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Ready or Not (2019)

Sometimes, the splashiest horror movies of the summer aren't the ones that reinvent the wheel, but the ones that just jack the speed up to 10 on said wheel. That's what we get with Ready or Not, a horror-comedy funfest that takes a little bit of Clue (1985), a dash of You're Next (2013), and buckets of Sam Raimi-style gore effects to produce one of the most gleeful, popcorny fright flicks of the season. Are you ready?

Ready or Not (U.S.A.)
Released: August 21, 2019
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
Screenplay: Guy Busick & R. Christopher Murphy

Tagline: "The Game Begins"

Cast:
Samara Weaving as Grace
Adam Brody as Daniel Le Domas
Mark O'Brien as Alex Le Domas
Henry Czerny as Tony Le Domas
Andie MacDowell as Becky Le Domas

Former foster child Grace is marrying into the staggeringly wealthy, blue-blooded Le Domas family, who made their fortune as a gaming dynasty generations ago thanks to a generous benefactor. Despite their misgivings, Grace is marrying her fiance Alex for all the right reasons. She's a kind, genuine person happy to have found the big family she always wanted. But Grace soon finds that there's a lot you take on when you marry into money. Strange traditions must be upheld. Rituals that could end in either merrymaking or murder.

Ready or Not takes the conventions of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and spruces them up for a modern critiquing of the 1%. The film makes no bold statement or offers any sort of scathing critique we've never encountered before--excessive wealth is dangerous, whether inherited or otherwise, and those that have it will go to great lengths to keep it rather than see their lifestyle threatened. What mattes here is the delivery, which is brutal, blood-soaked, and a total rollercoaster of jumps, jolts, and laughs. There's a certain balance that needs to be achieved in order to fashion a top-notch horror comedy, and it can be tricky to get just right, but Ready or Not is such a precise, tightly-written film that they really do nail that mixture. A fantastic and game cast adds to the viewer's delight as well.

Horror darling Samara Weaving leads the fray, delivering a phenomenal performance that will make you squeal and cheer in equal measure. Adam Brody also stands out as brooding brother Daniel, despondent over the family legacy and his own role in maintaining that status. All of the characters end up fleshed out by the time the credits roll, including the gorgeous mansion setpiece, whose secret passageways, twisted hallways, and gilded floors make it a character all its own. You can tell the production design team must have been giddy laying out the plans for the labyrinthine Le Domas mansion.

It seems like everyone had a blast making this movie, in fact, which is one of the things that make sit so refreshing. Ready or Not is summer movie from days of old, unconcerned with setting up dark mythologies, larger universes, or never-ending franchises. It's an original story seeking only to deliver thrills and chills while being funny as hell along the way. And in that regard, it's a winner.


Ready or Not
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

An entire generation, maybe even two if we're getting technical, recalls being scarred for life by the macabre stories--and even more so, the twisted illustrations--of Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a trilogy of nightmare-inducing collections that brought local legends, campfire tales, and ghost stories to grisly, realistic life. Now those short, savage shockers have made their way to the big screen, and they've brought the scary with them.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (USA/Canada)
Released: August 9, 2019
Director: Andre Ovredal 
Screenplay: Dan & Kevin Hageman (story by Guillermo del Toro, Patrick Melton, & Marcus Dunstan)

Tagline: "Based on the iconic book series"

Cast:
Zoe Margaret Colletti as Stella Nichols
Michael Garza as Ramon Morales
Austin Zajur as Chuck Steinberg
Gabriel Rush as August "Auggie" Hilderbrandt
Natalie Ganzhorn as Ruth Steinberg
Austin Abrams as Tommy Milner
Kathleen Pollard as Sarah Bellows

On Halloween night, 1968, in the small, quiet town of Mill Valley, Pennsylvania, horror junkie and social outcast Stella Nichols and her friends invoke the spirit of the holiday by pranking back the school bullies, trick-or-treating, and showing the new guy in town their creepy local legend: the abandoned, supposedly haunted house of the Bellows family, a dilapidated mansion shrouded in rumors of child-murdering, insane daughters, and black magic. Naturally, they find themselves trapped in the basement, where the story claims one Sarah Bellows was imprisoned by her own family for being different, and where she wrote scary stories, whispering them through the walls to anyone who would hear them. Stella finds the legendary book of scary stories, but when she takes it home, a darkness is unleashed upon her and her friends, and the only way to stop it is to find out the whole story.

The frame narrative is Scary Stories' weakest element, by far. An uninspired, contrived set-up meant to churn out the monsters one right after the other. But isn't that what we're all paying for, anyway? We know why we're here, and the movie does too, so I'm not going to take points off for the filmmakers giving us exactly what we wanted from this adaptation. In fact, I applaud that they didn't go the anthology route, which I imagine was tempting. I think it would have left the viewer disjointed whereas here we become invested in the characters. And the monsters and creature effects, of course.

While our main crew slips easily into teenage stock types, there are moments where each performer shines through. Casting relative unknowns and actual teen actors was a benefit here, especially since the film is targeted at a young adult audience and is very much structured as a gateway film for the genre. That being said, Ovredal isn't afraid to drop some serious scares in here, but as most of us would agree, that's the tried and true way to hook new blood. The frights are well-earned, and the combo practical/CGI effects are impressive, rendering Gammell's iconic drawings to a T. The Jangly Man and the spider scene are highlights, an effective combination of psychological terror and twitchy, gross-out body horror. 

Ovredal excels with tone, both in scares and general atmosphere. Mill Valley is quickly established as a Derry/Castle Rock-type Appalachian village faced with looming change as the cloud of the draft hangs thick, the Vietnam War kicks into high gear, and Nixon bumbles his way into the presidency. Environmental exploration shots and a chilly score--Lana Del Ray's witchy, weird cover of Donovan's "Season of the Witch," in particular--will make your flesh goosebump at an imagined autumn breeze as you swear you could taste cinnamon in the air. And could there be more perfect conditions under which to hear a scary story? Well, aside from in the dark, of course.


Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror

Crawl

A college student trapped in a crawlspace in the coastal Florida home of her injured father during a category 5 hurricane. Oh, and there's a giant alligator there too. Talk about one lousy day. But also one rollicking premise for a horror flick, one that delivers the fun and frights on all fronts and makes for a great addition to the canon of summertime creature features.

Crawl (U.S.A.)
Released: July 12, 2019
Director: Alexandre Aja
Screenplay: Michael & Sean Rasmussen

Tagline: "They were here first"

Cast:
Kaya Scodelario as Haley Keller
Barry Pepper as Dave Keller
Ross Anderson as Wayne Taylor
Moryfydd Clark as Beth Keller
Cso-Cso as Sugar

Haley Keller (Scodelario) is an accomplished swimmer at the University of Florida, though she may be losing her competitive edge. As Hurricane Wendy, a category 5 storm, bears down on the east coast, Haley learns from her sister Beth that no one can get ahold of their father, whom Haley has been slightly estranged from in the wake of their parents' divorce, and Beth is worried he won't follow the evacuation order. Haley takes it upon herself to drive into the heart of the raging storm only to discover that her father lies unconscious in the dank crawlspace beneath their old home, a giant bite mark in his shoulder and a lurking, prehistoric predator in the shadows.

The set-up for this film is thin and straightforward, and one might not think there's a ton of meat here (ba dum dum, psh!), but Aja has a gift for piling on complications and barriers that keep the plot and the tension on a steady incline for the entire brisk runtime. Haley and Dave just can NOT catch a break, but despite everything that possibly could go wrong going wrong at each turn, they dig deep, find their inner resolve, and get creative about what they can do next to maximize their chances of survival in what might be the least likely survival scenario ever. But damn if it's a blast to watch them try.

Crawl isn't overly violent by any means, but its sense of hopelessness is omnipresent, twisted into something both exhilarating and wickedly funny for the audience to watch. You can't help but bemoan "oh man!" every time Haley and Dave's initiative gets squandered by a new twist of fate, even as you cringe-smile in anticipation of what they'll do next. It's a lean film, one unconcerned with emotional baggage or extraneous subplots, and while this might be considered shoddy craftsmanship in other films, here it's exactly what Crawl needs to keep the thrill ride sensation in motion. 

Scodelario offers a magnetic and grounded performance that aids in propelling the film forward. Haley is beaten down by everything from the elements to apex predators to her own sense of self-worth; she's literally fighting on her own against the world, and what could be a more universal feeling for audiences to empathize with? The odds are stacked against her three times over, yet there's a fire and a spunkiness in her character that lets us know that hey, she just might pull this off; let's see. Like Haley, Crawl has modest ambitions, and meets them with crowd-pleasing grace. A perfect popcorn movie any way you slice it. Or should I say any way you shred it to bits?

Crawl
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror

Midsommar

Ari Aster faced a tall order in having to follow-up his nightmarish critical darling Hereditary (2018), but he aced it with Midsommar, an ambitious emotional drama concerning a grief, trauma, and failing relationships told through the lens of occult horror. Full of mania, madness, and anxiety, the film tells a more straightforward story than Aster's debut, yet never loses that pervading sense of inescapable dread that Aster has already made his trademark.

Midsommar (USA/Sweden)
Released: July 3, 2019
Director: Ari Aster
Screenplay: Ari Aster

Tagline: "Let the festivities begin"

Cast: 
Florence Pugh as Dani Ardor
Jack Reynor as Christian Hughes
William Jackson Harper as Josh
Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle
Will Poulter as Mark

Dani Ardor (Pugh) is an anxious college student in a declining, co-dependent relationship with her distant boyfriend, Christian (Reynor). After years of simmering discontentment, Christian is prepared to finally break up with Dani, but a shocking family tragedy leaves Dani gutted and alone, and Christian stays with her to lessen the pain. Several months later, Christian invites Dani to tag along on his guys' trip to Sweden, home of his classmate Pelle. Dani agrees and the five head out to Pelle's folksy hometown, a remote village in the far north of Scandinavia, as the villagers are preparing to hold a festival that occurs once every 90 years.

Everyone at the commune is very welcoming and kind, at first, but naturally as the vacation goes on, things become more strange, bizarre, and downright sinister. Unnerving rituals and eerie murals are only the beginning. It's familiar scaffolding for horror fans: loudmouth, horny Americans travel to rural countryside and get their comeuppance, and there are certainly stock characters at play here. The shitty boyfriend. The nerd. The pensive, cute "foreigner." Aster is aware of this framework, however, and though he may not transcend the template, he certainly makes it his own.

Much like in Hereditary, Aster explores emotional turmoil through grand imagery and twisted ideas, this time in specific regards to a doomed, toxic relationship. There's a tension here outside anything related to the physical safety of our core characters' stay in the village; a tension in watching both Dani and Christian continually postpone their inevitable breakup though it's clear to each of them that their time together has run its course. Neither of them can rip off the band-aid, and as viewers we know that the longer they wait, the more damned their fate. 

What's interesting with Midsommar is that the conclusion is foregone. From the moment our heroes step foot in Pelle's village, there's only one way this can end,but the art of the film is in driving us towards that inevitable ending while still somehow maintaining interest, dread, and tension. Of course, we don't know the specifics of how this will all play out, but we know that it will, and that question locks the viewer in a vice grip as we wait to see what sort of specific, disturbing violence will rule the third act. 

The symbolism can be a bit heavy-handed at times, though that may be because we get to spend so much time dwelling on Aster's foreshadowing. It's a long film, and there's lots of extended, lingering shots to give the viewer time to pick up on all the runes and drawings and murals that spell out what sort of danger Dani and the others are wading into. The camerawork in general is phenomenal, and the use of pastel and light to create such uncomfortable imagery is astounding. It's one of the few, great horror films that is truly both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It's a film with a soul, formulaic and campy at times yet sweeping and vivid at others; a riff on The Wicker Man (1973) that morphs into its own gorgeous, demented creature that is at once lush and tranquil, jarring and fiery. 


Midsommar
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror