Ready or Not: Gleeful gore to come

Ready or Not (2019) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for violence, gore, drug use, relentless profanity and buckets o' blood
By Derrick Bang

Fans of dark-dark-dark humor — who can work up a macabre chuckle amidst gore, gouts of blood and the occasional decapitation — are guaranteed to have a great time with this little chiller.

Concealed — and as yet undetected — behind a bed, Grace (Samara Weaving) has just
discovered the lethal details of the "game" her new husband Alex (Mark O'Brien)
insisted that she join.

The timid and squeamish — which is to say, everybody else — are advised to steer veryclear.

Ready or Not comes from the gleefully demented minds of a filmmaking trio collectively known as Radio Silence: co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, and executive producer Chad Villella. Their previous big-screen efforts haven’t made much noise — V/H/S, Devil’s Due and Southbound are best left forgotten — but this one likely will elevate their cred.

As well it should. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillet have made the most of a sharply honed script by Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy, which develops a simple premise into an exciting, 95-minute thrill ride. The execution may be gruesome, but there’s no denying the edge-of-the-seat suspense.

That “simple premise” will look familiar to those with fond memories of 2017’s Get Out, because the opening act is pretty much identical, albeit with a gender reversal: young adult brings lover home to “meet the folks,” whereupon the unsuspecting newcomer discovers all manner of dangerous weirdness within the massive mansion walls.

Mind you, Ready or Not doesn’t have anywhere near the ingenious social subtext that brought Get Out’s Jordan Peele a well-deserved Academy Award for original screenplay … unless, perhaps, Busick and Murphy intend a satiric shot at the notion that the obscenely wealthy really arehopelessly out of touch. But that’s probably giving them too much credit. 

At best, Ready or Not is a guilty pleasure, and an unapologetic tip of the hat to the cheerfully grotesque excesses of France’s infamous Grand Guignol stage productions, with a literary nod toward Marlowe and Goethe.

We open on a wedding day, with humble Grace (Samara Weaving) brought by fiancé Alex (Mark O’Brien) to the immense estate owned by the parents from whom he has been estranged for many years. We initially wonder why he’d bother, given that so many of the arriving clan members seem related to the Addams Family, but — as Busick and Murphy carefully establish — everything happens for a reason.

Arrival: They're here!

Arrival (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.11.16

Michael Crichton’a The Andromeda Strain pretty much invented the modern sci-fi techno thriller, and it was made into a crackling 1971 thriller by director Robert Wise.

After confronting the alien spacecraft that has terrified the entire United States, linguist
Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are garbed in
protective haz-mat suits, prior to their first meeting with the ship's inhabitants.

The tone was pure procedural, with a gaggle of scientists researching and conferencing in labs, to determine why a highly lethal microorganism killed everybody in a small Arizona town, except for a geriatric Sterno addict and a relentlessly cranky baby.

Few films since then have successfully duplicated that formula, because it’s a difficult tightrope walk: too many talking heads, and the result is boring; too much contrivance and coincidence, and audiences roll their eyes in contemptuous disbelief.

Director Denis Villeneuve gets the balance just right with Arrival, easily one of the most intelligent “first contact” movies Hollywood ever has delivered. Scripter Eric Heisserer embraced the challenging assignment of adapting sci-fi author Ted Chiang’s  2000 Nebula Award-winning novella, and the result is impressively faithful: fascinating, clever and suspenseful, with an out-there finale certain to fuel debates as impassioned as those that greeted the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The story also boasts one of the most truly unusual alien cultures ever conceived, the depiction of which is likely to forever change most viewers’ perception and understanding of language.

Finally, the film is an uncomfortably timely reminder of the dangerous levels of nationalism and xenophobia currently running amok throughout this country and the globe, and the consequences of failing to recognize that — at the end of the day — we’re a single species sharing this planet, and that it behooves us to behave accordingly.

To cases, then:

Northeastern university professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an internationally respected linguist, is surprised one day to discover that her huge, entry-level language class is almost empty. The reason becomes clear as breaking news reports interrupt all radio and television broadcasts: A disturbingly large something has landed in a deserted Montana meadow.

Actually, “landed” is the wrong word; the semi-cylindrical object hovers about 20 feet off the ground.