Those under the impression that the meta hip-horror genre had crawled back into the grave with Scream 4 might find themselves experiencing déjà vu on watching Christopher B. Landon’s Happy Death Day. Mind, they won’t be alone in the feeling. If you’ve ever watched: Groundhog Day, Mean Girls, Halloween, Scooby-Doo, Clue, American Pie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or, indeed, Screams 1 to 4, this one’ll resurrect familiarity. As a chirpy take on the slasher genre – more playful than the Wes Craven send-ups – there’s a lot of fun to be had here but a feature of slightly less eclectic genre pickings would have been welcome.
Just one in the latest batch of names in the entertainment industry to be felled by their hitherto unknown depravities is the two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey. Horrific that it is to find an actor you’ve admired has ruined the lives of others – and, to a much lesser extent, tainted the memory of some terrific films – it is best to leave analysis to the opinion columns in such matters.
If watching A Bigger Splash was like climbing into a jacuzzi and discovering that it may contain a crab, Luca Guadagnino’s third chapter in his so-called trilogy of desire, Call Me By Your Name (which follows the former and I am Love before it), might be considered akin to climbing into said jacuzzi, finding it crab free, being handed a cornucopia of cool, Sicilian lemonade, and then having to remain as the water drains away. It may be la dolce vita, but love stings.
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