Cert 18 Running time 95mins
Wedding night nerves are taken to the extreme in this riotous blood-soaked black comedy horror which guarantees a gory good time to go with your popcorn on a Friday night.
Former star of TV’s Home And Away, Australian actress Samara Weaving is the niece of the heavyweight actor and Lord of the Rings, Hugo Weaving, and she steps out of his shadow with a star-making performance as a far from blushing bride, Grace, whose big day ends with a most unexpected bang.
Weaving’s covered similar ground before in 2017’s US teen horror comedy, The Babysitter, and here is determined, smart and funny.
She needs to be as she’s put through an emotional and physical wringer which includes falling into a pit of animal corpses, and a scene with a nail is as skin-crawling as the one from Home Alone.
Having married into a hugely wealthy family who imagine her to be a “gold-digging whore”, tradition demands they all gather downstairs at midnight in their spooky mansion to play a game.
Randomly selecting a game of hide and seek, she initially fails to comprehend it’s lethal consequences, and while her new husband is distraught, her in-laws stalk the corridors armed with axes, crossbows, shotguns and a competitive attitude.
These blue bloods of US society are a bickering rabble of self-serving cocaine-addled alcoholics, and as deluded, degenerate and barking as any of their British counterparts could be.
Full of secret doors and passages, the CCTV is turned off and the house is on lockdown, while housemaids, the butler and even the dumb waiter get in on the action.
And Andie MacDowell channels Morticia Addams as the mother-in -law from hell, an elegant, charming and deadly matriarch who loves to smoke.
Funnier than many comedies and more tense, violent and gruesome than many horrors, it’s a death spasm of fun. And I mean it in a good way.
