Screening Room: Abigail, Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Sasquatch Sunset, The People’s Joker & More
Tag Archives: Hope Madden
Dancing in the Dark
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 set up, 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.
Pretty When She Smiles
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 deadname 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.
Fright Club: Malls in Horror Movies
Once upon a time, there was nothing cooler than a mall. There was no place you would rather be. It was an oasis, a microcosm, and an excellent location for horror. In honor of the 45th anniversary of George Romero’s pinnacle of consumerist horror, we decided to pull together a list of the five most effective shopping mall horrors.
5. Chopping Mall (1986)
In 1984, Kelli Maroney found mall side horror in Night of the Comet. Like Halley’s Comet, shopping center disaster returned to Maroney just two years later.
She and some pals are planning a wild party inside Park Plaza Mall after closing. But their state-of-the-art security robots go all Robo Cop on them. Boasting a supremely 80s vibe, plus the great Barbara Crampton and a Mary Woronov/Paul Bartel sighting! Jim Wynorski’s time capsule of 80s horror might be more fun to watch now than when it was released.
4. Slaxx (2020)
Absurdism meets consumerism in co-writer/director Elza Kephart’s bloody comedy, Slaxx. CCC Clothing’s new line of denim adjusts to your body and makes you look even more glorious than you already do. And these jeans fit every single figure, from 5 pounds underweight to 5 pounds overweight. It’s a dream come true.
Sehar Bhojani steals every scene as the cynical Shruti, but the jeans are the real stars here. Kephart finds endlessly entertaining ways to sic them on unsuspecting wearers.
Where Romero mainly pointed fingers at the hordes mindlessly drawn to stores like CCC, Kephart sees the villains as those perpetuating clean corporate hypocrisy. Still, it’s their customers and workers she murders—by the pantload.
3. Fear Street: Part One – 1994 (2021)
The first episode in Leigh Janiak’s trilogy takes us to Shadyville, site of misery, trauma and unpleasantness nigh on 300 years. Not that Deena (Kiana Madeira) is buying all this “witch’s curse” BS.
Janiak’s 90s vibe is strong and her soundtrack is tight. Performances—Madeiera as well as Benjamin Flores Jr., Maya Hawke, Fred Hechinger and Gillian Jacobs—far exceed expectations for an R. L. Stine adaptation.
Part One is the best in the trilogy, but all three of Janiak’s Fear Street installments deliver fear and fun in equal portions.
2. Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
1. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Romero returned to the land of the undead in ’78 with a full-color sequel to Night. Set in Philadelphia, at a news broadcast gone crazy, the film follows a news producer, her chopper pilot boyfriend, and two Philly SWAT cops ready to abandon the organized zombie fight and find peace elsewhere. The four board a helicopter, eventually landing on the roof of a mall, which they turn into their private hideaway.
Romero, make-up legend Tom Savini, and Italian horror director Dario Argento teamed up for the sequel. You feel Argento’s presence in the score and the vivid red of the gore.
Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger as the buddies from SWAT create the most effective moments, whether character-driven tension or zombie-driven action. Romero’s politics are on his sleeve with this one, and he seems to be working to build on successes of his original. He uses the “z” word, digs at Eighties consumerism, shows full-color entrails, and reminds us again that the undead may not be our biggest enemy once the zombie-tastrophe falls.
Screening Room: Civil War, Sting, Arcadian, The Chimera, Invader, LaRoy Texas
Queen of Pain
Sting
by Hope Madden
Is there a more reliable source of terror than the spider?
Well, maybe clowns, but spiders are a close second. Australian filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner is giddy to elicit shivers and gasps with his delightfully horrifying arachnid adventure, Sting.
Roache-Turner’s love for sci-fi horror bursts gleefully from the dollhouse-set opening credits, a scene that efficiently outlines our backstory. This snapshot playfully predicts the film, even as it homages genre classics.
The Wyrmwood director goes on to use the air ducts of an old Bronx apartment building to lay out the land, introduce us to tenants and their habits, and show our hero shimmying and crawling, all spider-like, through the building.
Who is our hero? Malcontent 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne). Her baby brother is loathsome, her parents are tedious, no one pays attention to her, her old witch of a great-aunt/land lady blames her for everything. Ugh!
But then Charlotte comes across a very cool little spider. And with so many cockroaches in Charlotte’s building, surely the newly monikered Sting will never need to look elsewhere for food!
Boy, that is lucky.
Browne channels Lulu Wilson’s Becky (maybe a little less angry). Her performance easily withstands the demands of a lead, but she does receive nice support from a variety of personalities living in the building: Nona Hazelhurt, Robyn Nevin, Danny Kim, Silvia Colloca and Jermaine Fowler.
Fiona Donovan’s production design stands out, emphasizing the film’s distinctly Joe Dante vibe. Although instead of perverting some idyllic burb, Sting ravages a storybook version of the Bronx.
But make no mistake, this movie gets nasty. The creature design and CGI are a bit campy, but the damage Sting does is convincing and pitiless. (Pet lovers be warned.)
If you missed Roache-Turner’s 2014 post-apocalyptic thrill ride Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, definitely check it out. With that film, his fondness for Mad Max flavored a delightful riff on the zombie movie. Here he channels affection for a wide range of creature features (he really loves Alien) but still manages to create something decidedly his own.
Screening Room: Monkey Man, First Omen, Wicked Little Letters & More
Sister Act Too
The First Omen
by Hope Madden
Just two short weeks ago, producer/star Sydney Sweeney’s Immaculate turned the threadbare “innocent nun bringing about the apocalypse” horror (it’s actually an incredibly common trope) into a potent and startling instrument of female rage.
Thanks, by the way.
But if all that remarkable sacrilege was a little too much for you, if you were looking for the exact same movie—just maybe not so hard on the patriarchy—can I interest you in The First Omen?
Arkasha Stevenson’s hands were a bit tied, of course, this being a direct prequel to Richard Donner’s 1976 classic. Donner’s film has already spawned three sequels and a remake, and now a reboot.
A lot has happened since 1976 that makes a “trust the priest” narrative tough to swallow. Stevenson, working from a script she co-wrote with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas, digs into the sketchy side of Catholicism hinted at back in ’76. You know, the burned convent. The shady hospital baby switch. The jackal.
And yet, for all the Omen specificity Stevenson sews into her antichrist apocalypse tapestry, the movie still feels for all the world like a neutered Immaculate.
Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is an American who grew up in Catholic orphanages and has come to an Italian convent to take her vows and become a nun. There’s a hospital wing at the convent. Margaret quickly decides things are unseemly but she’s powerless.
Why yes, that is the exact set up as Immaculate. There’s also a saucy best friend nun who doesn’t seem cut out for the veil, and of course, the involuntary vessel of the antichrist.
How do the films differentiate themselves? Well, Immaculate is not part of a decades-old franchise. The First Omen has a pretty great club scene. Other than that, they are essentially the same film. One just hits a lot harder.
Back in 2022, Daniel Stamm’s Prey for the Devil tried to breathe a little feminism into convent horror. It wasn’t a great movie, but it was a nice try. Just two years later, a little feminism feels like a pulled punch.
Music Maker, Dreamer of Dreams
Remembering Gene Wilder
by Hope Madden
Maybe the smartest choice director Ron Frank made when putting together his affectionate documentary Remembering Gene Wilder was to pull audio from Wilder’s own autobiography. Sure, we hear from many who loved the comic actor—Mel Brooks, Carol Kane, Alan Alda among them. But everything they tell you about his authenticity, humility, humanity, and perfect comic timing you can hear for yourself as Wilder spills the beans on his life.
You remember the hair, of course. And probably those eyes. But that voice proves, in case you have forgotten, that there was something deeply, bubblingly, undeniably delightful about Gene Wilder. And he could act.
Frank, working with writer Glenn Kirschbaum, hand picks some of Wilder’s best scenes. Not necessarily the most iconic, but the most confounding, the scenes where he made a creative decision no one else would have considered, creating an indelible moment on screen.
This is a film that loves Gene Wilder, and it makes a pretty good case for that.
We hear about is childhood, about Willy Wonka, Young Frankenstein, Richard Pryor, Gilda. Each story showcases the gentle, charming creature that was Gene Wilder. Though Frank doesn’t break any new ground cinematically—talking head interviews flank home movies, film clips surround family photos—the mellow approach belies a deep emotional connection.
Remembering Gene Wilder is not just a greatest hits. Although the film does not delve into any of the actor/director’s box office or critical missteps—nor does it devote a single moment to anything that would make Wilder out to be anything other than a treasure—it acknowledges low times. Even those just make you want to hug him.
Not every film or character of Wilder’s has aged well, but his good nature and talent shine none the dimmer. Remembering Gene Wilder certainly does not unearth any ugliness, bares no startling truths. It’s clearly the product of a filmmaker who truly loves his subject.
He doesn’t seem wrong, though.
Two Minute Warning
Baghead
by Hope Madden
Back in 2013’s Texas Chainsaw, a young woman receives word that she’s inherited a building from a mysterious relative. She ignores the notes explaining her duties until it’s too late and she’s already stumbled into what lives in her basement.
Laberto Corredor’s Baghead—an expansion of his 2017 short of the same name—treads similar real estate. Iris (Freya Allan) gets word that her estranged dad (Peter Mullan) has passed and she’s inherited his dilapidated Berlin pub. Currently penniless, jobless and homeless in England, Iris signs the deed and takes over the old place.
She doesn’t watch the video explaining the current basement tenant until it’s too late. But it’s not Leatherface down in Iris’s cellar. It’s Baghead, a centuries old witch condemned to freakshow status. For a fee, she’ll swallow a relic of a deceased loved one and turn into said loved one for two minutes.
But—as was the case with last year’s similarly themed Talk to Me—the conversation comes with more baggage than you might expect.
There are some exceptional shots in this film and solid performances. The small ensemble boasts memorable support work from Mullan, Ned Dennehy and Svenja Jung, as well as strong lead performances.
Ruby Barker elevates the thankless best friend role, while Jeremy Irvine smartly inhabits the character of a grieving husband.
Iris makes a lot of inexcusably dumb choices, but because Allan crafts her as angry and short sighted, this feels less like a misstep than it could have.
The plot—co-written by Christina Pamies, Bryce McGuire and the short film’s writer, Lorcan Reilly—becomes needlessly complicated. Worse, Corredor undermines the excellent production value of his locations with gimmicky and weak VFX.
Irvine and Allan nearly save the film, though. The result is a modestly entertaining mixed bag.
