I can’t remember the last decent vampire movie I saw, so thank the deities for Abigail (now streaming on Peacock, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), which is one hell of a bloodletter with a convoluted backstory. The film originated as a remake of Dracula’s Daughter, and was slotted as an entry in Universal’s Dark Universe horror franchise; but once that ill-fated idea went kerplotz, the directorial team of Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (Ready or Not and the two most recent Scream films) took the helm and made the movie under their Radio Silence banner. My expectations were low, as the Screams felt like rehash and the drowsiness from lame-ass Dracula flick The Last Voyage of the Demeter lingered, but if anything will make an old cynic enthusiastic about vampires again, it’s Abigail.   

ABIGAIL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open in what seems like a completely different movie. No, seriously. It’s a kidnapping thriller in which a cadre of misfit criminals bust into a rich man’s mansion and steal his 12-year-old daughter for a $50 million ransom. It’s one of those Reservoir Dogs-type jobs where none of the crooks know each other’s names so there’ll be no ratting on anyone, and they get nicknames, and all that. Our lead is Joey (Melissa Barrera), who seems a little out of place with this crew of freaks, probably because she’s the true protag with big, soft, sympathetic eyes that she uses to look at the photo of her estranged son on her phone. She’s also not thrilled to learn, moments before they bust in, that their target is a little girl. But there’s money to be made and a job to do, and her part of it is to knock the kid out with an injection.

The others are pretty much a bunch of mixed nuts: Frank (Dan Stevens) leads the crew and wears glasses that tell us he’s slick and shifty like the gearbox on a Ferrari. Peter (Kevin Durand) is a man mighty of muscle but slow of mind. Rickles (Will Catlett) is the poker-faced sniper. Sammy (Kathryn Newton) is the sassy hacker. Dean (Angus Cloud) is the getaway driver who’s got naught but a couple of chiclets rattling around where his brains should be. They snatch Abigail (Alisha Weir) and convene with plan mastermind Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) in a dilapidated mansion with a giant elevator cage as a centerpiece – I wonder if it’ll come in handy at all should anyone need it – and decor ranging from cluster-o’-antlers light fixtures to gross taxidermy and crumbling old frescoes. No, really, frescoes! I’m sure nothing bad has ever happened in this place. It’s a bit of a fixer-upper but after several thousand hours of work and exorcisms, it’ll be so cozy!

Being the nice person around here, relatively speaking, Joey comforts poor little Abigail, who’s still wearing her tutu from ballet rehearsal. Being the shitbird around here, and the specific breed of shitbird played by Dan Stevens, Frank threatens poor little Abigail with his gun – and finds out she’s the daughter of a notorious gazillionaire who’s rumored to have a henchman capable of “tearing people apart like an animal.” That might, key word here being “might,” explain how one of them ends up with their head being detached from their body in a rather disgusting and hilarious fashion. And just when you thought this crew of crooks had exchanged enough prickly gettin’-to-know-ya banter, well, when people are fighting for their lives, they really get to know each other, especially their insides, and extra-especially when those insides become outsides.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s no secret that Abigail is the vampire around these parts, and that she likes to plie and jete in between masticating her victims (it’s in the trailers and everything), so obviously the sequel needs to be ABIGAIL VS. M3GAN. ABIGAIL VS. M3GAN! Someone needs to make ABIGAIL VS. M3GAN! I mean, why couldn’t it exist in a world that gave us Freddy vs. Jason?

Performance Worth Watching: Barrera is a terrific Final Girl. And Weir throws herself whole-hog into the demonic role (it’s a lot of fun hearing this adorable kid spew obscenities like a sailor who accidentally dropped anchor on his toe). Stevens has his terrifically sleazy moments and Durand delivers some nicely modulated comedy. But I gotta go with Lisa Frankenstein herself, Newton, who slays a few one-liners and makes the absolute most out of the movie’s most demented sequence. 

Memorable Dialogue: You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Stevens quip, “Sammy, those are f—in’ onions” to the dimwit tasked with finding garlic to combat vampires. 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: In retrospect, the best joke in Abigail is how it starts off a little slow and dry and a lot like many other bickering-bad-guys crime thrillers, then subtly becomes one of the year’s most uproarious comedies thanks to a collection of nutty performances and exquisitely timed bursts of pustulent gore. Horror movies are often populated with characters I like to call one-by-oners, because the monster or slasher or alien picks them off one at a time, thus drawing out the plot to feature-length. But they rarely feature one-by-oners with much personality. Abigail is unique in that you’re loath to see the one-by-oners die, because it means they no longer exist to say and do hilarious shit anymore. 

On the other hand, they die in a fashion that’s so gruesome and entertaining, you’re too slackjawed to mourn their passing. The film absolutely functions within the confines of formulaic horror – put jerks in a creepy house and slaughter away – but adorns the familiarities with a few visual eccentricities, some amusingly silly twists and a screenplay that sets up its talented, tonally on-point cast to succeed. Abigail is a case where it’s not the material but what you do with it that counts, and Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin deliver the goods with wit, a little bit of suspense and some gloriously gross buckets of blood, just like Grandma likes it.

Our Call: There are times when Abigail doesn’t make sense and is not a perfect movie but I had too much fun watching it and refuse to nitpick it so STREAM IT. Thank you.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

If nothing else, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is Disney taking a victory lap for acquiring 20th Century Fox and the Marvel properties it controlled. We got a taste of this last year in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” when the advertising bragged about bringing in Patrick Stewart’s Professor X from the X-Men and then the movie threw in John Krasinski as Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards from the Fantastic Four just because it could. This time, two former Fox characters are front and center for a Disney release, and they’re bringing some very un-Disneylike mannerisms with them.

Wade “Deadpool” Wilson has fallen into a funk since we last saw him. He was turned down for a job with The Avengers, broke up with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and now does a lousy job selling cars. It’s hard to believe that a highly-skilled assassin with regenerative superpowers wouldn’t be able to get a better job even without The Avengers, but whatever, he’s in need of a comeback. He’s sought out by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), who runs a clandestine organization dedicated to preserving timelines. Wade’s timeline is about to end because of the death of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in 2017’s “Logan.” In fact, Paradox is just a few days away from deleting the timeline himself with a device that will erase the world painlessly.

Wade isn’t giving up on preserving his universe, so he kidnaps a Wolverine from another timeline to replace the one that his world is missing. Paradox finds the replacement insufficient and banishes both Deadpool and the new Wolverine to The Void, a desert world reserved for entities that Paradox and his organization want to sweep under the rug. The Void is ruled by Nova (Emma Corrin), the heretofore unknown twin sister of Professor X. She wants to kill the heroes, and they ironically need her help to return to Wade’s timeline to stop Paradox.

The bad news is that neither Deadpool nor Wolverine can hope to succeed on their own, or even together for that matter. It doesn’t help that the two don’t like each other, with this version of Wolverine wanting nothing more than to wallow in self-pity and Deadpool insisting that he put aside his failures and help save a timeline that isn’t his own. The good news is that there’s help out there in The Void. Remember, multiple-timeline and multiverse rules are in effect here. I will say that there are other versions of Deadpool played by Reynolds and other versions of Wolverine played by Jackman. Are there versions of these characters not played by Reynolds and Jackman? Will anyone else from the “X-Men” universe show up? Maybe some even stranger bedfellows?

The appeal of “Deadpool & Wolverine” lies in its ability to elicit laughter and gasps. The kind of gasps I can talk about here relate to crude humor and creative violence, which tie into the laughter anyway, so really the appeal of this film is its humor. Obviously this movie isn’t going to appeal to audiences that want their Marvel movies at the PG-13 level or tamer. But it also isn’t going to appeal to people that don’t like Deadpool or are sick of Deadpool. It’s hard to imagine anybody not falling for the charm that Reynolds and Jackman bring to their characters. It’s easier to imagine that people are tired of this schtick after eight years, with all the “shock” and meta-humor and excitement over silly things like ill-fitting pop songs. For me, there was just enough juice left in the tank for me to give this movie a recommendation, but I suggest seeing this movie early while the screenings are still a party, because I don’t think this movie is going to age well once the novelty wears off.

Grade: B-

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, gore and sexual references. Its running time is 128 minutes.

Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.

In “Inside the Episode,” writers and directors reflect on the making of their Emmy-winning episodes.

David Nutter carried out a lot of death sentences in the nine episodes of “Game of Thrones” that he directed.

He helmed Season 3’s “The Rains of Castamere,” which is more commonly known as the Red Wedding because it featured the bloody end of beloved characters Robb Stark (Richard Madden) and his mother, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley). He saw Kerry Ingram’s Shireen Baratheon, a child, burned at the stake in Season 5’s “The Dance of Dragons,” and in Season 8, he had Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) beheaded as she utters her final word: “dracarys” (“dragonfire” in High Valyrian or “burn it down” in modern English).

But he’s also noteworthy for a character he didn’t really kill after all: Kit Harington’s heart-of-gold Jon Snow. Although Jon seemed to be brought down in a Julius Caesar-like mutiny in Nutter’s Emmy-winning “Mother’s Mercy,” the HBO drama’s Season 5 finale, the next season’s premiere taught us that he was only mostly dead.

But Jon’s stabbing is just one of many, many things that happened in that jam-packed 2015 episode. Other highlights include Cersei’s (Lena Headey) literal walk of shame; Arya (Maisie Williams) going blind because she misuses a power; and Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Theon (Alfie Allen), two abused victims of the psychotic Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), joining forces.

And because this is “Game of Thrones,” there were also lots of character deaths.

Before departing for his daughter’s wedding earlier this summer, which he promised would be a lot more chill than anything he’d directed, Nutter discussed making what became one of prestige TV’s most divisive episodes.

What’s the first thing you do when you get an episode with this much happening?

Scream. (Laughs)

You know, it was the finale of the season and it was my big chance to show what I got.

There was the shame walk that we had to do when Lena was six months pregnant. So I had to find an actress who could actually do this walk like her and carry the same gravitas and weight. That was probably the toughest job I’ve ever had because I had to be a psychiatrist. I talked to all of these actresses that auditioned for the role, and I’d say to them, “You know that you could possibly be trending on the internet all over the world if someone snaps a picture of you on the first day of shooting?”

Lena Headey had a body double who performed Cersei’s walk-of-shame scene.

(HBO)

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A lot of women auditioned on tape and did the walk of shame naked. But there was one woman who auditioned on tape and did it in her undergarments. But she had a great head and shoulders, and Lena had a very similar [look]. And she was this great actress named Rebecca Van Cleave. She was from Virginia and lived in London and studied acting. She really wanted to be a good actress, and she was just phenomenal. I’ll never forget. There’s a side shot where you can’t even tell if it’s Lena or Rebecca.

That scene also features (a fully clothed) Hannah Waddingham as a religious zealot, yelling “shame” as she guides Cersei through town. She was then an unknown actor, but she’d soon become a breakout star of Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso.” Do you remember casting her?

[Creators] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] cast her. We wanted someone who was overpowering, and her whole presence was overpowering. Her voice was strong.

There’s also the big secret of Jon Snow’s seeming murder. Did you know when you shot this episode that he would be resurrected in the next season?

I never wanted to read past where I was in the story. Right after the season ended, there was a big political event with Barack Obama, and we were at Chuck Lorre’s house. Obama was a huge fan of “Game of Thrones.” I took a picture with Barack. He grabbed me and shook my hand, and he put his [other] hand on my shoulder and whispered, “You didn’t kill Jon Snow, did you?” I said, “Sir, he’s dead. He’s deader than dead.”

Did not knowing yourself make it easier for you as a director?

Yeah, much easier.

You want to give it the gravitas it needs.

I also wanted to do it kind of quick and not make it a long, drawn-out thing. So I used one camera as he steps through the crowd … and then the last shot was of Jon Snow [on the ground] with a [camera] up in a crane. I’d done enough gore with the Red Wedding that this needed to be almost peaceful.

The audience had questions about another death in this episode: Stephen Dillane’s Stannis Baratheon. The audience sees him wounded after battle, and Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) raises her sword over her head as if to strike him down for good. But we don’t actually see the body. How did that shot come about?

That was David and Dan twisting the screws tighter and tighter.

There’s also a death that encapsulates the show’s ethos of having something kind of good immediately followed by something really bad: Myrcella Baratheon (Nell Tiger Free) dies by poisoning after she tells her uncle, Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), that she knows he’s her biological father and that she’s cool with it.

This is a love scene between a daughter and a father. You know, “You sacrificed yourself for [this family]. But everything you did is for a purpose.” And then the daughter was willing to help her father any way that she could.

Indira Varma’s Ellaria Sand gives Nell Tiger Free’s Myrcella Baratheon a fatal kiss.

(HBO)

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Toward the end of the episode, we see Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) slowly, and then suddenly, surrounded by Dothraki warriors — members of her late husband’s people. But neither she nor the audience are clear if they’re happy to see her. How did you accomplish this?

We wanted it to be something where it evolved. She’s on top of the hill and she sees a storm coming in a way. It’s almost like they enveloped her. It’s a hurricane of Dothraki that she’s in the middle of.

It was important to play to the stature of her. Like they’re almost in awe of her.