it like a straight crime drama, with the supernatural threat kept completely out of it (other than the obvious hint with the music... and Brian Tyler’s score for the movie is also fine, by the way). So the end of the first act twist is when Abigail herself is revealed to be their enemy, an inhuman vampire ready to quickly kill them all. So why reveal that in the trailer? I mean, I know they want their horror audience in but, they could have cut it in a way that the audience didn’t know that the little girl was anyone other than someone the kidnappers were trying to protect and stop from coming to harm. And it would have been that much stronger and much longer before any one saw it coming.

Instead, we get the full reveal in the trailers, long before the majority of people might have got there by themselves. I mean, one of the problems I had with Takashi Miike’s Audition in 1999 was that the trailer campaign didn’t try to hoodwink the audience into thinking it was a romantic comedy. The... erm... less than subtle change in tone was completely broadcast in the original trailers. And I understand why they did that but... um... yeah, it would have been stronger for a lot of people if the reveal wasn’t already embedded into the fabric of the trailer. I think a wiser, less blatant trailer here would have kept the audience guessing for a fair bit before Abigail’s true nature was finally revealed.

Having said that though, the terrible marketing doesn’t kill the film and, even though I knew it was a vampire flick from the start, I still had a surprisingly good time with it. Oh... and it’s quite gory compared to a lot of horror films (it’s an 18 certificate in the UK and you can kinda see why). When a vampire is killed in the movie, they basically explode in a shower of blood (just like they did in one of the greatest vampire movies ever made... Bliss... reviewed by me here). So, yeah, Abigail is a surprisingly gruesome flick but, that’s to its benefit, not its detriment and, well, their comes a time in the film when the clichés become homage... a legacy of the vampire films before them.

I could have done without them, mind you but, yeah, I was especially cheered up by the Swan Lake references, possibly designed to specifically appeal to some of the audience members who are maybe a bit long in the fang, for sure. It’s not the best horror film I’ve seen at the cinema in the last month but, well, it certainly beats a lot of what usually passes for horror at the cinema these days. So if you think you’re the target audience for this one, check it out for sure.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Modok She Wrote

Ant-Man and
the Wasp: Quantumania
USA 2023 Directed by Peyton  Reed
Marvel/Disney
UK cinema release print

This is going to be a very quick shout out to the new Ant-Man/Wasp movie because, well, it’s basically fine and not the train wreck I had been led to believe by many critics, it has to be said. Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania is actually one of the stronger of the recent Marvel films as far as I’m concerned, easily beating out the likes of Black Panther - Wakanda Forever (reviewed here) and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (reviewed here)... but, you know, I loved Eternals (reviewed here) so, don’t take my word for it.

Once again we have Paul Rudd playing the Scott Lang incarnation of Ant-Man, Evangeline Lily playing the Hope Van Dyne incarnation of The Wasp, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man) and Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet Van Dyne (the original Wasp) but, we also have yet another new actress playing the grown up version of Ant-Man’s daughter Cassie (the always watchable Kathryn Newton and... none of the other much loved characters from the previous, stand alone Ant-Man films. There is, however, one returning actor from the first one who is basically a henchman to this movie’s main villain Kang The Conqueror (played by Jonathan Majors). I’m not going to say who the character is but, he’s been refashioned into a version of one of Marvel’s more ridiculous looking villains from the comics and, well, he wasn’t supposed to be the character he was playing in the first movie, truth be told (it’s complicated)... but I won’t say any more of that because, you know, spoilers.

This one is a lot different from the majority of previous movies which had Ant-Man as a character in them. Yes, it’s a superhero movie and features many people doing fantastic, superpowered fighty things but... it has to be said that this one more resembles a Star Wars movie than most anything else and, yeah, it’s certainly not the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to jump into a more space opera style yarn (although, technically, nobody is in space... it’s just the quantum realm). And I’m not knocking it... if anyone is staying true to their comic book roots by going down this road, then certainly Marvel probably have the most right to (and possibly DC but, let’s not make this review a comparison war).

And it’s also fairly well done and, as I said, basically fine. Even cleverly handled in terms of the origins of one of the big deus ex machina moments in the movie, for sure. It’s fairly entertaining and has a lot of humour, as you’d expect from an Ant-Man movie. One thing which did bug me, if you’ll pardon the expression, is that Marvel no longer have the rights to The Micronauts toys and the characters in the comics they wrote about them in the 1970s and 80s. I used to love those (both the comics and the toys) and, certainly, the quantum realm which has already become so essential to the way the MCU goes forward, pretty much started off life as the Microverse as far as I’m concerned. I mean, the spirit of those comics is certainly here in the way it’s been put together but, how great would it have been if Baron Karza and Arcturus Rann were facing off against each other in this one?

Oh, one of the big criticisms I heard levelled at this movie was that some people had difficulty understanding it. I was expecting to be in the same boat but, no, this is not a complicated movie and I am baffled as to what people think needs explaining here. It seems pretty clear to me... just remember the other 30 plus MCU films which came out before this and you should have no trouble following it.

The other complaint I’ve seen about this is that it deals with the Multiverse and therefore nothing has any consequence. Well... again I’m left thinking I saw a different cut of the movie somehow. This film does touch on the multiverse but, so very little of it, maybe a minute or two of post credits scenes, actually takes place in another facet of the multiverse. This movie really isn’t about the multiverse at all.... which we’ve all seen before in at least two Marvel movies and once TV show so, it would be nothing new if it was (even DC are getting into the multiverse act later this year and, again, that’s fine, they’ve earned the right to do that from their comics over the years... the two companies have pretty much different versions of everything the other does anyway). But, no, this one’s firmly set in the quantum realm and although the multiverse is mentioned a lot... it doesn’t really feature too much in the story, for sure... apart from a scene where it’s used to explain the idea of ‘possible alternate versions of oneself in a fairly blatant, visual way.

And that’s me done on this one. Ant-Man And The Wasp - Quantumania is basically an entertaining evening at the cinema, has some great actors, moves at a fairly good pace and has some nice musical glue by the series’ regular composer Christophe Beck (which, once again alas, has not been released on a proper CD at time of writing this). But, yeah, it’s a nice looking movie and I certainly didn’t mind it at all... make of that what you will.

Freaky

Freaky Friday
The 13th

Freaky
USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Landon
Blumhouse

Warning: Big spoilers on this one so,
if you want to go in cold then don’t read this yet.

Okay, so this is kinda bizarre but, less than an hour after I came up with a title for my review of Freaky, I found out that one of the original working titles for the film was... Freaky Friday The 13th so... yeah, I guess I joined the dots maybe. Either way... this one wasn’t initially on my watch list (I hate the word Freaky, just one of those things) and I had decided to ignore it but then I found out that, not only was one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, doing the score but that there was also a limited edition CD release (which I obviously pre-ordered). Then my cousin, who moved to Australia, saw it and recommended it to me so, yeah, I caved in and watched it (and then waited 10 months to post this review because it’s only, finally, just come out at the cinema over her in the UK... if I'd had known it was going to get a proper cinema release here then I would certainly have waited for it). Frankly, all the marketing people behind the movie would have needed to do was let me know that the film is written and directed by the same guy who made the truly brilliant Happy Death Day movies (reviewed here and here) and I would have been on board straight away (we need a third movie in that series guys!).

So, just like the first Happy Death Day movie (and, to some extent, the second) was a remake of Groundhog Day, so too is Freaky another ‘horrified’ remake of a popular classic. In this case, the tie in is specifically the Walt Disney movie (and all the other remakes) of Freaky Friday (a film I’ve never watched in either of its incarnations because it has Freaky in the title... see last paragraph) but, those were in turn based on the novel Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers which was, as I’m sure most of you know, cribbed itself from the English literary classic body swap novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey, which in turn was made into TV shows and movies called things like Vice Versa and, of course, the famous Tom Hanks movie using the same concept, Big. So... a movie with a long lineage but, as far as I know, this one has a slightly unique take on the concept in terms of the characters.

In this one we have the main protagonist, Millie, a high school girl played by Kathryn Newton and we also have Vince Vaughn as the Jason Vorhees style serial killer known as The Blissfield Butcher. The Vaughn character initially doesn’t speak, just gives penetrating stares through his hockey mask and, in a pre-credits set up to show how much of a bad person he is, visits violent death to a group of four teenagers in quite gory ways. That’s one of the things which is interesting about this movie in that, although there were stabbings and any manner of deaths in the Happy Death Day franchise series, this film really goes back to late 1970s/1980s slasher levels of goriness. For instance, in this film you will see people stabbed in the eye with packing hooks, split into two pieces by a buzz saw and, in a particularly memorable death in the pre-credits sequence, a person has a broken bottle forced into his mouth and down his throat until we see the shards of glass bloating his neck out and trying to force themselves out again. So, yeah, I don’t know what rating this movie has but it’s definitely got the kind of 'old school 1970s' levels of violence which you just don’t really see done well in slasher movies these days (I’m not sure, at this point, if all this made it into the UK cinema print).

That being said, I really find films with gruesome deaths unwatchable and less than compelling unless  it's either a) an Italian giallo or b) there is substantial other stuff going on in the film to hold the interest and, thankfully, Freaky has that second thing in spades. Just like the Happy Death Day movies, it has a very strong, self aware sort of broad humour running through it and, much of the time, it falls into the realm of comedy more than anything else.

So, anyway, due to an old Aztec (I think) knife, when The Blissfield Butcher tries to stab Millie, he gets chased away but, at the stroke of midnight, Millie and The Butcher swap bodies. And that’s where the real fun begins, as it transpires that the real Millie, inside Vince Vaughn’s body, has to recover the knife from ‘police evidence’ and find The Butcher (inside Millie’s body) and stab him/her before another 24 hours is up or the change will become permanent. Comic shenanigans ensue as Vince Vaughn, effectively playing a teenage girl with a crush on one of her/his classmates, tries to convince his friends of his real identity while hiding from the police. Meanwhile, Kathryn Newton takes on the minimalistic, cold dead stare of a serial killer and starts murdering various people at high school in various, imaginative ways.

And it’s a real pleasure. The film actually feels a little like those Happy Death Day movies so, I’m assuming that this is a certain amount of the director’s style coming to the forefront and he does familiar stuff like the long, sweeping establishing shots following the leads and also splitting the story into chapters by day, counting down from the night of the pre-credits killings until Friday the 13th, when everything is destined to come to a conclusion, one way or another.

Everything’s pretty cool and, like the director’s previous two movies, the teenagers who Millie hangs out with are mostly nice people and so you’re invested in the characters more. Vince Vaughn really plays the comedy routines well and truly lifts the film with his presence. However, Kathryn Newton certainly matches him all the way and switches from teenage angst to deadened psychopath really well... there’s a lot to enjoy in the performances of this movie. And, of course, the great Bear McCreary’s score is another mini masterpiece. This guy writes compelling music for pretty much all of the films he touches, really helping to glue the edits together with his riffs and elevating the movie to another level... this is top notch stuff.

So, yeah, not much else to say other than, Freaky is a great film I can recommend to most lovers of the comedy horror genre. I do look forward to seeing a sequel at some point (although it would be nice to see Vaughn come back for that, somehow, without giving too much away here). If I had a choice I’d really want to see a third Happy Death Day movie before this one though, or, actually, even a double sequel which ties the two franchises together might be nice. Either way, good movie, worth a watch, give it a go.