kathryn newton

Abigail (2024)

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The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigail reported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand.  Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there.  No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series.  Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background.  The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year.  The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.

To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu.  The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father.  She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time.  Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth.  The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first.  There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby. 

In short, Abigail is corporate slop.  The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage.  I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect.  Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be.  Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them.  At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one.  That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.

-Brandon Ledet

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

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Tim Burton was the very first director I recognized as an auteur, long before I knew the word.  Growing up with Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in constant rotation made Burton’s ghoulish subversion of suburban utopias as easily brand-recognizable as Disney’s white-puff VHS cases.  Or so I thought.  My developing baby brain would often confuse off-brand titles like Casper, Coneheads, and Addams Family Values for genuine Burton films, something I wouldn’t clear up until I matured enough to pay attention to the credits.  Had the new Cole Sprouse zomcom Lisa Frankenstein been released 30 years ago, I’m sure I would’ve confused it for a Burton film as well.  The title indicates a mashup of classic creature-feature horror with cutesy late-80s Lisa Frank kitsch, but in practice it mashes up the cutesy-ghoulish sensibilities of opposing suburban auteurs Tim Burton & John Hughes.  There’s nothing especially new to be mined from that heavily nostalgic genre blending—especially not in a world where Heathers was around to do that work in real time—but there’s always a fresh batch of developing-baby-brain audiences out there who need their own intro to this stuff, and they could do a lot worse (mainly by watching modern era Burton).

Kathryn Newton steps in to replace Winona Ryder as the starter-pack goth girl inspo protagonist, the titular Lisa.  Adjusting to life at a new school with a new family, following the violent death of her mother, Lisa has become a quiet loner with a chip on her shoulder and an aesthetic addiction to black lace.  Armed to the fangs with Diablo Cody dialogue, she refers to her peers as “skeezers” & “beer sluts”, while thinking of herself as belonging to a special class of “people with feelings” who listen to college radio.  The only person she’ll open herself up to is a Victorian corpse played by Cole Sprouse, whom she initially meets by chatting with his gravestone and eventually resurrects from that grave through a freak, supernatural rainstorm.  The walking, grunting corpse becomes a kind of safe boytoy figurine she can confide in and play dress-up with . . . until her self-assigned outsider status gets out of control and the unlikely pair go on a killing spree.  They justify the violence by collecting functional body parts for the rotting Creature, but it’s really just an excuse to dispose of the poor souls at the top of Lisa’s personal shit list: her icy stepmother, her handsy would-be date rapist, the bad-boy crush who turns down her own advances, etc.  In short, it’s wish-fulfillment fantasy for the angstiest people alive: gothy suburban teens.

I’m no longer a gothy suburban teen myself, but I like to think I’m still young enough to remember the appeal a movie like this can hold.  One of the smartest touches of Cody’s script is the way it allows Lisa to be morally in the wrong, but in a relatable way that recalls the audience’s own lingering teen angst (while also, again, recalling Veronica Sawyer’s).  First-time director and promising young nepo-baby Zelda Williams also appeals to an older crowd in her aesthetic nods to Suburban Outsider ephemera from the past, including Burtonized dress-up montages, Smashing Pumpkins-style homages to Georges Méliès, 80s-goth needle drops, and a soul-deep fear of the tanning bed.  Unfortunately, though, the movie’s not quite zippy enough to compete with the decades of suburban horror comedies that precede it, from cultural juggernauts like Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to VHS-era curios like Bob “The Madman” Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back.  Lisa Frankenstein is thankfully playful enough to avoid becoming the next victim of Age Gap Discourse despite the century’s difference between its romantic leads, which is good news for the teens who haven’t yet seen its dozens of obvious predecessors.  It’s just not funny enough to overcome its lax editing & scoring, which allow too many of its zinger punchlines to rot in dead air. 

This movie’s undeniably cute, but there’s something missing in it that pushes greatness just out of its reach.  Maybe it needed a tighter, zippier edit.  Maybe it needed the Danny Elfman touch that made Burton’s early triumphs sing.  Or maybe I just needed to be 13 again to fully love it.  With my 40s swiftly approaching on the horizon, decades after I’ve needed gateway-horror Burton titles to introduce me to the basic concepts of cinematic style, I’m okay with just liking it.

-Brandon Ledet

Blockers (2018)

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Although the recent coming-out melodrama Love, Simon had only a (very) minor impact at the box office, its significance as a safe, middle-of-the-road queer narrative within the larger mainstream filmmaking picture has been discussed at length in nearly all critical circles. An entire episode of the bonkers teen soap opera Riverdale was even dedicated to Love, Simon’s cultural impact on queer visibility, which seem outsized considering the sanitized, post-John Green mediocrity promised in its ads. The consensus argument seems to be that Love, Simon is important because of that mediocrity, that gay teens deserve their own bland popcorn fluff just as much as anyone else. It’s pointless to argue against that perspective, but for anyone who’s not especially interested in that kind of safe, sexless teen romance no matter what its orientation, I’d like to offer the high school sex comedy Blockers as potential counterprogramming. In Blockers, sex is exactly as fun, stupid, silly, gross, and awkward as it should be in a high school-set comedy. The film shifts away from the bro-friendly humor of the teen sex comedy’s American Pie & Porky’s past by approaching the subject from a femme, sex-positive perspective. It even has a remarkably deft coming-out story built into its DNA that matches the sentimentality promised by Love, Simon without the accompanying sexless schmaltz. I don’t mean to suggest that makes Blockers a better film by default or that Love, Simon doesn’t deserve the critical attention it’s being afforded. I’m just saying that if the ads for Love, Simon left you cold, Blockers might just be the trashy teen sex comedy antidote you’re looking for. It might even satisfy your craving for a modernized John Hughes emotional journey in the process.

Set over the course of a single night (prom night!), Blockers details the bungled execution of a “sex pact” between three teen friends who all plan to lose their virginity in tandem. Because they’re young women and not the typical Apatow-modeled dudes who usually helm these pictures, this plan was met with extreme resistance from their snooping parents. Leslie Mann is finally given to something to do for once as a stressed-out Alpha Mom who wants to protect her daughter form repeating her worst mistakes. John Cena, appearing in Pure Dad cargo shorts, is the typical overprotective father who’s terrified of his teen daughter’s sexuality despite his better judgment. Ike Barinholtz is the most nuanced of the three. He generally disagrees with the other parents’ sex-negative paranoia, but also wants to protect his own daughter, who he knows to be a closeted lesbian, from committing herself to a traumatizing heterosexual experience just to feel like she belongs. The heightened delusions & deranged coddling impulses that torment these parents are the butt of the film’s ultimate joke; their fear of young female sexuality is an eternally embarrassing punchline. Meanwhile, the three damsels they attempt to rescue (Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon, and MVP Geraldine Viswanathan, who steals every scene she’s afforded) are doing just fine navigating all the awkward, grotesque, humiliating, and absurdly silly pitfalls that accompany pangs of teenage horniness, as countless dudes in losing-your-virginity comedies have in the past. The blatant double standard in question is extensively & explicitly challenged in the film’s dialogue, but Blockers is rarely outright didactic in its sex-positive politics. Moralizing about the policing of femme teen sexuality is instead allowed to be a background flavor that enhances, but does not overpower the usual gross-out gags that steer the genre: butt-stuff, drug-trips, puke, unwelcome nudity – all the standard hallmarks of a post-John Waters mainstream comedy.

Like with most teen movies, the three girls’ personalities are visually established early on by their bedroom décor. The main girl’s bedroom is not as distinctly coded as her two besties’, but it does prominently feature a clue as to where the movie’s heart lies: a Sixteen Candles poster. Both Love, Simon and Blockers are chasing the John Hughes model of capturing the modern teen zeitgeist in a single picture and it’s lovely to see that they both feel the need to include prominent queer narratives in that mission (even if they happen to follow a coming-out misery pattern we’ve seen exhaustively repeated onscreen before). Blockers separates itself from Love, Simon in the open acknowledgment that sex & romance are both hilarious & disgusting, which is always going to be the more attractive route for me as an audience. I don’t think its own mold-breaking challenge to the gendered politics of the typical high school sex comedy are exactly revolutionary. if nothing else, The To Do List already delivered an excellent femme subversion of the trope to a tepid critical response in 2013 and 2014’s Wetlands has set the bar impossibly high for what a gross-out femme sex comedy can achieve. Blockers is a damn fun addition to that tide-change, though, one that’s surprisingly emotionally effective in its own continuation of a John Hughes tradition. Just like how critics are calling for a wave of normalized queer narratives in the Love, Simon vein, I’d love to live in a world where we’re afforded at least one of these gross-out femme sex comedies a year. Continuing to keep prominent queer characters as part of that tradition would also be ideal (which is admittedly something you don’t get in my pet favorites The Bronze or The To Do List), which is partly why Blockers is a shockingly well-considered precedent for how the teen sex comedy genre can remain both modernly relevant and true to its gross-out roots.

-Brandon Ledet