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.

Arts

The Fabulous Four
Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Southpaw Entertainment
In Theaters: 07.26

November 8, 2017 – the day that Donald Trump was elected – was among the worst of my life, comparable to the deaths of my parents. The reason that I mention this is that, while Susan Sarandon used to be a favorite of mine, I put some degree of blame for that nightmare upon her and other extremists who strongly encouraged liberals to boycott the election. The only reason I mention any of this is to give full context to the statement that, for me, The Fabulous Four is still the most unforgivable thing that Sarandon has ever been involved in. 

The Fabulous Four is the story of a quartet of old friends reuniting for a wedding in Florida. Lou (Sarandon, Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking) is a successful heart surgeon who lives alone with her cats, having never married after the love of her life eloped with her best friend Marilyn (Bette Midler, Hocus Pocus, Beaches). After the death of Marilyn’s husband, she is lost and lonely, and quickly becomes engaged, planning a lavish ceremony in Key West. Alice (Megan Mullally, Will & Grace, Dicks: The Musical), a singer who once toured with the Rolling Stones, and Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph, Abbott Elementary, The Young Wife), a cannabis farmer who has a strained relationship with her hyper-religious daughter, are determined to get Lou to come to the wedding and finally bury the hatchet with Marilyn. To get Lou to come to Key West, they concoct an elaborate story about winning a raffle to become the owner of a polydactyl cat from Ernest Hemingway’s estate, and soon the women are reunited. While tension runs high between Lou and Marilyn, Kitty and Alice spend a lot of time getting drunk and high. Lou finally starts to loosen up when she meets a suave man named Ted (Bruce Greenwood, Thirteen Days, Star Trek), and things appear to be working out for a little while until further complications ensue.

Despite starring a group of highly talented performers, The Fabulous Four has a lot of elements working against it, chief among them the abysmal screenplay by Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly (You’re Dating a Narcissist!), which is a feeble collection of cardboard characters, stupid situations, and raunchy routines. The crazy contrivances include the aforementioned feline-oriented sub-plot, constant variations on the same marijuana joke, an attempted robbery foiled by using a Kegel ball as a projectile weapon, and a wild bachelorette party at strip club wherein one of these four women inevitably has a shocking discovery you can see coming from at least 20 miles away. The dialogue leaves a lot to be desired: when Kitty’s born again daughter, Leslie (Brandee Evans, Rolling Into Christmas, Unprisoned) wants to put her into a Christian retirement home called Heaven’s Gate, Kitty quips “Heaven’s Gate? More like hell on earth!” and constitutes one of the wittier moments in the film’s poorly conceived jokes about topics ranging from slavery to date rape make for some seriously cringe-inducing moments. 

Sarandon fairs best of the cast, and for all of the negativity I cast at her in the opening paragraph, this movie stands as proof that she’s incapable of giving a truly bad performance. This is more than can be said for the campy and constantly mugging Midler, who is only slightly less over the top than she is as the buck-toothed crone Winnifred Sanderson in Hocus Pocus. Ralph is almost as bad, transitioning poorly from the more presentational acting style of a broad sitcom to what should be a more grounded characterization in a feature film, and all that can be said for Mullally is that she’s only asked to portray three states of being: drunk, stoned, and horny, and she convinced me on at least two out of three. A cast of venerated stars giving such sloppy performances and so unable to find convincing chemistry has to be put at the foot of the director, and Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, How To Make an American Quilt, The Dressmaker) approaches the material with all of the subtlety and grace of an incontinent sheepdog, and it’s a bit of a surprise that a movie this amateur and slapdash comes from such an industry veteran.

The Fabulous Four is an utter misfire from beginning to end, and the only positive thing I can say about it is that, given the fact that it’s getting minimal publicity and opening opposite the most anticipated Marvel release in a couple of years, this film going to meet a mercifully quick demise at the box office before it goes on to punishing streaming viewers. By far the person who comes off looking best here is Diane Keaton, because her mediocre vehicles such as The Book Club and Summer Camp look quite solid in comparison. –Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews here:
Film Review: Deadpool and Wolverine
Film Review: Longlegs