I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with guest anchor Sean Leathonog to talk about new movies in theatres including Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 14:04)
I join “CP24 Breakfast” host Nick Dixon to talk about Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” and the new Taylor Sheridan show “The Madison.,”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tune a violin. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about Ryan Gosling’s sci fi adventure “Project Hail Mary,” the psychological thriller “The Things You Kill” and the horror sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a sequel to the 2019 horror comedy “Ready or Not,” Grace MacCaullay is once again targeted by the 1% in a deadly game of hide ‘n seek. “It’s not round two… it’s sudden death.”
CAST: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.
REVIEW: The new film picks up immediately after newlywed Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) survived her new family’s deadly game of hide ‘n seek. Still dressed in her blood stained wedding dress and smoking a cigarette after the action-packed wedding night that left her fiancée and his entire family dead, she finds herself the target in an even deadlier diversion.
“By surviving Hide and Seek you’ve triggered a new game,” says the lawyer for the aristocratic game players (Elijah Wood). “This time against the High Council families. Double or nothing. This part will be familiar. They will try and kill you.”
The High Council families are the 1% of the 1%. Rich beyond belief, their money and power is the result of a deal with the devil, and now they must hunt and kill Grace and sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) for the chance to sit in the “high seat,” the world’s most powerful position.
Questions is, can devil worshippers outwit, outplay and outlast two resourceful women named for the pious properties of grace and faith?
Like many sequels “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” is bigger than the original. There are more characters, more gore, two protagonists—Grace now has a sister, even if they aren’t close. “Biologically speaking, we’re sisters,” Faith says, “but we’re not family.”—and the stakes are higher.
But, like a pimple or a hole in the roof, bigger isn’t better.
The new film, which features the same creative team as the 2019 original, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, gets off to a fun start with Amy Winehouse’s version of the Shirelles classic “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” but soon devolves into a morass of exposition.
In the forty-five minutes before the “game” begins, Weaving has the unenviable task of recapping the plot of the first movie and later Wood wades through the over complicated history of the High Council and the rules of the hunt for Grace and Faith. It’s clunky and even though Weaving and Newton spark off one another, and Wood appears to be having fun, it’s s slog. ighkjfk
What follows is a litany of near misses, bland action choreography and gallons of grizzly gore. The fight sequences are uninspired, although a battle involving pepper spray has the kind of exuberance missing from the other action scenes.
“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” has a few laughs—Faith pleads for her life with the well-delivered line: “No, no I’m her emergency contact!”—but the needlessly complicated story leans into the evil without the absurdity that made the first movie so much fun.
Lots of kids like to play with their food, but the main character in “Abigail,” a new vampire film now playing in theatres, takes it to a new level.
The story begins with a plan to kidnap Abigail (Alisha Weir), the twelve-year-old ballerina daughter of a well-known underworld boss. Ringleader Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) makes it sound simple. He directs his ragtag team, including ex-cop Frank (Dan Stevens), hacker Sammy (Kathryn Newton), medic Joey (Melissa Barrera), musclebound enforcer Peter (Kevin Durand), ex-Marine Rickles (William Catlett) and get-away driver Dean (Angus Cloud in his last completed role), to contain Abigail and babysit her for twenty-four hours until a sizable ransom is paid.
How hard can that be?
With little effort, they pick up the unassuming looking rich girl, and secret her away to a secluded mansion where she is blindfolded and tied to a bed for safe keeping.
Things take a twist, however, when it’s revealed that Abigail is a bloodsucking fiend, quick to kill and drop a witty one-liner.
“I’m sorry about what’s gonna happen to you,” she tells one of her soon-to-be victims.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence, blow the plasma budget, filling the screen with gallons of bloody goo and arterial discharge. In its last half it is a splatter fest that provides the satisfying guts and gore horror fan expect.
But, in its own limited way, it’s also a family drama, a story of lost, lonely people, looking for approval from loved ones. That element gives the movie a nice grace note, but the focus here is popcorn thrills and chills.
As in “Ready or Not,” a Radio Silence movie from 2019, “Abigail” is largely set in a grand old gothic mansion. Trapped like rats in a labyrinth, the kidnappers flail helplessly, looking for, and finding, danger around every darkened corner.
Against that setting, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett stage several memorable scenes. In one, a newly-turned vampire acts as a puppet, performing an undead dance under Abigail’s telepathic control. It’s bizarre, kinda cool and diabolically funny.
The film’s beating heart, or rather, unbeating heart, is Weir, a kinetic presence who blends ballet with bloody vampiric attacks. Her shift from helpless child to two-hundred-year-old bloodsucker is the film’s coup de grâce.
“Abigail” goes on a little too long, puts a bit too much space between the gory set pieces and gives some characters the short shrift, but ultimately delivers a gory good time for genre fans.
Fifteen years after “Jennifer’s Body,” writer Diablo Cody returns to the horror genre with a teen riff on Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece. “Lisa Frankenstein,” now playing in theatres, breathes life into a reanimated corpse and the misunderstood teenager who loves him.
Set in 1989, the phantasmagorical romantic comedy stars Kathryn Newton as Lisa Swallows, a gloomy Goth who feels out of step with the world. “Lisa looks good,” says her step sister Taffy (Liza Soberano). “She could even do pageants if she had congeniality.”
Lisa, the survivor of a horrific axe attack that took the life of her mother, writes dark poetry, watches silent movies and hangs around the Bachelor Grove Cemetery, a rundown burial ground near her high school. She makes wax rubbings of the gravestones, and is particularly drawn to the marker of a handsome young Victorian era man whose bust sits atop his grave.
“I just don’t think anyone should be forgotten,” she says.
At school, she has a crush on Michael (Henry Eikenberry), the hipster editor of the school literary magazine, but her withdrawn nature prevents her from making the first move. “I can always count on Lisa to work Saturdays,” says her boss at the dry cleaner where she is a seamstress, “because she can’t get a date.”
At home, her father (Joe Chrest) is the mild-mannered counterpart to her evil stepmother (Carla Gugino), a psychiatric nurse who would love nothing more than to ship Lisa off to a residential psyche ward.
When a freak lightning storm strikes the crucifix necklace Lisa draped over her favorite grave, the young man (“Riverdale’s” Cole Sprouse) is reanimated and makes his way to Lisa’s home. After a meet-not-so-cute, they form an emotional connection.
They complete one another, except that he’s not quite complete. He’s almost perfect, save for some culture shock and a few missing bits and pieces, which they attempt to replace and rebuild with the help of a few unwilling victims and the electric charge of a faulty tanning bed.
“Lisa Frankenstein” isn’t just a gender swapped “Weird Science,” or a riff on the scientific hubris of “Frankenstein.” It’s a high school outsider story about loss and love with a hint of mayhem thrown in for good measure. Cody’s screenplay is often more strange than actually funny, but the underlying theme of forming connections—even if it is with a guy who “speaks” in grunts—is heartfelt and even touching. Sure, it’s still a slasher movie, but one more interested in what makes the heart beat, not what stops the heart from beating.
Newton, who visually channels “Who’s That Girl” era Madonna, is eccentric yet charming, building empathy for Lisa, even though she’s aiding and abetting some pretty heinous acts in the name of love.
As the zombie heartthrob, Sprouse radiates heavy Edward Scissorhands vibes in a role Johnny Depp would likely have played if this movie was made in the early 1990s.
Gugino goes all in as a mommy dearest type but it is Soberano who steals scenes as Taffy, Lisa’s superficial but big-hearted step-sister.
In “Lisa Frankenstein” director Zelda Williams, daughter of the late, great Robin Williams, creates a stylistic homage to both John Hughes and Tim Burton. It’s a sweet and strange zombie love story that understands teenage angst and how the heart wants what it wants, even if that heart no longer beats.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” now playing on theatres, kicks off Marvel’s phase five with a talky sci fi story, heavy on the scientific blather. Instead of “Quantumania,” a more appropriate subtitle could have been: More Fun Than Physics Class!
“It’s a pretty good world,” says Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a.k.a. Ant-Man. He’s a member of the Avengers, gifted with the power of size manipulation and some funny dialogue. “I’m glad I saved it.” Basking in the glow of his heroic contributions to mankind, he’s written a book titled “Look Out for the Little Guy,” and shamelessly drinks in the praise of his friends and fans.
His family, however, thinks he is resting on his laurels, and, in secret, are still working on ways to help the planet. His romantic partner Hope van Dyne, a.k.a. Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and the original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), have created a sort of satellite for deep space, except it connects them to the Quantum Realm, a subatomic level where the realities of space and time don’t exist.
Having spent 30 years trapped in the subatomic world, Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) is horrified by their experiments. “Do you know how dangerous the Quantum Realm is? Turn it off now.”
Of course, Cassie and Co learn too late that the connection to the Quantum Realm goes both ways, and they are all sucked into the satellite and transported to the strange world, a place that looks like a Yes album cover from 1973 come to life.
Separated into two groups, Scott and Cassie are captured by freedom fighters led by Jentorra (Katy O’Brian), while Hope, Hank and Janet are cut loose, on the run from Janet’s old nemesis, a destroyer of worlds called Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).
Kang needs the Pym Particles, the subatomic particles developed by Hank which can increase or reduce mass as well as density and strength, to exit the Quantum Realm and travel through time and bring havoc to the real world.
Only Ant-Man and his ragtag gang can stop him and his interdimensional threat, but only if they can navigate the Quantum Realm and come together as a group.
There is a lightness of touch to “Quantumania.” Rudd’s charisma sees to that, and he provides some genuinely funny moments in the film. Majors brings the secret sauce as a great cartoon villain, but the talky script and messy action scenes suck away much of the fun.
You may be thinking, “But Michael Douglas talks to a giant ant. How can that be bad?” True enough, it is something I never would have expected to see, and I got a kick out of it, but for every nifty moment like that, there is sea of exposition, as if the filmmakers don’t trust the audience to understand what is happening unless it is spelled out for them.
The loud, CGI-overload climax fills the screen but doesn’t grab the imagination. There are cool creatures and action enough for any two movies, but it all feels thrown at the screen, willy-nilly. There is a lot of it, but none of it is memorable or particularly original.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is a let-down, a movie that feels more like an introduction to the next batch of MCU movies than a standalone.
