This month we’ve got a bit of a mixed bag to sort through. We have one horror film in “Abigail“, previously known as “Abducting Abigail” (As listed in my January preview for this year); We have an over the top action comedy in “Boy Kills World“; and the most indie of indie movies, the story of a family of Sasquatches “Sasquatch Sunset“. No clangers this week, but two that didn’t quite land for me. Although only one of these ended up a recommendation, all these movies have positives and something to offer someone. Let’s dig in!
Sasquatch Sunset
This is a film that didn’t entirely work for me, but I can see where some may find it appealing. It treads the ground between artistic vision and gross out comedy. In my view it relies a too heavily on the latter, making it hard to enjoy the former. If I’ve learned anything about these fictional creatures it is that they are basically just grosser versions of humans. This is in some ways endearing and in others… Well, just unpleasant. This is the Sasquatch cycle of life. We witness mating, death and birth. In between we seem aggression, we see tenderness, anger, fear at the unknown, curiosity and uh, body excretions.
Despite featuring very emotional scenes, I struggled to feel empathy for these creatures. This all felt very mundane to me. Part of the problem is that the heavy makeup makes it difficult for the actors to emote. As Sasquatches of course they don’t speak either and instead just grunt. They compensate for this with a lot of body acting and it works to some degree. But I didn’t feel especially connected. Fun fact: One of the Sasquatches is actually Jesse Eisenberg. Of course he is unrecognizable and doesn’t talk, so you’d be forgiven for missing that.
Cryptid Writing
When you have cast that will struggle to emote, you really need the music to do the heavy lifting. However, instead the soundtrack is understated and ethereal with a dream like quality. To be fair, I actually liked the soundtrack quite a lot, but it didn’t drive the story emotionally. It’s possible it was intentional to give the film a dream like quality, these are mythical “Cryptids” after all. The soundtrack release for the movie actually contains a cover of one of the actual songs from the film, but with the lyrics replaced by grunting. Really, that sort of summarizes the features art meets silliness approach!
Conceptually this is interesting and it is why I watched the film in the first place. I was especially interested in the lack of dialogue (I’m a big fan of the series “Primal”). What I wasn’t aware of was how much the movie would rely so much on body excretions to entertain. That isn’t my thing, but if you like an artistic concept paired with gross out humour this may be for you. What I will say is the Sasquatches did look great. Visually the film worked really well and this was made for around $1m, so that is in itself very impressive. For me though on entertainment value it is a 5.5/10.
Abigail
Abigail tells the story of a group of criminals that have been given a high paying job abducting a young girl. They don’t know who her father is outside of them being wealthy. However, it turns out things are not as they seem and one by one they are being eliminated while they await news of the ransom. It turns out it really does matter who you kidnap. The movie comes from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and stars Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens and Alisha Weir. SPOILERS for this one. Suffice to say this is a visually entertaining movie but full of cliches and heavily reliant on all the characters being stupid. If you still want to stay unspoiled, skip to the last paragraph.
The film gave away the nature of Abigail both in the trailer and many early synopsis’s. Hell, I knew she was a monster late on in 2023 back when this film was still going to be called “Abducting Abigail”. Child Vampires are not new and the movie even references Anne Rice, so I guess little Claudia was the inspiration here. She is done reasonably well and definitely the movies highlight. The visuals are in the “Fun horror” category where things are pushed to such extremes as to be sort of funny (Lots of “Red mist”). While the visuals are fun, I can’t help but find a lot of similarities between this movie and “Ready or Not” by the same directors. But that movie had something this does not: Characters.
Red Mist
Every character here is a hollow shell and everyone other than the final girl is mind-numbingly stupid. Joey (Said final girl), could not be more of a cliché. Her single flaw is that she is a recovering drug addict. She recently got clean. As a result is incredibly competent, a master of hand to hand combat, able to read every person she meets instantly and figure out their back story and is afraid of nothing. Yep, sounds like the kind of recovering drug addict who would be in on a kidnapping scheme…. Of the rest of the team only a couple even verge on competence, but ultimately fall short. Even with Joey, the group collectively make repeated dumb mistakes (Such as constantly splitting up).
Ultimately, this by-the-numbers horror features barely outlined characters who need to make constant stupid decisions to drive the story forward. It has some decent cinematography, generic but fun effects and reasonable pacing. If you want a popcorn horror it may suffice but it is a long way from “Ready or Not”, which was this directing duos one good movie. Most recently they made two bad scream sequels. This is better than those but not by much and I’m starting to realize how much “Ready or Not” relied on the talents of Samara Weaving to make it work. Unfortunately Melissa Barrera (Who was also in those bad Scream sequels) is not quite good enough to prop up a movie by herself. Anyway this is a 5/10.
Boy Kills World
For the final movie is this months review roundup we have the directorial debut of Moritz Mohr with “Boy Kills World”. The movie is written by Mohr, Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers and stars Bill Skarsgård as the unnamed “Boy”. Bill is playing a deaf mute here though, but his character has a constant voice over representing the voice in his head and H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers/Archer) provides that voice over. The rest of the cast split fairly evenly in their supporting roles, but Famke Janssen stands out as the film’s big bad, “Hilda Van Der Koy.” This is a martial arts revenge film set in a dystopian future, but played out very much as an action comedy.
“Boy”, grew up in a Dystopian city ruled over by the brutal authority of the Van Der Koy family. The family has an annual tradition of rounding up 12 dissidents and executing them on live TV in an event dubbed “The Culling”. As a child, the Van Der Koy’s killed his mother and the families matriarch Hilda Van Der Koy personally shot his sister in front of him. Boy himself was to be executed via hanging, but was rescued by a mysterious Shaman (Yayan Ruhian). Since then the stranger has trained the deaf and mute child to be the ultimate fighting machine and given him a single task: To kill Hilda Van Der Koy. The child though never got to experience growing up naturally and so despite his skills maintains a certain childishness to him. He also is haunted by visions of his dead sister. Eventually though he must take on the evil family on the night of “The Culling”.
Smart But Stupid
This is a movie that I expected to be fun both for outrageous action and a bit of comedy. That was really all I expected and yet it managed to pleasantly surprise me. The story is both darker and more interesting than I first imagined and provided a solid twist towards the end that turns the entire story on it’s head. Meanwhile, I did indeed gain a lot of entertainment from the action and comedy. Most of that comedy (That landed with me anyway) was down to the deaf protagonist not being able to read the lips of one character properly, which ended up not just providing a few quick (Hilarious) laughs but actually became a pivotal part of the story. This is a clever film packaged as a dumb movie and it does both parts extremely well.
I don’t have a lot of criticism for this one. One issue is the film focuses so much on the protagonists’ point of view that we don’t really get to know the other characters well. This also means the world building is somewhat minimal. To be fair some of this is because the film relies heavily on mystery. You know this is some kind of dystopian future but not much more than that. While this is a flaw, it doesn’t really harm the film that much so it’s not a big one. We don’t spend much time with the supporting cast, but they are all without exception larger than life and feel straight out of a comic book. This means they are at least memorable. We learn everything we need to know about them, but nothing more. The over-the-top video game style voice-over may put some people off. However you will find a lot of entertainment value if you can get past that. This movie does just about enough to earn a 7/10 for me. Definitely recommended.
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