Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) should make us grateful that director duo Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin are done futzing around in the Scream franchise. Cut out the take-or-leave-it-but-mostly-leave-it Scream (2022) and Scream VI from their directorial filmographies, and you’ve got Abigail and two Ready or Nots making a solid case for these guys – once known by the moniker Radio Silence – being the new kings of not-so-elevated horror movies what make us guffaw. The first Ready or Not precluded the wave of eat-the-rich stories that have been so popular lately, which dulls the sequel’s pointy satirical lance a bit, but Here I Come boasts an impressively committed performance from the ever-lovin’ new scream queen Samara Weaving, and enough of its makers’ wit and style to keep it viable.
The Gist: ONE-SENTENCE RECAP: You may recall that the first Ready or Not found Grace (Weaving) being hunted by her new secret-Satanist in-laws, but turning the tables and slaughtering them all the while wearing her lovely lacy wedding dress. Here I Come finds her in the immediate aftermath, still in the dress, still caked head-to-toe with other people’s drying blood, her ex’s family’s mansion in flames behind her. She lights a cig but then passes out and is loaded into an ambulance and defibbed then wakes up in the hospital cuffed to the bed and facing arson and murder charges. Well, shit. Making everything more complicated, her estranged younger sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) walks in the room. “I’m still your emergency contact,” Faith reminds Grace, before they get into airing out the dirty laundry from their old baggage, an act that will take the entire movie to complete, in between gory slayings and a delightful running gag in which they get splattered with blood when people spontaneously combust.
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, David Cronenberg runs the entire world, which ain’t such a terrible proposition, is it? He plays Danforth, who can make a phone call and then watch the results on CNN as they report on a cease fire in a war occurring half the planet away. Thus kicks off an amusing exposition dump outlining how the world’s richest people are all Satan worshippers who belong to a secret society led by Mr. Le Bail, who’s actually the demon Belial, and who crowns the most powerful human on the planet via convoluted bloodsport. Since Grace killed her rich-ass in-laws, Earth’s most elite squillionaire families must agree to hunt her sorta like British Royalty to a fox, with the winner killer earning the high seat of the occult council. Of course, it’ll be a hide-and-seek game like in the first movie, and it’ll play out on the Danforth’s sprawling country club estate. There are rules we won’t bother to reiterate – the most important one is, the hunters can’t kill each other – but suffice to say, if you break one, you spontaneously combust in a burst of deep-red gore.
All this is explained by Satan’s lawyer (Elijah Wood), who also doubles as a Satanic priest, something I found rather amusing. He assembles the hunters, who include the Danforth heirs/siblings Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar exclamation point!) and Titus (The Pitt Emmy winner Shawn Hatosy), Ignacio (Nestor Carbonell), Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng) and brothers Madhu (Varun Siranga) and Viraj (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), along with a smattering of their comic-relief family members. And so our bickering sisses Grace – who finds herself back in the same shredded wedding dress, with no time for a fresh laundering – and Faith get to work avoiding being killed, killing right back and mending their relationship, roughly in that order. Oh, and sighing deeply after they look like they stood in front of a crimson-corn-syrup sprinkler when the other dumbass characters end up spontaneously combusting, a joke that never ceases to tickle your inner sicko.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Most Dangerous Game gets a comedy treatment via The Purge, The Hunt and Sam Raimi. Oh, and there’s a moment here that sure seems inspired by one of the most famously stomach-churning sequences from RoboCop, and one can do far, far worse than making an indirect reference to that all-timer.
Performance Worth Watching: Weaving has honed her horror-comedy chops to a fine point via The Babysitter movies, Azrael and the Ready or Nots, to the point where there’s no one else we’d rather see wearing that not AGAIN face expressing deep annoyance after she’s once again utterly drenched with blood. She often and effectively acts with her eyes, widening them in a manner that simultaenously reflects the ongoing trauma and comedy of a situation. She has a gift.
Sex And Skin: No time for any of that!
Our Take: By amplifying the character (and therefore body) count, Ready or Not 2 manages to render diminishing returns not too terribly diminishing. Enough time has passed since the first film to make the second go-round modestly refreshing conceptually, despite it being yet another flurry of withering potshots at morally dubious rich people, the comedy of which has yet to fade, since the real-life versions of these assholes continue their attempts to murder us average folk with antihumanist policy, war and the Oppenheimerism of AI. There’s nothing deeper to this film than watching an everywoman type get seduced by a life of privilege only to be victimized by that privilege, and fight back with an appropriate degree of viciousness. For the sake of survival, mind you, not vengeance. It’s crucial to split that hair.
And that’s about as “elevated” as Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin’s brand of horror gets. Beelzebub bless ’em for not traumacoring us to death, although there’s just enough of The Horror Of It All in Weaving’s eyes to give the comedy cloud a darkish lining and a smidgen of emotional depth. That’s not at all the emphasis here, though – the Ready or Nots aim to entertain with some back-to-basics carnage-heavy action and a loosey-goosey plot, all held together with enough tension to keep us from getting bored.
Not everything makes narrative sense, the pace sags a bit in the middle and the jokes have about a 66.6 percent hit rate (see what I did there?), and despite the inevitable and hacky irony-drenched deployment of an ’80s glop-pop Billboard hit – Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” sigh – the movie still significantly surpasses baseline expectations for horror sequels. It’s simply enjoyable to watch the filmmakers and their game-for-it cast execute within their wheelhouse and not strive for anything more than some inspired gory gags ‘n’ kills.
Our Call: No need to hide under the bed from this horror sequel. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
