Three Films Make A Post: Children can be such monsters.

Abigail (2024): In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillet’s new directorial outing, yet another hapless gang of criminals (among them characters played by Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kevin Duran and Kathryn Newton) kidnaps a little girl (Alisha Weir) that turns out be rather more dangerous than anyone could have expected.

Once the kid vampire ballerina is revealed, things turn into the typical chase through a mildly creepy location, with a couple of decent twists and betrayals added to the mix. It’s all decent enough, but also not terribly creative on the scripting level: Barrera’s character, for example, is supposed to be the likeable one because she has a child she loves and hesitates about five seconds when it comes to kidnapping another child, which assumes an audience willing to cut a pretty face rather a lot of slack. Fun fact: Hitler really loved dogs.

I’m also less than enthused about the movie’s absolute fixation on that vampire ballerina thing, something that stops to be as funny or creepy as the filmmakers seem to believe long before she starts on the vampire ballerina kung fu.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): The first half or so of Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s (what’s it with all these directing duos these days anyhow?) is a wonderful little horror film, a lovingly created exaggeration of a late 70s TV talk show that turns increasingly bizarre in its supernatural shenanigans. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for the film, and it begins to turn into an oh so 2024 series of “twists” and unnecessary reveals that I began feeling I was watching a scriptwriting rulebook come to life instead of the film the first acts promise.

It’s still a pretty interesting movie, with some effective performances – David Dastalmachian is particularly great at the talk show host – but I found myself increasingly bored by its screenwriting 101 approach to narrative.

Dune: Part Two (2024): I really didn’t expect Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune movie – adapting the second half of the first book - to go quite this consequently and ruthlessly down the road of deconstructing the idea of the chosen one Frank Herbert mostly left for his second novel. Yet here it is, with Villeneuve doubling down on this element of the books early – perhaps because a third film wasn’t guaranteed or simply to set up more physical conflicts for that film – making this the central point of the film.

This doesn’t mean this second film loses any of the visually visionary power of the first one – in fact, here, too, the director seems to be doubling down, making his future even stranger and awe-inspiring than that of the first.

In short: Scream VI (2023)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but honestly, what’s to spoil?

The survivors of the last movie all have moved to New York. Yet another Ghostface Killer does their thing. There’s a subplot that plays on the non-existent problem of inheritable serial killer-ism.

There’s really no need to get into any details of the plot when its only reason to exist is keeping the franchise going anyway. Don’t get me wrong, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s direction is still as traditionally slick as is typical of the Scream movies but this slickness is in the service of no substance whatsoever. The little character work involved is based on the mediaeval, and pretty offensive, idea of a daughter potentially inheriting being a serial killer/”evil”, whereas the meta level of the old Screams has turned into pointless monologues that have no impact on anything in the film. Worse, these meta parts are about as insightful as that soap bubble floating around my head right now.

James Vanderbilt’s and Guy Busick’s script is not at all improved by a finale that’s even worse than the killer reveal in the previous five movies, while it still shares their love for bug-eyed mad acting which annoys the crap out of me. This time, they’re going for quantity instead of quality.

Also going for quantity is the ridiculous number of characters in Scream VI that work under the Hero’s Death Exemption/Plot Armour rule. One or two characters, one can happily live with, but six? Even the film itself has problems juggling so many protected characters, so we learn about the survival of two of them only in a couple of lines of dialogue. Which leaves us with a slasher where the only characters who are actually dying are the introductory deaths, some nameless side characters and the killers. Seen positively at least here Scream VI innovates, though innovating away tension seems to me a peculiar direction to go into.

In short: Scream (2022)

Two and a half decades after the first serial killing spree from the original Scream and three sequels, yet another film-critically interested serial killer puts on the old Ghostface costume. A new bunch of kids – our lead being one Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) who has a very interesting family history – has to go through the old rigmarole of murder and ironic explanation of horror movie tropes, even those among them who have the good taste to prefer The Babadook. Eventually, good old Dewey (David Arquette), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) will have to return too, for that’s the rule of the franchise.

As somebody who is not madly in love with the original Scream movies (except for part two, which is pretty damn great), I didn’t go into this Scream Requel (a term taken from the ironic explain-y scene, so blame the writers, not me) with too many expectations; though I am a big fan of directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (aka the better Knives Out).

So I was actually pleasantly surprised at how good the film is at fulfilling all the usual sequel wishes fans have for a franchise while being conscious of but not smug about them. Hell, some of the film’s best scenes are directly mirroring scenes from the original Scream - not so much commenting on them ironically but using the audience’s knowledge of them and the resulting expectations as another method to build suspense. Something the film actually manages to do for most of its running time, until it comes to the great unmasking and a climax with way too many running parts. That the killers are mostly lame clichés of mad people you only meet in the movies with non-motives is by now the franchise standard, of course, and apparently not one the directors and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick were willing to change.

Another weakness is the integration of the classic characters into the movie. They are mostly there for the nostalgia factor, to get in a mid-movie kill so that the audience can feel something, and so they can dispatch a mentally ill young woman in the most brutal way imaginable in the final act.

Which doesn’t ruin the film, mind you, but makes me a little sad that this element of the movie isn’t as thoughtful and genuinely clever as the rest of the film but really aims for the lesser goal of fan service. But what can you do?

Ready or Not (2019)

Grace (Samara Weaving) certainly didn’t expect that marrying into the rich (through board games!), rude and rather eccentric family of Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) would end up with her spending her wedding night quite the way it’s turning out. There’s a family ritual involved everyone marrying into the family must go through, you see, so whosoever becomes part of the family has to draw a card containing the name of a game from a box. That box has been handed down through the generations and comes with a nice little story of what sounds decidedly like a family deal with the devil. Poor Grace, or lucky Grace, depending on one’s point of view, alas, draws the somewhat problematic card of “Hide and Seek”.

Nobody tells her what the special family variant of this single deadly game in the deck entails, and soon, her new family is hunting Grace through the house trying to hobble her with weapons and catch her so they can sacrifice her to Satan. Neither Alex nor his black sheep brother Daniel (Adam Brody) are quite in with this particular program, but family is difficult, and rich boys tend to lack backbone. Man, but the rich are different.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not is a pretty great example of what focussed direction, a game cast, and wonderful timing can make out of a very simple basic idea. One could hold it against the horror comedy that its social criticism isn’t terribly complicated and just a bit obvious – a problem it shares with most “the x are terrible” films - but the film does put visible effort not in the basic situation but into why in the hell anyone would take part in this thing – apart from as it will turn out very well justified fear for one’s own life – and so those family members that aren’t total caricatures make actual sense as people doing absurd and violent things for believably shitty people reasons. Which I believe to be quite an achievement to get into a film that is basically one long sequence of chases through a couple of rooms and corridors and a patch of woods with captures and reversals of fortune. It’s fascinating how small the scale of the film actually is when one thinks about it; yet the actual movie never feels small or constrained, but focussed and doing exactly what it sets out to do in the best way possible.

This is also one of the rare horror comedies to always manage to find the right split between the jokes and the suspense, often intermingling both brilliantly. There’s nary a moment where the humour stands in the way of the suspense or vice versa, leaving us with a film that is as exciting as it is funny.

In large part, this is the achievement of the lean and minimal yet very clever script and of a director duo who really make the most of the opportunities that come with this sort of thing. However, there’s also a great cast who can shift between the coarser and subtler moments of the writing with ease, adding dimension without showboating. Samara Weaving is obviously great, throwing herself into every single scene with the kind of controlled abandon that makes a great horror actress, while shifting from dry quipping to actual human emotion and back again with natural ease, but the supporting cast hits every note as wonderfully. Why, even Andie McDowell does not seem to have been made out of wood for once.


In addition to all that, Ready or Not looks rather fantastic too, making as much of wood-panelled walls and soft light as any horror film I can remember. It’s a joy to watch from start to finish, even avoiding the lame twist ending that some horror filmmakers now seem to think is mandated by law in the genre, simply wrapping up its plot in a fitting manner.