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.

Ready Or Not

Ready, Play Her, Run

Ready Or Not
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
2019 Canada/USA
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very mild spoilers on one of the deaths.

Ready Or Not was a film I took a hard pass on when it played at FrightFest earlier in the year. Why? Well, because the concept is old and tired out and the trailer made it look really bad. However, by the time it got a general release in the UK, I was really looking forward to it. This is because I’d spent a fairly pleasant half an hour talking to a horror film critic (and nice guy), sitting on the little inner wall which goes around Leicester Square, opposite what we all still call the Empire cinema and exchanging views on various horror movies we both loved. He said that the reaction to Ready Or Not at FrightFest had been overwhelmingly the best audience reaction he’d ever seen at a screening ever and he said it was an absolutely brilliant movie. So I knew I would have to get around to it at some point and I was aware it would be getting a general cinema release a month or so after FrightFest. That being said, he also said something which I’m still kind of mulling over and trying to make sense of. In terms of this film I think this is a bit of a red herring and I wish I’d have known that when he told me... that the film has one of the best twist endings ever which “you will absolutely not see coming”. Well... I’ll tackle that thorny issue in a little while.

Ready Or Not is a movie which really shouldn’t be as watchable as it is. Kind of a souped up version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little N... oh wait, I’m not allowed to call books by their original, racially problematic titles anymore because modern people are unable to wear historically contextual blinkers, it would seem. Let me try that again then... it’s kind of a souped up version of the Agatha Christie book which would later come to be known as both And Then There Were None and Ten Little Indians at various times but with no skimping on the goriness which can often be a part and parcel of murderous violence... and with a big, campy dose of comedy thrown in for good measure. A cocktail combining these elements and then liberally mixed with a big jug of The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff).

The film concerns a couple getting married... Grace, played by Samara Weaving and Alex Le Domas, played by Mark O'Brien, who is part of a fictional family, the Le Domas gaming empire. Traditionally, the couple are married in front of the Manor House the family makes their home, which they do and, also traditionally, they have to play a game starting at midnight to become properly part of the family... which they do and which is where this movie gets its title from. The ritual involves the new bride pulling a card from an antique box which tells the family what game they will be playing that night. Quite often it’s something normal like Backgammon or Old Maid but, every now and again, a bride will pull the ‘bad’ card. The card which helps fulfill the family pact with the devil which allowed the gaming empire to become rich and prosperous in the first place. When this card is pulled, the bride or groom, whoever the new family member is, is not made aware of all the rules, often until it is too late. So of course, Grace pulls the one card that her new husband has feared she might... Hide And Seek.

So she has to go and hide and stay hidden without being found until dawn. What she isn’t told.... but finds out soon after, is that the rest of the family, coming ready or not after a count of one hundred, are armed to the teeth and need to wound or maim her long enough to bring her back and perform a sacrificial ritual on her, offering her life for their continued charmed existence or, if they fail, they themselves will die. It doesn’t take long for Grace to find this little twist to the rules out, however... and so the film becomes a grimly humorous game of cat and mouse where Grace is fighting for survival amongst a clan of psychotic killers who mean her some considerable harm.

And it’s nicely done. There are some hugely funny shots of humour injected into the thing, such as a running joke where ‘the help’ keep getting accidentally and horrendously killed by the family (including Grace herself, who manages to ‘take out’ one of the house staff by crushing her in a dumb waiter). There are also some genuinely edgy moments of suspense and little, sharp punctuations of violence which help pile on the odds as Grace tries to outrun the various family members... one such moment being when she is trying to escape a pit in the goat shed where the skeletons of other victims of the game have been left to rot over the decades.

It’s also nicely acted. There’s not a bad one in the cast which includes the always watchable Andie MacDowell and Adam Brody (who played the puzzlingly adult version of Captain Marvel Jr in the recent SHAZAM! movie, which I reviewed here). And special mention to Nicky Guadagni who plays a wonderful character called Aunt Helene who has, frankly, the best, comically outrageous, permanently grumpy stare to her face ever and who livens up every scene with just her bad mood in general.

It’s a fun film but my one disappointment comes, well not from the film itself but, with what I was told about the ending with it’s wonderful, revealing twist. And the reason for that disappointment is...

There is no twist.

No reveal at all. Everything plays out, surprisingly predictably all the way through. This film has absolutely no surprises... you know just when Grace will be caught to further the next bit of the story and, if you’ve been listening to the family history at all, you’ll almost certainly know how various people are going to die in the film's last ten minutes. It’s all right there in the dialogue and... yeah... I still can’t see what the guy meant by a final twist. I don’t think there’s any pretense of a reveal even... the story just plays out exactly how you think it will and then it finishes. You know just who will be the ‘final girl’ of the movie and, while it shouldn’t work, the film is so nicely written in terms of dialogue and the performance of it by an incredible team of skilled actors, that you don’t really care how old and jaded the plot is. Meanwhile, I’m still puzzling over what could possibly be thought of as a final twist. It kind of got my hopes up that something new was coming and... it didn’t.

That aside though, fans of both the slasher thriller and horror genres should take a look at Ready Or Not, which combines both those genres and has a fun time doing it. I’d even recommend it to people who aren’t into those kinds of movies because the goriness is not, too excessive and it’s almost always used to elicit a laugh rather than to shock. It’s a slight movie in terms of having much to say about anything (even family politics) but it’s good for an evening’s entertainment at your local cinema and the few audience members who I saw it with in the almost empty screening on opening night all seemed appreciative of it and there were a lot of laughs. Not sure it’s something I’d watch again but good for a one off watch, for sure.

V/H/S

Taped Heck 

V/H/S
2012 UK
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, David Bruckner, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, Joe Swanberg, Chad Villella, Ti West, Adam Wingard
Momentum Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this movie when it did the festival circuit a couple of years ago, despite seeing some pretty mixed word of mouth, so to speak, on Twitter. Ultimately, it’s a movie which seems to doom itself to failure in some ways, fairly early on in the game but, at the same time it’s certainly a nice idea to present an old style horror anthology by using the, relatively, new popularisation of the old found footage variation of horror film. And, it has to be said, there are some fairly bright moments in the movie that make it worth persevering with through the negative stuff and I can certainly see why a couple of more enthusiastically received sequels have already been made in what is now a strong, found footage franchise.

The film is all shot on VHS tape... well, probably not actually, it’s probably shot on something much better and visually downgraded after the fact. This becomes especially apparent in the last story of the movie where some interesting CGI stuff is utilised throughout yet another “shaky cam” sequence. This, of course, allows for the various crews getting away with all kinds of bad camera work and not having to think too much about the design of any particular sequence in terms of framing... other than the details of the set or location dressing, of course.

The framing story starts off really quite badly by inviting us to follow a bunch of thugs who have been hired to steal a specific VHS tape from a house. Unless you are some kind of hoodlum yourself, you will find yourself having absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for any of the characters and will want to see them all die in as horrible a way as can be conceived, right from the outset. Now, while this may well be the tactic being deployed by the filmmakers here, for me this just didn’t work that well. If I can’t sympathise with any of the victims then I’m really not going to invest enough emotion in them for the scenes of suspense to work on me and while the director was taking great delight in showing little, telling details unheralded in a corner of a frame, such as a corpse vanishing, for instance, this stuff really didn’t get the heart racing as much as I’d hoped a horror movie might.

The idea is that while the hoodlums are going through the house, one of them starts watching the various other “found footage” VHS tapes in the TV room and we watch these along with him... and it’s here that the film threatened to lose me on two counts.

The first problem is that the group of characters in the next found footage film are basically... another bunch of hoodlums not much different from the ones in the framing footage and who have absolutely no sympathy from me when they start dying. The other problem is, and this should really have been a no brainer of a mistake not to make, is that we are no longer watching the video footage we were watching... somehow, each of the miniature found footage stories are now directly on our screens. So that completely kills that concept then... did someone splice these onto one long tape in just the right places so that the framing story can then take over again in between each segment? This makes absolutely no sense and it was just about now that I kind of gave up on the film inside my head for a bit.

Luckily for me, the first story has an enthralling femme fatale, lets call her the “I like you” girl, in the form of British actress Hannah Fierman and it was her that got me interested again. Now it’s obvious, right from the outset, that no good is going to come out of the main protagonists hooking up with her at a party (yeah, good, they all deserved to die for their thuggish behaviour anyway) but it’s such an old school dose of clichéd but classic sexual horror that I was enchanted with it in some ways... primarily, I suspect, because the actress I just mentioned had such an interesting screen presence.

After this segment, the film becomes a bit of a hit and miss affair, as would be expected in these kinds of anthologies. The majority of the scenarios presented to us are nothing too new but, in some cases (the well made ones), this really doesn’t matter. There’s a nice “haunted apartment” section, for instance, which turns into something else and which, while not altogether unsurprising, has enough in terms of the writing and performance that, if anything, it leaves you feeling the segment was just a little too short. The down side of that, however, is that it’s not actually pseudo-VHS footage... it’s pseudo-Skype footage... which, of course, makes even less sense when you consider it in the context of the found footage framing device... what, somebody transferred their collected Skype conversations to VHS tape. Why?

Another segment is a “final girl” story with a nice “Predator-like” killer who can only be seen on video and with a main protagonist who is using her companions as bait to catch him... which could have been quite refreshing and is relatively well done visually but which has a script and story that really lets it down. Seriously, if you’re going to go hunting a killer, you take weapons with you and not rely on setting traps which it’s obvious couldn’t have been made and prepared in the ridiculously short amount of time played out via the footage. No matter how unintelligent the characters are in horror films, sometimes as a necessity, this one really takes the cake for a person going in completely unprepared and needlessly. So the twist in the tale in that one was tempered by the quite extraordinary lack of brain power of the person who sets events in motion in this one.

There are around six stories in the film in total and, while some of them do hold your interest... and some of them do finally have some characters who are at least a little sympathetic... it’s not exactly the best set of horror shorts I’ve seen although, the last story with it’s Dennis Wheatley style shenanigans is quite nicely done with some well executed special effects. There was an alternative ending on this sequence which I’m glad the director didn’t go with but, strangely, this story marks the end of the film. The framing story is, surprisingly, already played out by the time this last segment appears with, pretty much, no context... so it was a bit of a jarring ending in some ways.

Ultimately, although I was disappointed with a lot of this film, it’s still a nice idea and, like I said earlier, you expect anthology format kinds of films to be a bit hit and miss. This one is mainly miss for me but there were enough interesting spins on old classics to keep me interested... once I’d gotten past the first quarter of an hour. Due to the nature of the beast, I can’t say it’s not worth watching because I expect everyone is going to have their own specific hits and misses among this lot so, if you’re a fan of horror, and found footage shaky cam horror in particular, then you could do a lot worse than to spend an evening in with this movie, of you can rustle up a cheap copy. I’ll certainly be checking out the sequels at some point... when the price is right.