Ready or Not review - bloody awful

Equal measures class system satire and Scream or Saw genre knockoff, Ready or Not is entirely appalling, except perhaps to those forgiving hipsters in the crowd who will view its ineptitude as some deliberate "meta" statement all its own.

Nonsensical on virtually every level and as badly acted as it is written and directed, this celluloid amalgam of comedy and horror wears its coolness on a distinctly blood-spattered sleeve: my sympathies go out to all involved. 

The fast-rising Australian actress-model Samara Weaving (pictured below) stars as the about-to-be-married Grace, who has no idea that her beyond-creepy inlaws make The Addams Family look like pillars of normalcy. (One or two of Grace's newfound relations are here given haircuts intended to evoke their iconic forbears.) And coming from virtually no family of her own, Grace very mistakenly accepts her husband Alex's extended brood as the family she never had, and so what if marriage into the Le Domas clan involves the kind of eyebrow-raising initiation that might prompt most sensible brides to run a mile? Lovers of games, the Le Domas assemblage quickly suggest a round of hide-and-seek, only for Grace to realise fairly early on that this apparent lark represents an armed fight to the finish: the weaponry on view includes guns, a crossbow, and both a literal and figurative battle axe. And though Alex (a rather wet Mark O'Brien) makes vague moves towards assisting the woman he purports to love, before long he succumbs to the gathering anarchy of an assemblage presided over by a scarily gaunt Andie MacDowell as a matriarch in extremis. Along for the grand guignol ride are Adam Brody as a marginally less bloodthirsty, drink-sodden brother and Nicky Guadagni as Aunt Helene – every family has one – here coiffed to resemble no-one so much as Emma Rice. 

Commentators in some overenthusiastic quarters have taken Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy's script as a kind of encoded feminist statement, an assertion requiring quite a lot of pre-film alcoholic lubrication to pass muster. As it is, this collaboration between co-directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett honours any number of antecedents (thirty seconds of Rosemary's Baby is more compelling than anything on view here), while itself catering to an age that values mayhem and noise, regardless of whether those arrive grounded in any reality whatsoever, however alternative. The audience, needless to say, cheers on every new bout of carnage, all but ensuring the film's status as a late-night cult classic, complete with a public sure to show up dressed to match their favourite malefactor. I can hardly wait. 

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