Boy Kills World

 We live in a decade that's given us a ton of high-energy, high-budget action movies with carefully choreographed combat - all with an excellent level of quality that's got to be a statistical anomaly.
 I guess that's where Boy Kills World comes in; Something's got to balance the scales.

 Boy (Bill Skarsgård) is a deaf-mute dude who lives with a Shaman (Yayan Ruhian!) in the middle of the jungle. He was taken in as a kid after the evil head of the totalitarian city nearby (Famke Janssen) killed his mom and little sister; The shaman knew his mother, so he subjects boy to a brutal training regimen to turn him into a killing machine with the sole objective on getting revenge against this Van Der Koy family who run the government or something. The movie makes a token show of establishing what a bunch of dicks they are - casual oppression and mass murder, a yearly televised culling of known dissidents, being a very superficial caricature of the one percent, that sort of thing- but this a very, very thinly drawn dystopia.

 One of the film's main gimmicks  is that while boy is deaf mute, his inner voice is provided by none other than Bob Belcher himself, H. Jon Benjamin, with a near-constant stream of smartass comments that aim for humorous and consistently, sometimes catastrophically, miss their mark. This is an extremely, uncomfortably unfunny movie that telegraphs all of its piss-poor punchlines. You know that lame Marvel-style joke where someone starts saying something cool, the music swells, and suddenly they fall down or fuck up or whatever? Yeah, that's the sort of thing you can look forward to here.

 Making H. Jon Benjamin not funny is some kind of feat, but writer/director Moritz Mohr makes it look easy.

 Anyhow. Boy fights his way up the Van Der Koys (Sharlto Copley, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, and Brett Gelman) on his way to the matriarch in a series of fights and shootouts that mimic the progression of a videogame - I'm going to say that's intentional, since Boy's inner voice was taken from an off-brand Street Fighter clone. It's absolutely the sort of game I'd be desperately hitting buttons to skip cutscenes.

 There's a deeply stupid, nonsensical twist near the end, and even worse, the movie seems to get ever-so-slightly more serious - suddenly it clearly expects us to give a shit about its plot and characters! The moment I realized this provided the only laugh I had during the entire movie.

 For context, this comes right after a scene in a televised show where innocents are "comically" murdered by people dressed up as goofy cereal mascots.

  Just about nothing in this sorry mess works. It's meant to be a style over substance affair, but the style fails to look interesting. The comedy aspects... there's maybe a couple of bits that are funny on paper - like a guy (Isaiah Mustafa) whose lips Boy can't read, so he keeps spouting Pootie Tang-style nonsense, a fight at least partially inspired by a famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene (he's got issues), and a wince-inducing tactical use of cheese graters - but the execution is botched at every turn.

 And the action! what a fucking waste. The choreographies (action coordinator: Dawid Szatarski) are involved and seem fun, but are completely ruined by disorienting camera moves and choppy editing that rarely let us get a good long look at what's going on; some of those camera moves are interesting (a couple takes, for example, use drones to zoom through a pretty busy brawl), but this showiness comes at the expense of momentum and clarity. It's really frustrating, because there are some really good stunts in there; But I can only remember one short sequence in a longer warehouse fight where the camera didn't seem to me to be at odds with the action.

 Blood is mostly CGI, providing another layer of artificiality to the proceeds. It's a good argument in favour of squibs and practical effects, actually, especially in a surprisingly non-jokey final fight. Nothing like seeing a huge burst of goopy, comic-style blood, followed by a shot showing a floor that's completely free of any splatter.

 At least the acting is pretty good, even if it's in the service of these non-entities. Skarsgård's action hero debut is impressive, and the mix between his comical idiocy mixed in with what's basically peak human form is almost - almost! - enough to make some of his material work.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

  Hellraiser hadn't even hit theaters when New World pictures greenlit a sequel. Clive Barker could not fit it in his schedule, so he only remained on as an executive producer... though he provided the basic story and by all accounts was frequently on set and involved in many of the decisions.
 Fortunately most of the rest of the Hellraiser crew stayed on and, against all odds, good replacements were found for Barker: Tony Randel (who'd done some uncredited editing on the first movie) for the directors chair, and more importantly, Peter Atkins on scripting duty. Atkins, a long-time Barker collaborator (along with Doug Bradley) from his time in avant-garde theater, didn't just get Hellraiser at a fundamental level, he was somewhat ahead of his time in the way that he didn't just deliver more Hellraiser - he and Barker delved into it, expanded it, deconstructed it, made it even weirder.

 It's relatively similar to the way Aliens exploded, chest-burster-like, out of Alien, so it's funny both movies share Lt. Gorman in a key secondary role.

 Hellbound kicks off with a time-honoured cost-cutting measure: padding the runtime with a recap of the previous film's final scenes*. Just hours after facing off against S&M demons, a rapey undead uncle and an evil stepmother, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) wakes up to find herself as an inmate in a psychiatric institution under the care of smarmy, ridiculously posh doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and his hunky, earnest aide Kyle (William Hope).

 Kirsty recounts the events of the first movie as if she was reconstructing what happened - I love the dialog for this scene and how it's paced, though some of her guesswork is conveniently too accurate (and it's another excuse to recycle more footage from the first movie).

 Realizing, in another improbably leap of logic, that the mattress Julia died on could be used to bring her step-mother back, she asks the doctors to burn it. But as soon as the interview is over, Dr. Channard calls the police and asks that they send the mattress to his place.

 Kyle overhears that phone conversation and, his suspicions aroused, does what any normal person would in that situation: he breaks into Channard's house later that night to see what the deal is. And lo and behold, Channard's studio is full of occult diagrams and carefully preserved cenobite memorabilia... including three of the hell-raising puzzle-boxes. Oh, and the blood-stained mattress in the middle of the floor.

 Before he can take off, Channard gets home, accompanied by one of the inmates - one of those movie nutjobs who hallucinates bugs are crawling all over him. I'm imagine that's a real thing, but it seems to be it must be really overrepresented in fiction.

 Anyhow, Channard sits the inmate (played by Frank himself, Sean Chapman) on the mattress, gives him a straight razor, and just observes as he cuts himself to ribbons; it's a very effective, pretty horrific scene even before skinless Julia, summoned by the blood, comes out of the mattress and finishes off the poor sod. Then, in her weakened state, she asks Channard for help, and he reluctantly pushes the mattress towards her with his foot.

 Can I just point out how fantastic the villains are in these movies? Channard is such hateable, sociopathic asshole, and the ways he keeps finding ways to do 'disagreeable' things without dirtying his hands is truly great writing. And Julia, of course, gets a chance to go big this time around - the script thoughtfully hands her many variations of Frank's lines from the first movie, and even lets her get a little payback.

 In any case, Kyle finally manages to escape and extracts Kirsty from the asylum. Meanwhile, Channard is busy providing Julia (Clare Higgins) with victims so she can reconstitute herself. There's a confrontation which Kyle doesn't survive [spoilers, don't read the previous line if you haven't seen the movie], and afterwards Channard puts in motion a plan where he uses Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a previously-introduced autistic girl who's a puzzle-solving prodigy to solve one of his cubes. The whole second half of the movie literally goes to hell, which in the Hellraiser universe is a giant labyrinth full of surreal little nooks, presided over by Leviathan - an unknowable monolithical god that looks like a rhomboidal lighthouse that spews darkness instead of light.

 Oh, and the cenobites pop up for a little bit but they don't get a lot to do; if you'll remember, the movie was already in full production before the first one even came out- So no one had any inkling of how big Pinhead would become. This is Kirsty's and Julia's movie, with a side of Chanard and Tiffany; the demons are barely supporting characters.

 It's got a lot going on, and not everything works. Hellbound definitely lacks the elegance and simplicity of Hellraiser, but it makes up for it in ambition and weirdness. The film never quite follows the course you'd expect- still, despite some silliness and a fuzzy plot, most of its events make sense.

 Because the crew from the first movie is almost all in place, everything that was good there remains good in the sequel. Robin Vidgeon's cinematography really benefits from the enlarged sets, and does well by some wonderful visual ideas - like a completely white apartment, all the better to frame Julia's skinless form. Bob Keen and his team provide some really great work, including a brand new cenobite, and Christopher Young delivers another classic soundtrack - it's not as fresh as the one for the first movie, but it expands on its themes beautifully.

 In case you can't tell by now, I'm a fan. I can see the seams and that many things don't strictly work, but it's still a wildly imaginative and original movie. Hellraiser is one of the movies that in many ways made me me, one I rewatch every few years. Hellbound, I hadn't revisited for a long time - more than a decade and a half, probably - but for a long time it was, along with Aliens and Dream Warriors, what I considered the platonic idea of what a sequel should be. Warts and all, I'm very happy to find it still is.

*: While New World provided a bigger budget for the sequel, the movie started filming just as the dollar's value fell precipitously against the British pound - and as the movie was filmed in London (at the legendary Pinewood Studios, no less), the crew suddenly discovered that their budget had been slashed down by a significant amount; Whole planned sequences had to be scrapped. Due to this and studio interference, it's been described by people who worked on it as 'heavily compromised'. Still kicks ass.

Prospect

  Damon (Jay Duplass) and his daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) are 'floaters' - space drifters, basically, trying to make a living in the lawless frontier of the far reaches of civilized space. Damon, a very Duplass goofball played straight (though he does get stoned in one scene), has a lead on a prospect on a distant verdant moon, a toxic planet covered in budget-friendly earth-like forests: the location of a valuable pod of organically-generated gems.

The long-distance starship that ferries them to the moon's vicinity is doing its last run, so they risk being left stranded if they don't rendevouz with it three days later when it slingshots back from a nearby star. So of course things go wrong from the outset: their beat-up lander breaks down on entering the planet's atmosphere.

 That's only the start of their problems. While trekking to their destination they soon run into another couple of scavengers led by one Ezra (Pedro Pascal); The encounter proves disastrous, leaving Cee alone in the moon with a broken-down lander.

 Ezra tracks her down, and Cee enters into an uneasy alliance with him to try and find her father's big score and find a way off-planet.

 It's a slow, methodical movie that occasionally bursts into spurts of ugly, desperate violence - an expansion on a short from 2014, but it does more than enough to earn an extended runtime. The setting is well realized; While it's pretty jarring to see people in spacesuits walking through obviously terrestrial woods, the amount of detail in the world - coupled with some wonderfully functional-looking machinery, spaces and tools (production design: Matt Acosta, costumes by Aidan Vitti) ends up making it feel fairly convincing.

 The script, by the directing team of Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell, also provides a lot of cool character detail. Cee listens to space indie pop and fills her notebook with a reimagining of a beloved novel she's lost, and Ezra is a Mal Reynolds-style motormouth who keeps spouting all sorts of stories and bizarre facts in a very compelling, flowery patois (yes, the Firefly influence is very strong in this one). The roster acting is superb from everyone involved.

 It looks great, too. Co-director Zeek Earl acts as the cinematographer and he gives the movie the look of a faded polaroid; It's a weird choice for a sci-fi film, but it's a colorful, cohesive aesthetic that fits the film's down-to-earth, subdued action very well. There's a little bit of blood - including a pretty gruelling field surgery, and the practical effects used on the meaty alien flora(?) that serves as the story's McGuffin are pretty cool.

 Daniel L.K. Caldwell provides a gorgeous, very memorable soundtrack. Seriously, it's very, very good.

  Not sure what's up with harsh, cruel sci-fi with young women as protagonists -this would pair well with Vesper- but it does give me hope that we could get an adaptation of Alastair Reynold's Revenger one of these days. I wouldn't want to hype this one too much, as it's a bit on the slight side, but I liked it.

Portals

 Those silly scientists are at it again, running their particle accelerators and trying to create a black holes...

 Luckily for everyone, they don't succeed at creating a (presumably tiny) singularity. Those things are a pain, dropping down into planets and starting to eat them from within as they see-saw around their core like a nightmarish, all-consuming 3D spirograph. No, Portals is content to just be a horror movie. So instead of a black hole we get worldwide blackouts and evil 2001-style monoliths popping up all over the place.

 The monoliths -portals- are at least somewhat sentient and seem to have an agenda. They can communicate telepathically with whomever they choose, control others, and they can take those they're interested in when they touch their vinyl-like black surface. The invader's motivations are kept mysterious, but are generic enough that their antics never really roused my interest.

 Portals tells three stories set around the time the portals make their appearance. It starts with Adam (Neil Hopkins), who wants to take his family out of the city, away from the blackouts and this mysterious threat the news keep talking about.

 First impressions are good - it got me excited, at least, because the writing is pretty good; The story isn't anything special and it gets worse as it goes on, but the characters are believable and very likeable (Hopkins does a pretty good job, and Ruby O'Donnell, his on-screen daughter, is adorable). This segment (which recurs throughout the movie, later moving to a spooky hospital) is directed by Liam O'Donnell, writer of all the skylines and director of the much better sequel (I haven't seen the latest one yet).

 When Adam and his family run into a portal in the middle of the highway the movie shifts into the second story, one set in a 911 call center facility. Again, it's initially interesting, and it's a great way to give a sense of the world (or at least, the corner of the world closest to the call center) going to hell, with the lines overloaded with people calling in about weird occurrences. It devolves to hokum pretty quickly once it introduces your typical conspiracy theorist with that laziest of lazy signifiers: a notebook full of creepy portal-related drawings. When a portal appears in the middle of the office, he grabs a gun and starts forcing his co-workers into it, but the situation fails to go anywhere interesting. Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale.

 After a short catchup with Adam the action moves to Jakarta, where sisters Sarah (Salvita Decorte) and Jill (Natasha Gott) get stuck in a multi-story car park with a monolith. This one's almost a zombie movie- the monolith takes over multiple nearby people and forces them to chase after Sarah and her sister. Very well-made on what's clearly a shoestring budget, it's got some impressive and very high-energy stunts (mostly to do with a slow-moving vehicle) and some very, very creepy business involving a pram. I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out it was directed by Timo Tjahjanto; I can't say it redeems the movie or anything, but it's a lot of fun.

 The last real segment finishes off Adam's story - it gets a few nice images, an extremely shit Scanners-style headsplosion (CGI, sadly), and some effective nastiness, but especially compared to its strong opening, it's a bit of a disappointment.

 Then there's a cool bit of credits, and a surprise fourth mini-story featuring a couple of scientists (Georgina Blackledge and Dare Emmanuel) who gave some exposition as talking heads early in the movie. I love this sort of formal experimentation, but unfortunately the short is completely disposable, a hollow non-story with a poorly rendered gory finale.

 So... this one's a bust, sorry. It got made by some of the same brains behind Doors, which came out two years later, including the Boulderlight production company, Brad Mishka, and creator Chris White. They'd get it much better on their second attempt, which for me merits a qualified recommendation- this one's not really worth a watch despite Tjahjanto's best efforts.

No One Will Save You

 M. Night Shyamalan famously tried to milk suspense out of an alien invasion from your conspiracy-standard grey aliens. Successfully, even - the problem with Signs wasn't the threat, it was the extremely writerly conceits Shyamalan ballasted his script with. Because a doomsday scenario isn't enough to keep viewers engaged, I guess.

 Two decades later we get another movie that attempts the exact same thing... and fails for pretty much the exact same reasons.

 Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in a big old house in the outskirts of a small town. She seems happy, except for her mom being dead and some unspecified trauma. Perky, enthusiastic, and... well, a little too quirky, to be honest, but that's mainly down to the film's gimmick: there are barely any spoken lines at all, so to compensate Dever is directed to emote like there's no tomorrow. The few times anyone does talk, it's way down in the mix, almost unintelligible.

 Brynn's exaggerated, cartoonily upbeat demeanor only lasts until her first interaction with a neighbour (and, it's implied not too subtly, potential crush), who returns a friendly wave with a similarly over-emoted, withering look of disgust. Brynn deflates in a way that all but demands a sad trombone playing in the background.

 As it quickly becomes apparent, Brynn is a social outcast - everyone in town hates her and makes no bones about it, despite her being friendly to a fault. This is, of course, is all part of her mystery trauma, clues as to its nature carefully parcelled out throughout the movie. It also explains the silence that smothers the whole movie; It's a cute, if glaringly obvious, conceit.

 The alien invasion happens on that same night. Brynn wakes up to some noise downstairs and finds a very noisy little grey man stumbling around. It's a pretty cool variation on a home invasion scene, especially when the alien reveals telekinetic powers. It does raise the same question Signs did - to wit, how the hell did these (space) clowns ever get to interstellar travel?*

 Brynn, plucky heroine that she is, survives the attack, and the next morning opts to get the hell out of Dodge - which reveals the next stage of the alien invasion in probably the movie's most effective scene. From there it's a series of confrontations with the greys, putting the poor woman through the wringer.

 Technically it's very well shot, with writer/director Brian Duffield providing a few tense, well paced sequences and some cleverly blocked shots. The beautiful cinematography comes courtesy of (hello again!) Aaron Morton. The effects are excusably shoddy for a low-budget picture like this, with some nice, weird imagery and fun variations on standard alien iconography offsetting some pretty dodgy physicality in the scuffles with the monsters and terrible-looking effects for things wriggling under the skin (to be fair, that's a type of effect that's defeated much better-funded movies). The practical effects fare better, with some clever use of lighting to depict future technology.

 Dever's the best thing in the movie, and is wonderful as Brynn- She makes a hugely artificial character work through sheer effort and talent.

 Everything's in place for a nasty, effective little thriller... but ultimately it's all let down by the writing; The script is fucking terrible.

 I'm not going to treat it as a science fiction movie, because it's only wearing that skin to tell a... I guess a fable about self-forgiveness and the crushing weight of guilt and public censure intertwined with a straightforward run-away-from-invading-aliens yarn.

 As far as the plot goes the aliens are nicely inscrutable, even if their actions made me laugh a few times (they have a fondness for spelling out alien letters with their bodies like lanky, creepy cheerleaders). That's... well, not all good, but all good fun, and I like bold choices like that even if they don't work. What bothers me is that they are fucking incompetent, their technology inconsistent from one scene to the next, and their threat level varies arbitrarily from situation to situation depending on whatever is convenient for the script.

 Even worse is Brynn's story and the way it integrates with that plot - It's handled so cack-handedly it's hard to take seriously. And when the secret is out... don't get me wrong, it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone, but it's also deeply underwhelming. It completely fails to upend your understanding of the character in any way, and it renders her situation even more simplistic, the society that's shunned her for a decade that much more a caricature.
 The whole film is yoked to an idea that doesn't really work and has very little weight. Had her crime been less mundane, harder to forgive - something actually shocking, like, I dunno, a school shooting - maybe it'd be on to something. As it is, there's no substance, no impact.

 Why do the aliens find her situation so fascinating? I have no idea; I suspect it's just the script writing itself into a corner yet again. But at least it leads to a deeply contrived, but also really fun ending that finally shows a little of the wit that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.

* Also, how would they be able to take over any town in America? Brynn manages to take a couple down with her tiny frame, blind luck, and improvised weapons - what happens when they try to invade an average home in the ol' US of A, which I'm led to believe holds multiple John-Wick-style weapon lockers?

Doors / Portal

  Millions of sentient structures appear all over the planet. They're big stone-slate things, each one different, covered in constantly rippling living metal (think iron filings on a big magnet). Anyone who touches them disappears, and only sometimes come back... changed. Scientists somewhat unimaginatively call the structures doors (I assume because Portals is the title of a similar 2019 movie).

 The doors communicate with some, and millions of people just walk up to the doors of their own volition and go away elsewehere.

 The pretty cool conceit behind this movie is that the premise is communicated in the interstices, via text infodumps, background chatter and a 'wake up, sheeple!' style podcaster (David Hemphill). The meat of the movie is split in between four shorts, each one set at a specific point during this bizarre invasion, with a focus on the small picture that obscures as much as it illuminates, keeping things mysterious.

 The first segment, 'Lockdown', follows a bunch of high-schoolers stuck in detention right when the invasion begins. It's got a nice paranoid feel as the kids hear sirens and helicopters zoom by outside, their phones all going off at once from within a locked cupboard, and their professor abandons them. Pretty shitty of him, to be honest. But unfortunately it quickly loses steam and kind of flounders when the kids run face to face with one of the newly arrived doors.

 Then it's time for 'Knockers', which is the dumb name given to the people who go into doors to try to document everything within for science. This is dangerous, we learn, because most of these explorers succumb to some form of psychosis if they stay inside for longer than ten minutes or so.
It begins with some rather beautiful nature footage, as one of the knockers (Lina Esco) muses on her overbearing life partner (Josh Peck)... who's also a knocker. Very Terrence Mallik. But the main influence here is quickly revealed to be Alex Garland's Annihilation as they venture into the other side of a door that's bisected a beautiful woodland house. This is the clear standout story in the movie; The alternate house the party of knockers ventures into is eery, weird, and pretty cool, and while the relationship drama ends predictably, it's narratively satisfying in a way that the rest of the film doesn't really ever manage again.

 In 'Lamaj' we catch up with the deadbeat teacher who abandoned the kids in 'Lockdown' (Kyp Malone). He's gone full survivalist out in the woods and has managed to communicate with one of the Doors using some homebrew equipment. The Door is surprisingly friendly and communicative - it's all fairly interesting until he invites a fellow scientist and her plus one, and then some extremely clunky relationship drama ensues again.

 Finally it's Midnight Mike's turn, the guy who runs the podcast we've been listening to throughout the movie. He gets an interview with an expert on parallel realities (Darius Levanté), who acts like a spaced-out cult leader and provides some more information on what may be going on. Again, it's  kind of interesting - anything that reminds me of Childhood's End will make me perk up and pay attention - but dramatically it's completely inert, and that's a terrible way to wrap up the film.

 This is a tough movie to gauge. I really enjoyed its general vibe - and despite a very low budget, it always looks great, with 'Knockers' being again a highlight. I also dug the experimental nature of the filmmaking, which mixes in text, drone shots, and abstract images with its narrative with abandon. The scripts (all written by different people) vary wildly in quality, but none of them are particularly great, with some incredibly clunky exposition (the way characters just blurt out their motivations in Lamaj is near unforgivable). As science fiction none of it has any rigour, nor does it explore any of its ideas satisfactorily, but I do appreciate how much leeway it leaves by design for you to fill in between the lines.

 Brad Miska of V/H/S fame is one of the producers, and it's created by Chris White, but the driving force here seems to be Saman Kesh (who also directed 'Knockers'), with Jeff Desom and Dugan O'Neal taking care of 'Lockdown' and 'Lamaj' respectively.

 Much as I like a lot of it, overall it's a bit of an unsatisfying mess. An engaging unsatisfying mess.

Abigail

  Six thugs kidnap a young ballerina (Alisha Weir) and take her to a Resident-Evil-style mansion at the behest of one Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) with a promised reward of a few million each. Once the deed is done, they need to hole up there and babysit the kid for twenty-four hours until the ransom is paid.

 Simple. Except that, as the movie's trailers and marketing make abundantly clear, the kid is a vampire.

 Imagine how good a twist that'd be if it hadn't been spoiled months before the movie came out! It's easy to understand why they've done this - it'd be a hard sell otherwise. But it's harder to swallow that the movie acts as if it was a big twist for half an hour or so. And while the vampire isn't turning the screws, we're expected to give a shit about half a dozen of poorly written caricatures traipsing through sub-standard tough-guy (and gal) posturing and some of the lamest attempts at humor I've seen in a while.

 The crew are: Joey (Melissa Barrera), the soulful one who balks at inflicting violence on a little girl; Frank (Dan Stevens), a domineering asshole; Peter (Kevin Durand), a dimwit muscle-head and piss-poor comic relief; Rickles (William Catlett), a nice-guy sniper cypher; Sammy (Kathryn Newton), a perky hacker; And finally Dean (Angus Cloud), a mushmouth sleazebag. The actors are clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery, and sometimes they make it work - but the lines provided to them fall way short of the achingly clever, witty banter the script clearly thinks it's delivering.

 Things pick up considerably once the vampire finally bares its fangs and starts chasing these idiots around, acting for all purposes like a blood-splattered, murderous version of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. The script (by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick) remains pretty fucking dumb, but the mayhem is well choreographed and the gore is pleasingly over-the-top. It's pretty watchable until it gets to the home stretch and it starts piling up twists like the world's stupidest pancake stack, especially during a final confrontation against a new menace that pissed away any goodwill the film had accrued up to that point.

 Directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (who did segments for V/H/S and Southbound, and then cashed in their success with their excellent feature debut Ready Or Not to do a couple of Scream sequels) bring the movie to life whenever the undead menace is prowling (it's never scary, which is par for the course in horror comedies, but the action is well staged) but don't really do enough to elevate the shitty script in its slower moments. Oh well - at least they (and DP Aaron Morton, who's been pretty busy between this and First Omen) make some of the scenes look pretty good, almost monochrome. Some are sepia, but one of the exterior shots is all subdued pinks, which I thought was cool and unusual outside of a Miami scene.

 They also give (an abbreviated version of) Blood and Tears an airing in an appropriately bizarre dance number - I know she's rich, but It's still pretty impressive how Abigail got a hold of a shellac edition of Danzig II for her gramophone.

 It's hard to criticise a movie that's clearly going for 'dumb fun' for being overtly stupid, even when that equation leans 90% dumb and 10% fun. But there's a point where cheap contrivances, plot holes and hoary dialog start reeking of half-arsedness, and this movie crosses that threshold very early on; I only have myself to blame for the mild annoyance, because it was patently clear from the trailer that the writing would be terrible.