Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Given the film's premise - a blushing bride is pursued by evil billionaires participating in a satanic ceremony, this time joined by her younger sister - you might be forgiven for thinking that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is acquainted with prolonged instances of jeopardy. This isn't really the case, the film's tonal dimension is much absurd and comedic. Scenes track towards clipped punchlines here rather than take the time to construct excruciating tensions that terminate on a retributive release valve. Samara Weaving's Grace, the winner of Ready or Not's previous attempt to curry favour with the literal devil, takes the majority of her persecution in her stride; soaking up an incredible amount of punishment that, a frenzied finale aside, isn't really turned back against her tormentors. It's not that a protagonist wallowing in sadism is definitively the preferred destination when considering this kind of highly personalised danger but, if you want an audience to consider something like a dimensionality in your characters, it's perhaps best if they respond, proportionally, to such slights. With that in mind, Kathryn Newton as Faith, Grace's sister (the actress looking distractingly similar to Virgina Madsen when wearing her hair up), is largely used as a substitute body for these absurd elites to work out their ongoing frustrations with an uncooperative and unkillable Grace. The slow-motion used to describe the pummeling that Newton's character is subjected to by Shawn Hatosy's Epstein class weirdo is particularly off-putting, suggesting that some level of decision maker on this film really enjoys seeing beautiful blonde women hissing blood through their pearlescent teeth. 

Ready or Not

It's difficult to not immediately compare Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not to Adam Wingard's 2011 stunner You're Next. Both films feature an Australian actress (both veterans of the never-ending seaside soap opera Home and Away) racing around a massive mansion pursued by murderous in-laws armed with crossbows. In her Wingard directed showcase, Sharni Vinson had to cope with shrieking subordinates and an ever-changing landscape of intergenerational loyalties. Samara Weaving's Grace is less encumbered, obliged to slink around an unfamiliar household while still wearing the remains of her wedding dress. Where Vinson got to tap into an expertise for mangling (one that no film since has expected of the actress), Weaving instead runs an emotional gamut, scrunching up her makeup model good looks as she forces her shredded gown though a succession of shocks and snares. Of the two, Ready or Not proves to be the lighter proposition. Its characters are caricatured and confused rather than sexually deviant trust fund children who climb all over each other while their mother rots inches from their rut. As well, and despite a large cast of bumbling oafs, Ready or Not does not adopt the tick 'em off structure that so electrified You're Next either. Grace's initiations into the pacts that underline the fortunes of her husband's parlour game obsessed family are instead centered around a harried avoidance. Ready or Not then greedily holds onto its ingrates and cack-handed buffoons, denying Grace a piecemeal vengeance just so her tormentors can suddenly ripen during the thwarted ritual that closes the film.

Scream VI

It seems churlish to criticise a Scream sequel for being so relentlessly self-referential. After all, the entire series is built out of its characters' acute awareness that the slasher movies they have experienced as viewers can now be used as ammunition against the costumed assailants trying to stab them. The frazzled lectures of each film's terminally aware film freak then function as pitch meetings: the fiction itself speaking to its audience about how they can expect events to be framed from that point on. They either lay out all the twists and turns, with an ironic inflection, or firmly establish a daunting step-by-step that will then be subverted. By Scream VI though, co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, this sustained commitment to metatextual reproduction has transformed into navel-gazing. Despite a New York setting, this is a strangely routine sequel. An instalment happy to churn, adoringly, through the sights and sounds of its own immediate predecessors rather than, say, the 1970s and 1980s horror films that defined the (by now long forgotten) tape rental era. So while Wes Craven's Scream 2 might have featured a sequence based around screenwriter Kevin Williamson's memories of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Scream VI simply regurgitates the invincible supporting cast and university setting of its own ancient ancestor, Scream 2.