BRIDE AND SHRIEK!
Australian actress Samara Weaving dazzles in this comedy-horror-thriller
WEDDING night nerves are taken to the extreme in this riotous blood-soaked black comedy horror which guarantees a gory good time to go with your popcorn on a Friday night. Former star of TV’s Home And Away, Australian actress Samara Weaving, is the niece of the heavyweight actor Hugo Weaving, and she steps out of his shadow with a star-making performance as far-from-blushing bride, Grace, whose big day ends with a most unexpected bang.
Weaving has covered similar ground before in 2017’s US teen horror comedy, The Babysitter, and here is determined, smart and funny. She needs to be, as she’s put through an emotional and physical wringer which includes falling into a pit of animal corpses, and a scene with a nail which is as skin-crawling as the one from Home Alone.
Having married into a hugely wealthy family who imagine her to be a “gold-digging whore”, tradition demands they all gather downstairs at midnight in their spooky mansion to play a game.
Randomly selecting hide and seek, she initially fails to comprehend its lethal consequences, and while her new husband is distraught, her in-laws stalk the corridors armed with axes, crossbows, shotguns and a competitive attitude.
These blue bloods of US society are a bickering rabble of self-serving cocaineaddled alcoholics, and as deluded, degenerate and barking as any of their British counterparts could be.
Full of secret doors and passages, the house is on lockdown and the CCTV is turned off, while housemaids, the butler and even the dumb waiter get in on the action.
And Andie MacDowell channels Morticia Addams as the mother-in-law from hell, an elegant, charming and deadly matriarch who loves to smoke.
Funnier than many comedies and more tense, violent and gruesome than many horrors, it’s a death spasm of fun. And I mean that in a good way.