WARNING: TRAILER CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE
Abigail
by Hope Madden
Back in 2019, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had a blast locking a group of evildoers and one innocent inside a luxurious mansion for about 90 minutes of head-exploding, weapon-wielding, visceral mayhem.
The fun they had with Ready or Not was contagious. So catchy that you can certainly feel its influence in the filmmakers’ latest, the ballerina vampire tale Abigail.
The first big difference is that in this mansion, no one is innocent.
A team has been assembled for a kidnapping: grab a wealthy guy’s kid and hole up in some out-of-the-way safe house until the ransom comes. They nab little Abigail as she’s coming home from ballet lessons, easy enough, and now all they have to do is wait out the night until the cash comes through.
It’s an airtight movie setup, even if it leaves little breathing space for twists or surprises—assuming you’ve seen the trailer, or at least the poster, and are not shocked to learn that Abigail is a vampire.
Alisha Weir (Matilda: The Musical, Wicked Little Letters) strikes a fine balance as the centuries-old bloodsucker who suckers victims by playing a helpless preteen. She certainly makes ballet look sinister.
Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin surround their wee star with a solid ensemble. This ragtag group of bloodbags (or criminals, as they’d probably prefer to be known) delivers some fun chemistry.
Dan Stevens (having a banner year!) is delightfully unpleasant as group leader Frank, while Melissa Barrera (Scream) carves out a compelling lead turn. Meanwhile, Kathryn Newton (Lisa Frankenstein, Freaky) and longtime “that guy” Kevin Durand deliver the comic notes.
Abigail offers quickly-paced, sharply edited gore with enough banter to keep the characters interesting. It’s tough to know who to root for—these people did willingly kidnap a child, after all. The overall moral ambiguity of the film makes it less satisfying than Ready or Not and the lockstep plotting keeps it from sticking with you long after the credits roll.
It’s fun, though. And when it decides to finally get bloody, it may not leave a lasting impression, but it definitely makes a mess.
The People’s Joker
by Hope Madden
When Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, Warner Bros. and their lawyers promptly shut it down.
How in keeping with the spirit of the film, an autobiographical glimpse into the filmmaker’s transition that skewers homogenized corporate-controlled art. A multimedia collage of sorts, the film sutures live action with animation to tell of a young person, fed up with their narcissistic mother and absent father, numbed by the conveniently prescribed “Smylex” that’s helped keep reality at bay lo these many years. The numbness doesn’t keep our hero from heading to Gotham City to fail wildly as a comic, though.
Moments in the film that directly address the filmmaker’s own life story deliver an emotional punch that somehow feels at ease inside this wickedly satirical take on the death of fringe art.
Vera Drew also stars as the performer who becomes Joker, then Joker the Harlequin, her dead name being bleeped throughout the film, a la Kill Bill. The transition from put-upon son to underground comic outcast to what she was meant to be all along creates a strong and emotional structure for the film.
In its own way, The People’s Joker homages as much as it lambasts. The film is dedicated to Joel Schumacher, whose Batman Forever provided young Joker his first inkling that he was not who he was meant to be.
The film takes aim at Saturday Night Live and superhero culture as essentially a hollow impersonation of what once was outsider art, and it achieves its aims by being, very clearly, outsider art.
Gotham City—ever the cesspool—withers under the fascist rule of Batman and Lorne Michaels, whose United Clown Bureau Live (clearly SNL) is the only legal form of comedy in the city.
Batman’s not all he’s caped up to be, either.
It’s an incredibly impressive effort both behind and in front of the camera. Her film is wildly imaginative but devastatingly personal at the same time. But her clear-eyed image of corporate comedy has even more bite.
Villains, Inc.
by Rachel Willis
When their supervillain leader dies, three henchmen are left adrift in director Jeremy Warner’s comedy Villains, Inc.
It’s an interesting concept told with the kind of mundanity that speaks to real life. Though most of these villains have superpowers and special abilities, they need jobs – just like the rest of us. They also have dreams of the future, just like us. Not perhaps of a summer house in the country, but of world domination.
After the leader dies, Beatrix (Mallory Everton) becomes the group’s de facto number one. The other two (Colin Mochrie and Jason Gray) just aren’t capable of leading anyone.
There is a certain amount of comedy from the setup alone. What do henchpeople do when they have no one to guide them? However, this concept only takes you so far. What follows is often forced and ineffective. No one leans into the material, so too often, there is nothing to laugh at.
We’re left with clunky dialogue and a been-there-done-that style of humor. That’s not to say no joke ever lands – Mallory Everton and Jason Gray get produce a good laugh or two – but too often the writing gets in the way.
The story itself is fine. We have montage moments and misunderstandings, reconciliations, and growth. The superhero of the film, Captain Justice (Trey Warner), has some of the best scenes, but even a few of those are lifted from other films. The moment when Justice hands out “swag” to fawning cops is reminiscent of The Lego Batman Movie.
While the characters are likable enough, there simply isn’t enough working for this movie to keep it interesting. There are too many threads for each to get a satisfactory resolution as if the writers weren’t quite sure what kind of story they wanted to tell.
The slap-stick style comedy will definitely work for some, but comedy is one of the toughest sells. What resonates is not so much the humor but the desperation that comes with needing a job – even if you have superpowers.
