This comedy horror is Home Alone with fangs
Abigail (18, 109 mins) Verdict: Grisly comedy-horror
★★★☆☆
Swede Caroline (15, 98 mins) Verdict: Bit of a turnip
★★☆☆☆
Jeanne Du Barry (15, 117 mins) Verdict: Lavish but flawed
★★☆☆☆
MOVIE trailers these days might as well be renamed spoilers. Again and again, stuff you don’t see coming in the actual film has already been proudly given away by the official trailer. It’s a curse of modern cinema; feeding audiences such a hefty appetiser that the pleasures of the main repast are greatly diminished.
Universal’s trailer for the comedy-horror Abigail is a perfect example, disobligingly undermining the film’s first act. A cute-looking ballerina is kidnapped by a gang of rogues who intend to milk her super-rich daddy for a $50 million ransom.
They hide her in a spooky old mansion, where she appears to be terrified. But ominously she tells one of them: ‘ I’m sorry about what’s going to happen to you.’ And soon she is doing the terrorising herself... because she’s a vampire. It’s Home Alone with fangs.
This film’s answer to Macaulay Culkin is Alisha Weir, the engaging young Irish actress who began her rise to stardom two years ago in the exuberant Matilda: The Musical. Her title character this time is another little girl with special powers, but of the savagely murderous variety.
THAT we know this in advance is a pity because the opening seems to presage a gripping thriller. On a grand stage, Abigail is dancing Swan Lake, deftly intercut with the gang’s meticulous preparations for her kidnapping. From the theatre she’s chauffeurdriven back to a stately pile where she does, indeed, appear to be home alone. But it is in another pile, the spooky mansion, that the story unfolds. The gang’s leader is played by Giancarlo Esposito, who will never play anyone more sinister than Gus Fring in the incomparable TV drama Breaking Bad, though he gives it a broad shot here.
He has deliberately gathered a crew who are strangers to each other and names them after the Hollywood Rat Pack. ‘Frank’ is a former cop from Queens played by Dan Stevens; ‘Joey’ is a recovering junkie played by so-called ‘ scream queen’ Melissa Barrera.
It is Joey’s job alone to deal with Abigail, and the pair appear to bond, but soon the grisly rampage begins — and it is truly grisly. It’s amazing what passes for comedy these days, but in fairness, codirectors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, with writer Guy Busick (the team behind last year’s Scream VI), do inject some bona-fide fun.
I enjoyed the gang’s speculation as to who Abigail’s rich daddy might be. ‘It’s America’s Dad, Tom Hanks,’ one of them suggests.
But it isn’t. Without wanting to emulate Universal’s trailer by blowing any secrets, let’s just say that Abigail is a ‘reimagining’ of the same studio’s 1936 picture Dracula’s Daughter. I can also tell you that Matthew Goode has a scary cameo, which, considering what happens to the Dan Stevens character, makes this about as unlikely a Downton Abbey reunion as you’re ever likely to see.
All it needs is Mrs Patmore decapitating dopey Daisy with a chainsaw. I rather wish she had, by the way, but maybe that’s just me.
And so for the $50 million question: should you see it? The marriage of black humour and extreme gore always makes me uneasy, and the plot blunders about at times, but comedy- horror fans should probably tick it off.
■ FANS of the mock-documentary genre, by contrast, won’t find much to cherish in Swede Caroline, which coincidentally is about another abduction, this time of a giant marrow in Shepton Mallet. The singular world of competi-tive outsize veg-growing is a good subject, but co- directors Finn Bruce and Brook Driver, working from the latter’s script, just don’t have the lightness of touch that on TV characterised The Office, and on the silver screen, Christopher Guest’s masterly Best In Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003).
A decent cast is led by Jo Hartley as the eponymous Caroline, whose marrows are pinched, unearthing a right old vegetable plot that features MPs and sex parties.
Hartley, Aisling Bea, Fay Ripley and Richard Lumsden do their best, but Swede Caroline is nowhere near as funny as those involved evidently think it is, and really that’s the problem. Unlike the best mockumentaries, it uses comedy as a bludgeon. There’s no subtlety, which is a shame, because it’s a 24-carrot idea.
■ YET another release named after a woman, Jeanne du Barry is a French-language biopic of the doomed mistress of King Louis XV, played by Johnny Depp of all people, doing a passable job with the lingo.
The silly manners of the 18thcentury Versailles court are splendidly satirised, but ultimately the film feels like a vanity project for its writer- director Maïwenn, the mononymous French actress who also plays Jeanne.
The story demands that we believe in her as a head-turning beauty, radiating sexual magnetism. Well, I hate to seem ungallant, but I can’t say I did.
All films in cinemas from today apart from Rebel Moon, which is streaming on Netflix.