Alisha Weir in Abigail
ABIGAIL
We frequently rail against the creators of movie trailers, given how many previews are misleading or vague or, as happens most frequently, determined to give away every nanosecond of the plot. But you've also gotta feel bad for these folks sometimes. What is a marketing team to do when the element guaranteed to get butts in seats – in truth, the film's entire reason for being – is the one element that shouldn't be spoiled in advance?
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Abigail is about a 12-year-old ballerina vampire. If you've seen the trailer for this tongue-in-cheek horror thriller, you already know this. Heck, you know it even if you've only seen the movie's 30-second spot on broadcast TV, as the cutie-pie blood-sucker bares her fangs before the commercial is two-thirds over. That's why it was rather astonishing to watch Abigail in full and discover that not only does it take more than 45 minutes for the tiny dancer to vamp it up, but that the time beforehand is largely spent with our victims-to-be arguing over who might be responsible for the escalating viscera. Could it be one of the six kidnappers hired to abduct the girl in exchange for a $50 million ransom? Could it be their mysterious employer, considering this serene, dapper fellow is played by Giancarlo Esposito? Could it be the child's unseen father – whom we learn is a psychotic gangster – or one of his cronies? You want to shout at the screen: No, you dolts! It's the ballerina! Haven't you been seeing the trailers since January like the rest of us?!
It's hard to say whether this campy fright flick, written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, would've significantly benefited from Abigail's undead condition being kept a secret; the one-note stereotypes, generically profane dialogue, and unsurprising “Boo!” effects weren't exactly indicative of great times ahead. Yet because almost half the movie is spent getting to the “twist” that nearly every patron will be aware of before entering the theater, you'll likely find yourself inordinately antsy even if you're enjoying the rogue's gallery of mismatched kidnappers.
Dan Stevens, trying out an unconvincing Noo Yawk accent, is thoroughly annoying, and it's easy to forget about Will Catlett, whose character description likely stopped at “former Marine.” The others, however, are a lot more fun to be around. Lead Melissa Barrera comes the closest to suggesting actual depth, while Kathryn Newton and Kevin Durand provide chuckles as the most obviously dimwitted of the sextet. Meanwhile, seeing Angus Cloud on-screen in the wake of his 2023 passing made me miss the Euphoria co-star all over again. He doesn't stretch beyond what he did as Fez, but I'm not sure he ever needed to; even in his non-role here, the actor radiates empathy and soulfulness, and demonstrates his knack for finding genuine laughs in mumbly disengagement. Cloud was one of a kind, yet while I relished his presence in Abigail, I wasn't at all looking forward to seeing him inevitably turned into monster meat.
While connoisseurs of goo will find more to admire than others – I, for one, didn't expect quite so many characters to implode – the film's sole nod toward invention comes from a distracting rule change, as it turns out that newly infected vampires are miraculously cured if the creature who bit them dies. (This blatant cheat seems included only for a climactic reversal that, weirdly, never happens.) But the only true reason to sit through Abigail is Abigail herself, with 14-year-old Irish performer Alisha Weir as excellent here as she was playing the heroine of 2022's Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical. I'd say you have to see her juicy transition from traumatized abductee to pirouetting sociopath to believe it, but you know … . You've already seen it.
THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE
A spy-themed action comedy as British as its unwieldy title, director/co-writer Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is for fans of Inglourious Basterds who would've liked Tarantino's film more if it had less threat, less wit, and no Christoph Waltz. But apparently, it's also for viewers such as the patron who exited my screening ahead of me and said to his companion, completely without irony, “They don't make 'em like that anymore.” This is a cliché generally reserved for movies set in the 1930s or '40s that boast easily recognizable good and bad guys, a clear moral stance, a measure of historical fact, and a bunch of good-looking, mildly amusing caricatures for whom you know no significant harm will ever come. He may ramp up the violence more than the they-don't-make-'em-like-that-anymore clientele is used to, but Ritchie, here, is absolutely working in a register of hearty escapism for the CBS crowd. And even someone with no patience for this sort of thing (ahem, me) may find TMoUW easy enough to sit through, despite actual enjoyment remaining stubbornly out of reach.
Inspired by a 2014 Damien Lewis nonfiction and the 2016 declassification of certain World War II documents, Ritchie's latest finds Winston Churchill (an egregiously miscast Rory Kinnear) recruiting a team of lowlifes and hooligans to destroy a Nazi U-boat, a mission that goes slightly awry when the cabal has to instead steal the U-boat. Although there's plenty of surrounding narrative decoration, that's pretty much it ... and I pretty much gave up on the film halfway through, when one of the ungentlemanly gentlemen found himself in an impossible fix and still managed to kill a trio of Germans bare-handed without getting a scratch on his jacket. Ritchie's Nazis are the Nazis of many moviegoers' dreams – buffoonish blowhards whose gunfire can't hit the broad side of a barn – and it was frankly exhausting to watch our consistently unruffled assemblage led by a typically blah Henry Cavill score kill after kill and victory upon victory. Yet there were at least a few perks along the way.
Those handsome blanks Henry Golding and Alex Pettyfer seem more alert than in roles past. The charismatic Elza González looks ravishing in her Cleopatra costume. Alan Ritchson, despite his Danish dialect being about as believable as Brad Pitt's Basterd-ized Italian, adds some frisky physical humor. And everyone involved genuinely seems to be having fun – even the reliably cranky Til Schweiger (Tarantino's Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz!), whose Nazi psychopath is a cuddly kitten compared to Waltz's. All told, there's nothing entirely objectionable about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. I just wish that weren't also the reason so many people appear to like it.
SASQUATCH SUNSET
As written by David Zellner and directed by him and his brother Nathan (who also co-stars), Sasquatch Sunset is unmistakably a feat of some kind. But what the hell is it? There's really no narrative to speak of – it's simply a year in the lives of four forest-dwelling Bigfeet as they eat, sleep, empty their bowels, satisfy their libidos, and eventually, mildly, contend with the inevitable encroachment of human beings, none of whom we ever see. The Zellners' movie somewhat brought to mind Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire, the Oscar-winning prehistoric adventure starring Ron Perlman, Rae Dawn Chong, and Twin Peaks' Everett McGill. It more strongly brought to mind the recent area release of Hundreds of Beavers, which found hundreds of adults engaging in slapstick shenanigans while donning theme-park plushie costumes. That indie at least had a goal: to make us laugh. I'm not sure what the goal of Sasquatch Sunset is, except maybe to prove that the Zellners can out-weird any other filmmakers out there, and can do it with a healthy dose of star power … not that their stars are in any way recognizable.
Among the quartet of human/simian hybrids we follow here, Nathan Zellner plays the mini-tribe's feral, horny, supremely stupid leader, and Christophe Zajac-Denek plays the most diminutive and presumably youngest Bigfoot, a creature who “talks” to his hand like it was Danny's Tony in The Shining, or Shari Lewis' Lambchop without the sock covering. The other two, however, are portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, and it's in their casting that the Zellners' feature takes on the qualities of a self-congratulatory stunt. Neither actor's involvement is necessarily a shock. Eisenberg routinely gravitates toward unusual, risky material, and Keough, who's a fantastically magnetic and confident performer, has Elvis money, and can consequently take on whatever wackadoodle project she wants. Yet as soulful as Keough's nonverbal expressions are, and as sweet as it is to watch Eisenberg's Sasquatch attempt to count the stars before quitting because he can't count past three, the actors are distracting presences, because they continually remind you of the degree of difficulty involved. You spend less time engaged in the characters' journeys than wondering why, in God's name, Keough and Eisenberg would subject themselves to this ordeal under such (admittedly phenomenal) heavy costumes and latex makeup. The only answer that makes sense is: because they trusted the Zellners' vision. Which would be a perfectly acceptable rationale if, as an audience, that vision were in any way apparent.
Let's be clear: Despite arguments to the contrary, the Sasquatch is still a creature of folklore and mythology, no more “real” that the flying saucers that reportedly hover over Area 51. So is the Zellners' film meant to be a slice-of-life regarding how these beings, if they indeed exist, live their daily lives? Is it a lament for their apparent demise and subsequent near-invisibility? (Over the course of the movie, our cadre of four protagonists will be whittled down to two, albeit with a new recruit showing up before the finale.) Are we meant to laugh at their survival-based actions? To pity them? And what are we to make of the tribe's first contact with a paved road, where they shriek, urinate, defecate, and all but enact the famed scene in The Simpsons' “Cape Feare” episode where Bart races from one end of the ship to another and finally ends his treks with a resigned “Oh yeah”? Are our hairy heroes, in discovering this modern miracle, scared? Angry? Threatened? Merely confused? As impressive as the grunting, loping performers are, they're in service to a narrative, and a film, that doesn't appear to know what to do with them beyond simply letting them be. That works for David Attenborough. It works far less well in Sasquatch Sunset, which, despite a killer climactic image, turns its nature study into a joke with no discernible punchline.
