A second helping of comic gore

  

     It has been seven years since the release of Ready or Not, a jokey, gory slice of horror that pitted a new bride (Samara Weaving) against wealthy in-laws intent on protecting their privilege. I hadn’t thought about the movie until I learned that a second helping was in the offing. I rewatched the original, and remembered why I enjoyed it while also recognizing that blood, gook, and fear aren’t everyone’s favorite popcorn seasonings.

    The same mini-review might apply to Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a movie in which co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett make good use of Weavings’ fierce determination and find reasonably clever ways to revive the Ready or Not strategy.

   Once again, Weaving's Grace must survive a deadly hunt in which she’s the prey, this time at the cruel behest of a fiendish cabal composed of sects vying to head a coalition of Satanic cultists who claim to control the world.

    And once again, Grace takes a beating that leaves her wounded, bloodied, and in bad need of a shower.

   Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett repeat the formula, adding gory flourishes and making enough references to the original to connect the two movies -- if not in plot, then in spirit. 

   A major addition involves providing Grace with a fellow sufferer, her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). Faith resents her older sister for fleeing to New York at the age of 18. Fifteen at the time, Faith was left in foster care.

     Forget the Le Domas family of the previous movie and glide past the movie’s devilish mumbo-jumbo. Focus instead on the brutal game played at a sprawling Connecticut  estate.

    The hunters compete to head the council, the governing body of the movie’s greedy Satan worshippers. Hunters must use weapons that were common during the period in which their forbearers joined the group. We're talking axes, pistols, bazookas, rifles, knives, and more.

      The large cast includes Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy as cunning siblings who want to rule the clans. They’re joined by an embittered woman (Maia Jae) who once was engaged to the man Grace married in the first installment. Other characters may be less well-drawn. Some don’t do much more than add to the body count.

      Elijah Wood signs on as The Lawyer, the character who defines the rules of the game, and horror master David Cronenberg makes an early appearance as the father of the twins.

      The simmering conflict between the sisters can feel  forced, and the blend of comedy and gore can’t help but feel familiar. An overstated grand finale of blood and exploding bodies serves as an icky exclamation point to the proceedings.

      One could slice and dice further, but as second helpings go, Here I Come proves a reliably amusing bloodbath, particularly for those who like their violent mayhem served with stinging comic twists.

Death-row interviews with Theodore Bundy

 

    In January of 1989, 42-year-old serial killer Theodore Bundy was executed in a Florida prison, having confessed to committing 30 homicides during the 1970s. Bundy's gruesome crimes need no further description here, but as a well-spoken, clean-cut killer, Bundy secured his place in the hierarchy of monstrous American crime figures. 

    I'd read enough about Bundy to approach No Man of God, a drama based on death-row interviews conducted by FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, with some misgiving.  Did we really need a deep dive into the mind of a criminal who already has commanded a lot of attention?

     Director Amber Sealey builds her movie around the interviews in which a sly, calculating Bundy (Luke Kirby) talks with Hagmaier (Elijah Wood). 

    Sealey's approach puts us in roughly the same position as Hagmaier. We’re constantly trying to evaluate Bundy as we search for clues to the question that haunts every serial-killer movie. Why did this person commit such terrible crimes? 

    Sealey opens the movie up a bit with news footage and breaks the claustrophobic prison mood with the late-picture introduction of an anti-capital punishment lawyer (Aleksa Palladino) who tries to stave off Bundy's execution.

     According to the movie, Focus on the Family evangelist James Dobson (Christian Clemenson) took some of Hagmaier's valuable interview time to conduct a final interview with Bundy just before his execution. Bundy told Dobson that hard-core pornography played a major role in twisting his mind toward evil.

    Hagmaier -- a Christian -- had no objection to Bundy's execution. He wanted to understand a serial killer. It was part of an early FBI effort to develop profiles of killers, a process depicted in Netflix’s compelling Mind Hunter series.

     Kirby isn't a dead-ringer for Bundy but he captures the mercurial way Bundy shifted moods, his desire to control, and his imagined superiority over ordinary mortals. He also conveys the intelligence that Bundy brought to the job of creating the character he sometimes seems to be constructing for Hagmaier's benefit.

    A youthful-looking Wood -- he's 40 -- wisely doesn't try to compete with Kirby. He makes Hagmaier a committed listener, a resolute and religious man who Bundy came to regard as a "friend." 

     Toward the end, Bundy agrees to take Hagmaier into the depths of his psyche. It's a powerful scene in which Kirby reveals what it was like for Bundy to commit one of his murders.

    Zac Efron played Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, director Joe Berlinger's foray into Bundy's world. Unlike Berlinger, Sealey doesn't dramatize Bundy's life as a killer. 

   When I engage with movies such as No Man of God, I ask myself why I'm watching and why I've watched other films like it. Perhaps it's because we never seem to get a handle on serial killing and never will.

    Many years ago I read an article in Newsweek in which a psychiatrist outlined shared characteristics he identified in most serial killers. He listed some, but qualified his remarks: For every serial killer's awful background, he could find someone with a worse personal history who never committed any crimes.

    Bundy, of course, didn't have a horrible childhood. He insisted that he had grown up in "a fine, solid Christian home." 

    Maybe mystery explains the fascination. We look for answers -- and we should. None may be forthcoming but that doesn't mean we're able to turn away.