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.
“Carmen” borrows its name and main themes from 19th century works by romantic novelist Prosper Mérimée and composer Georges Bizet, but is set very firmly in modern day. A loose and often surreal adaptation of the novel and the opera of the same name, this movie begins with a tragic event that shapes the rest of the story.
When a bullet from a drug cartel member kills defiant flamenco dancer Zilah (Marina Tamayo) in the Mexican desert, her daughter Carmen (Melissa Barrera) is left alone and vulnerable. Fleeing to safety with the help of a smuggler, she heads for the US border and Masilda (Rossy de Palma), her mother’s best friend.
On the American side in Texas, Aiden (recent Oscar nominee Paul Mescal), a discharged Marine suffering from PTSD, reluctantly takes a job patrolling the border.
The journeys intersect when Carmen and other immigrants attempt an illegal crawl under the fence dividing the two countries. Spotted by Mike (Benedict Hardie), a racist guard with a quick trigger finger, they are met with a hail of gunfire. Carmen escapes with Adreian in tow. On the run, the pair begin a passionate affair as they plot their next steps.
“Carmen” is a musical odyssey but it isn’t exactly a musical. It is a gritty and timely story told with magic realism, where contemporary dance and music are part of the story’s language. Directed by French dancer Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed the 2010 movie “Black Swan” and the “sandwalk” in “Dune,” goes for a dream like feel that stands at stark contrast to the gritty reality of Carmen and Adrian’s situation.
This approach does make for some jarring transitions from scene to scene, as the movie shifts from pragmatism to avant-garde fever dreams, and it can be confusing, but the sheer beauty of the dance sequences and the music goes a long way in keeping the experience compelling. Millepied’s dance sequences are, unsurprisingly, visually stunning, and often worth the price of admission alone.
Barrera and Mescal’s smoldering chemistry is “Carmen’s” touchstone to reality, but this isn’t about realism, it is about pure emotion. Often more beautiful than cohesive, it’s geared to make you think and feel, and on that level it succeeds.
Ghostface is back, kicking and screaming—and stabbing, punching and shot-gunning—in another bloody adventure where real life imitates the reel life of slasher movies. Like the other entries in the franchise “Scream VI,” now playing in theatres, sets out to deconstruct slasher movies, but actually delivers the gory slasher goods.
Set following the events of the 2022’s “Scream,” the new film moves the action out of Woodsboro, California, site of the previous Ghostface killings, to New York City at Halloween. The “core four,” the survivors of Ghostface’s latest rampage—sisters Samantha and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega) and twins Chad and Mindy Meeks (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown)—hightailed it across country to attend school and put the past behind them, but trauma has a way of following a person.
Sam, who killed her boyfriend Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid) when she discovered he was a Ghostface killer, in love with her simply because she is the daughter of the original killer in the screaming mask, is now seeking treatment, but admits, stabbing him 22 times, slitting his throat, and shooting him in the head, “felt right.”
No spoilers here, but suffice to say, the movie follows the “rules” laid out by film student Mindy: Rule one: As the franchise ages, the movies will get bigger. Rule two: Expect the opposite of last time. Rule three: Legacy characters and main characters are cannon fodder. No one is safe.
“Scream VI” feels fresher than you would expect from an almost thirty-year-old movie franchise. A rotating cast of new and old faces helps with that, providing new stories wrapped in nostalgia, but it also has something to do with the franchise’s desire to entertain at almost any cost.
This one is a tightly knit, if familiar-ish, story, amped up with gorier-than-usual killings—I’m sure I saw intestines!—and what Alfred Hitchcock would have called a “refrigerator climax.” That means it seems to make sense while you are watching it, but later, when you’re standing in front of the fridge looking for something to eat, and your mind drifts back to the film, you realize just how preposterous it was. The Grand-Guignol ending is over the top, but hey, remember rule number one?
“Scream VI” doesn’t exactly slash a new path for the franchise, but the expected mix of humor, gore and self-reverence and its willingness to be silly and kinda tense at the same earns it a recommend.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Jennifer Burke to have a look at new movies coming to VOD and streaming services, including Johnny Knoxville and the unnatural acts of “Jackass Forever,” the reboot of “Scream,” the unhappily ever after fairy tale “The King’s Daughter” AND the great punk rock doc “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché.”
It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the original “Scream,” starring David Arquette, Neve Campbell and Drew Barrymore, reinvented the slasher genre with a scary, funny and self-reverential take on things that go stab in the night.
Three sequels later, there’s a new edition, the inventively titled “Scream.” It’s the fifth film in the series, and they’re not calling it a sequel. It is, God help us, a relaunch, or, as they call it in the movie, a “requel.”
A mix of new and old characters, “Scream” takes place in Woodsboro, California, a sleepy little town whose peace and quiet was interrupted twenty-five years ago by a killer in the now iconic Ghostface mask.
The action in the new film gets underway as a new Ghostface killer sets their sights, and knife, on Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), a teenage senior at Woodsboro High who enjoys “elevated horror.” (MILD SPOILER) Unlike the opening scene characters before her, Tara survives and is tended to by older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) whose thorny history with Ghostface makes the pair a target for the masked killer.
As Ghostface’s killing spree continues, Sam turns to the old guard, Dewey Riley (David Arquette), television morning show host Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), for help.
“Scream” is much cleverer than the retread title and recycled killer would suggest. It continues the meta commentary on the rules characters in slasher movies must abide by if they expect to survive the knife but, more than that, it plays like a satire of itself. It’s a trickly line to walk but directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett stay the course.
As the killer carves notches on his belt, characters talk about “elevated horror,” and toxic fandom until the line between what the characters are talking about and what we’re watching on screen blurs into one bloody riff on postmodern horror and what it really means to be a “requel.” It is simultaneously self-reverential and mocking of the slasher genre, and values its cleverness as much as the kills that provide the scares.
The scary scenes don’t have quite the same atmosphere Wes Craven brought to his “Scream” instalments, but there are moments that linger in the memory. The old trope of revealing the killer behind an opening door is played for laughs and tension, and the loss of one of the “legacy” characters is actually kind of touching.
As expected, the killings are brutal and bloody, and mostly not played for laughs. The new “Scream” is the most gruesome film in the franchise, offering up piercing knives and gallons of pouring plasma. There are plot holes everywhere and the victims have usually done something to out themselves in harm’s way, but the killings are effectively played out.
“Scream” is a slasher movie that bends the rules of slasher movies but, best of all, it also breaks the sequel rule of diminishing returns. Adding a fifth entry to an established franchise, that holds up to the original, may be the movie’s biggest achievement.
Richard joins Ryan Doyle and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show to talk about the history of champagne cocktails, the Kardashians retreat from television and “In the Heights”!
“In the Heights” (in theatres and on PVOD) is a crowd pleaser that offers heart and uplift in almost every frame. HERE’S Richard’s interview with stars Jimmy Smits and Olga Merediz! HERE’S a a shorter version OF “Vax for Joy!”
“In the Heights,” now playing in theatres, is a joyful movie based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony award-winning musical, that will make you feel better by the end of the movie than you did when it began. Energetic, exultant and empathetic, it feels like a long weekend away from real life.
A series of connected stories, “In the Heights” transcends its Broadway bound beginnings with a production cut loose from the confines of the stage. Shot on the streets of Washington Heights, New York, the story of a bodega, gentrification, a winning lottery ticket, love, community and the dreams of its characters is lovingly painted in big, bright colors by director John M. Chu.
The spider-web of a story weaves in and out of its character’s lives, centering around bodega owner Usnavi, played by the charismatic Anthony Ramos. Like almost everyone in the film Usnavi has a dream of a life beyond his neighborhood, and, in a sentiment borrowed from another famous musical, soon, most everyone discovers there’s no place like home.
“In the Heights” is a story of the immigrant experience that touches on the DREAM Act and fear of deportation, but is more concerned with its characters and their day dreams of creating better lives for themselves. It’s a story of resilience, of hope and it’s a tonic during these pandemic times when it seems the media, both social and mainstream, are incapable of delivering anything but unsettling news.
In an eager cast, Olga Merediz, who reprises her Broadway role as the neighborhood’s grandmother Abuela Claudia, and Melissa Barrera as Usnavi’s love interest Vanessa, are standouts.
The sheer spectacle of it all, however, may be the real star. Chu’s camera is in constant motion, capturing the many ensemble dance numbers that accompany the soundtrack’s hip-hop, salsa, merengue, soul and R&B, in an eye-popping manner. The Busby Berkeley-style “96,000” number, shot at a public swimming pool is a total throwback to Hollywood’s Golden Age, as is a terrifically staged gravity-defying dance on the side of a building.
It doesn’t all work, however. A framing device that sees Usnavi tell his story to a group of kids is clunky and the opening number, “In the Heights,” an almost eight-minute set-up to the story, is stylish but overstays its welcome.
Still, those are small issues in an invigorating crowd pleaser that offers heart and uplift in almost every frame.
