SUPPLEMENTAL: ABIGAIL

 

STARRING: Alisha Weir, Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud and Giancarlo Esposito. Written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. Budget $28 million. Running time 109 minutes.

A group of professional criminals, lead by Frank (Dan Stevens), Peter the muscle (Kevin Durand), Sammy the hacker (Kathryn Newton), Joey the medic (Melissa Barrera), Rickles the sniper (Will Catlett) and Dean the driver (Angus Cloud) are hired by criminal mastermind Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) to kidnap Abi (Alisha Weir) the ballet-loving daughter of a super wealthy man and keep her hostage for 24 hours while they wait for the ransom to be paid. 

Holding up in a mysterious country house, the gang soon begin to realise that something isn't right when one of their number is discovered horrifically and gorily butchered and that they're sealed inside the house with something that wants to eat them.

What that thing is and why they've been chosen is delightfully revealed over the next 109 minutes in fantastically gruesome detail, mixing a funny, but not OTT script, with a very likeable bunch of characters, a superb set, and some brilliant practical special effects subtly augmented with CGI. 

I sadly missed this at the cinema, which is a shame cos it would be one of my favourite films of the year. I've begun of late to think that I was growing tired of the cinema and that I could no longer enjoy something so downright and outrageously enjoyable as Abigail, and I'm delighted to have discovered that I can still sit through something like this and bloody love every single second of it!

I've not enjoyed a film this much, nor found one so satisfying in a long time. For me this is what a good film can be, something that doesn't need to be desconstructed or analysed to the Nth degree, something that's just bloody enjoyable, end of! And Abigail is that, indeed I've not had this much fun since 2020's The Hunt.

The great thing about Abigail is how it develops over its running time, changing from a standard crime caper, to locked in a house horror film, before changing gear again for a deeply satisfying ending with a very funny final line from our sole survivor. 

This takes the old, tired vampire genre and gives it a much needed shot in the arm, making vampires exactly what they should be, disgusting blood-sucking monsters! 

As gory as hell, as funny as fuck, but never to the detriment of the story, and a satisfying film plot to boot. 

Stake through the heart recommend!

9/10

 

#50: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

 

STARRING: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delany, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, Matthew Macfadyen, and more Cameos than you could shake a stick at, with some that are downright delightful. Written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells and Shawn Levy. Directed by Shawn Levy. Budget $200 million. Running time 128 minutes. 

The third Deadpool movie in the series crash lands into a market that seems to have lost its love for the superhero genre after a string of truly shit superhero films that tanked, bombed, crashed or 'failed to perform at the box-office' to use Hollywood parlance. Those turkeys include the likes of, for Marvel,: The Marvels, Madame Web, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Gaurdians of the Galaxy Vol 3; while DC showed up to the party with five bottles of absolute shit, which included: Shazam! Furry Gods, The Flash, Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

The end result of such dreck is that both studios have seriously put the brakes on their respective output, to such an extent that Marvel only have two more 'product' to push out this year, both of which are Sony Studio offerings, Kraven the Hunter and Venom: The Last Dance, and DC only has one, Joker: Folie à Deux.  

So, enough waffle what of Deadpool & Wolverine?

Well it's 2 hours and eight minutes long and features two end-credit bonuses, one at the beginning and one at the very, very end, before the screen lights come up which might be worth your while depending on how much you've enjoyed the preceding 128 minutes.

The plot, sees Wade Wilson, now retired from being Deadpool trying to live a normal life selling cars and celebrating his birthday with his nine closest friends when agents from the Time Variance Authority arrive to arrest him for his past crimes against the Sacred Time Line. He is subsequently given almost god-like powers by TVA boss Paradox, Matthew Macfadyen, to help him destroy the Time Line. Instead Deadpool steals a Macguffin device, to travel the time line in search of a Wolverine to help him save his own time line. However when both 'heroes' are marooned in the Void they must find a way to get back to their own world before it's destroyed.

What follows is a relentless chase across multiverses, and time-lines and features so many cameos it's almost impossible to name them all. Packed with in-jokes, visual nods, and Easter-Eggs galore, and copious amount of profanity to such an extent you'll find yourself tutting at the overuse of the word, 'fuck', oh and the constant fourth-wall breaking that becomes deeply monotonous. In fact it's all in danger of sinking this Blockbuster completely, so thank the gods for Hugh Jackman and Emma Corrin, Jackman's Wolverine is the backbone of this film and his presence elevates this film greatly, despite Deadpool's constant attempts to derail proceedings with his incessant prattling. And Emma Corrin is just outstanding bringing real malevolence to her role and offering us the best villain since Thanos, but sadly there's just not enough of her and her incredibly long fingers.

And then there's the violence, which to say is excessive would be an understatement, it's non-stop, brutal and utterly relentless, scene after scene of consequence-free stabbing of victims with knives, swords, thigh bones, leaving spouting cgi blood to magically disappear into the sky, luckily the humour is on hand to undercut the whole thing.

It's a film made for die-hard fans, there are cameos that will have the comics fan in the audience howling in delightful glee. There's a great sequence where Deadpool, while time hopping, comes across a veritable who's who of alternative Wolverines which is possibly the high-light of the movie, the trouble is that because the whole thing is played as just one very long in-joke and laugh riot, it renders any meaningful story redundant. Plus the running time is far too long for a comedy and after two hours of this I was left weary and very nearly bored.

If you're not a fan of Ryan Reynolds then this might not be your cup of tea, because here he dials it up to 11 and he's in almost every single scene, sometimes acting opposite himself. 

Overall, I was left bemused but not enthralled. There was just too much of everything and it left me a little flat. It's like being screamed at two hours by two hyperactive 9 year-olds ripped to the tits on sugar and Ritalin while you're force-feed boxes of sugar enriched, corn syrup saturated caramel popcorn by the fistful, by the end of it, you feel a little nauseous, deaf and bewildered and you'll want to watch something to cut through all the relentlessness and mayhem, something like Zone of Interest. 

In a nutshell, it was too fun, too loud, too long, and too, too much. 

7/10 

#49: LONGLEGS

Starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michcelle Choi-Lee and Dakota Daulby. Written and directed by Osgood Perkins. budget $10 million. Running time 101 minutes.

Maika Monroe is Lee Harker, a low budget Clarice Starling, and likewise FBI agent with psychic abilities who's assigned to investigate the 'Longlegs' cases, a series of mass family murders that stretch back decades that all have two similarities, each of the young girls killed in the attacks all share the same birthday and a letter written in code was left at the scene of the massacres signed 'Longlegs'.

Within a gnat's fart, old Harker has solved the cryptic code and the connection between all the murders and sets off to find out what it all has to do with her memories of a strange white haired old man who visited her single mom decades earlier when she was just nine years old. And whether it has anything to do with Harker's boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) and his eight year-old daughters impending birthday...

Murky to look at, gloomy to watch and unrelentingly miserable, this is a film lit by 30 watt bulbs where not a shred of sunlight breaks through, where everybody is depressed, and horribleness lurks behind every corner. Lee Harker mopes about the whole film, looking like she's clinically depressed and every character is as damaged emotionally as she is. Indeed everyone appears to be half asleep. 

I liked the trailer and went into this thinking it was going to be a later-day take on Silence of the Lambs, with a horror twist, but what it was instead was yet another horror film with Christianity at its core, or the Devil, because all the recent horror films I've watched have been about the Devil and evil manifest, indeed this one ends with a close up of Longlegs's face as he blissfully cries out "HAIL SATAN."

This was most certainly not for me. Growing up, my formative years were spent watching every single stalk-and-slash serial killer movie that came out in the 1980s and 90s, and after years of 24-hour horror movie marathons at the Scala Cinema in Kingscross I think my capacity for horror films got burned out. This just left me sad and bored, I've seen it all before and there's nothing new here, apart from Nicolas Cage as Longlegs who I wanted to know more about, the trouble is by making him supernatural I failed to connect and lost interest, if he'd been more human I'd have been far more invested, his crimes would have been more horrific, however the reveal of how he managed to be involved in so many mass murders over the years is so ludicruous and revealed as one huge plot reveal late in the third act that I lost any patience I might have had with it. 

I'm fascinated by Hollywood's obsession with these types of horror films where evil always wins, it's all so nihilistic and bleak. There is no hope, no salvation, just the cold embrace of the grave. Enjoy.

6/10

 

#48: QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

STARRING: Lupita Nuyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou. Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski. Budget $67 million. Running time 99 minutes.

Arriving 'hot' on the heels of 'A Quiet Place II', well four years anyway, this is the third in the film series known as A Quiet Place and it's a prequel detailing the arrival of the blind, vicious, psychopathic alien monsters from outer-space who hunt by sound. Explaining nothing and offering no origin story, this film instead focuses on two survivors and one cat and their desperate fight for survival as they try to escape the island of Manhattan on the last boat out of Dodge.

The film follows Lupita Nuyong'o as Sam, a terminally ill cancer patient and her support cat, Frodo, on a day trip to New York City to see a puppet show with a bus load of other hospice patients when the aliens attack. From then on, it's a fight for survival as Sam teams up with an English law student called Eric, Joseph Quinn and they concoct a plan to escape. Sam wants to return to Harlem for one last slice of pizza and Eric just wants someone to help him survive. When the authorities blow up all the bridges in New York and then tell any survivors to make their way to the river front where boats will rescue them (it turns out these aliens can't swim), the race is on! But first there's a side mission involving a perilous nighttime trip through the shattered streets of New York in search of pain relief medicine through an alien nest, lit by bonfires. 

And that's the plot! What follows is a gripping, tense, deeply moving and satisfying movie that had me on the edge of my seat for all of its blissfully crisp running time of 99 minutes (aaaah, the good old days). But don't worry, this isn't a wham-bam! relentless action romp, due to the alien's hunting by sound, this film for the most part is silent, save for the odd whisper, but there is also a wonderful scene in a deserted jazz club where our two heroes get to communicate and connect that is both deeply affecting and moving. 

It's not perfect, there's some continuity issues with having a cat as one of your three main leads and it tends to disappear at times in the plot, and there's a side plot involving medicine that just there to ratchet up the tension but these are very minor quibbles and don't ruin the film. The design and look of the film is also impressive borrowing from War of the Worlds and every disaster movie since 2001. 

Lupita Nyong'o is outstanding as Sam bringing a reality and vulnerability to the role and at no time does the film forget her physical frailty for the sake of the plot. 

I avoided the sequel to the 2018 original, which I enjoyed but had continuity issues with, but this was a totally different kettle of fish. It's a deeply satisfying, tense and emotional ride that will keep you gripped and tense throughout.

8/10 

#47: DESCIPABLE ME 4

 

Directed by Chris Renaud, written by Mike White and Ken Daurio. Voice talents include: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Pierre Coffin, Joey King, Miranda Cosgrove and lots of others. Budget $100 million. Running time 95 minutes. 

Steve Carell, as family man and ex-super criminal Gru, returns for the fourth film in six film 'franchise', which includes two Minions films. This arrives with an increased roster of characters that includes Kristen Kiig, Pierre Coffin, Joey King, Steve Cogan, Steven Colbert and Will Ferrel all fighting for screen time and attention and because of it the film ends up being just a series of funny scenes which don't all jell together.

The first Despicable Me was released in 2010 and proved to be a smash hit for Illumination the French animation company behind it. It was fresh, funny and gorgeous to look at thanks to some great design work from a truly talented bunch of artists and animators. 14 years later and it all just feels a little dull.

The film suffers from way too many characters, but not nearly enough Minions, it's also packed full of some incredibly old references to older films that won't even click with most of the parents of this era's new rugrats, I mean, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Terminator 2 - seriously you're referencing films that are 56 and 34 years old respectively?

The addition of Kristen Wiig was a good one, both thematically and comedically because Gru has always worked best as a man becoming a better person thanks to the pressures of having a family. This time, his three adopted daughters are joined by Gru junior, a baby who obviously hates his father. 

What follows is a convoluted plot involving witness protection sub plot, an adversary for Gru from his childhood who holds a grudge as the main story, and then there's the arc involving four of the Minions who get transformed into superheroes, oh and then there's another storyline where Gru has to help the daughter of his neighbours commit a super-villain caper or risk getting exposed, then there's the story-line with the three main Minions and a vending machine, then there's the one where Gru's wife, Lucy becomes a hairdresser, then there's the arc with Gru and his son. Then there's the one with Gru's three daughters attending a Karate club, Look, there's a lot of story and not much in the way of laughs to go with it. And the trouble is, that what's good about the Despicable Me films gets completely lost in all this guff. I wanted more of the three adorable girls, but all I got was OTT action sequences with a little old lady in a rocket powered wheelchair, which I know sounds like fun, but really isn't. 

Still it all looks very pretty, the production design is delightful and the sound track is fine, Gru and the other main characters are still fun, but I miss him being the main focus of the films. All in all, there's just too much stuff and not enough heart.  

Basically, it's just more of the same and then some. 

6/10  

#46: THE IRON GIANT

Featuring the vocal skills of Eli Marienthal, Jennifer Anniston, Harry Connick Jr, Vin Dissel, Christopher McDonald and John Mahoney. Based on the book by Ted Hughes, from a story by Brad Bird and a script written by Tim McCanlies. Directed by Brad Bird. Budget $70-80 million, running time 86 minutes.

On its original release back in 1999 this utterly glorious animated masterpiece was considered a flop when it bombed at the box office and that's a crime, because this is one of those rare films that's, for all intensive purposes, flawless. Considering it came out in the same year as Tarzan, Toy Story 2 and South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut, it could be argued that it maybe just got lost in the mix, and certainly the lacklustre marketing campaign that limped along promoting it didn't help. The argument is that Warner just didn't know how to sell it. If so, then shame on them.

The story, set in 1957 just after Sputnik has been launched, sees the Iron Giant (VIn Dissel) - an intergalactic weapon of unbelievable power - crash land off the coast of Maine with a nasty head injury and no memory of what or who he is. He's found by young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), a nine-year old boy with a passion for rescuing lost animals, who realising how the huge metal robot will be perceived decides to keep him hidden from his mother – Annie (Jennifer Annisto), the fellow inhabitants of Rockwell – the small town he lives in – and Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald), an obsessed government agent sent from Washington to investigate reports of a giant metal man. Hogarth enlists the help of a jazz-loving sculpturist and scrapyard dealer, Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr), to help him.

I last saw this on the big screen in 2014, Jesus, 10 years ago and couldn't wait to see it again on the big screen. Wow, it's lost not an ounce of its extraordinary charm, it's simply fantastic, beautifully animated with a lovely use of CGI and directed with real subtly by Brad Bird who later went on to direct The Incredibles, Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Ratatouille.

It's a wonderful film, dramatic, exciting, emotionally engaging and at times downright funny! It's perfect and deserved to be a huge hit when it was first released. Today it is considered to be a Modern Classic and beloved by all who've seen it. I Cannot think of a single thing to fault this on. If you get a chance to catch it at your local Cineworld cinema over the half-term break do! your kids will thank you and you'll leave with a smile on your face and a warm glow in your heart.

Perfect. 10/10