Fangs a lot, kid
SIX STRANGERS GET MORE THAN THEY BARGAINED FOR AFTER ABDUCTING A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL WHO ISN’T
AS children, we’re told to stop playing with our food. The tween menace in this horror thriller from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett has been playing with her meals for years – centuries, in fact.
Ballet-obsessed moppet Abigail is especially thrilled when her preferred main dish – a terrified human – brandishes a sharpened stake or clove of garlic shortly before she drains them dry of delicious life force with her impressively tapered fangs.
This movie puts a morbidly humorous spin on the vampire mythology peddled by Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris
and Stephenie Meyer by trapping six strangers inside a Gothic mansion with the 12-year-old girl (Alisha Weir) they have just abducted for a $50 million ransom.
Except the seemingly helpless child, pleading for her life with tear-filled eyes, is a manipulative creature of the night, who will turn her captors against each other then hungrily rip out their throats.
What we have here is a satisfyingly gory game of cat and mice, reminiscent of Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s 2019 film Ready Or Not, which played hide and seek with cinema audiences before the duo shared directors’ chairs for the most recent instalments of the Scream franchise.
Blood flows freely in a playful script cowritten by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, which nods affectionately to hoary horror tropes in impeccably staged set pieces that reference crucifixes, coffins, sunlight and mirror reflections for jump scares and giggles.
Weir scored top grades in the title role of Matilda: The Musical and here, she is monstrously entertaining, practising her ballet pirouettes and humming Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake before she drains terrified prey of glossy crimson liquor.
The cast sink their teeth into predominantly likeable-yet-doomed characters, who are destined to lose more than their dignity after a close encounter with Abigail’s gnashers. Dinner is served.