Ready or Not

The simplest pleasures are sometimes the best pleasures. Why complicate things if you can enjoy something easy. Look at all those fucking man-children with their fancy scotch or cigars or bitter beers who think they can fill that deep black hole at the center of their existence with fake interest in sophistimacated shit. They’ve tied their entire self-worth to their ability to hijack conversations and ramble on about how expensive their taste is. It doesn’t matter if you want to hear about it; they’ve got to talk or they have no reason to live.

I’m satisfied with grain liquor, 99-cent aerosol paint cans and Four Loko; if I could find cheaper highs, I’d be fine with them, too. Hell, why would I want to complicate what makes me happy? Why would I want to learn more if the only value of that knowledge was in having to spend more to satisfy myself?

I get the sense the folks who made Ready or Not are with me. Why overcomplicate something when you don’t have to? I don’t know if this movie is a horror or thriller; it may be both. It’s gory, for sure, if you consider a woman stopping a fall by using a fresh bullet hole in her hand to catch herself on rusty nail gory. I do. But, hell, I also consider bloody noses gory, or the mere possibility of a bloody nose. One time my nose felt wet and I thought it was bleeding so I fainted. I woke up an hour later having almost choked to death on snot.

Ready or Not, horror maybe, cooks and it’s funny in morbid ways. It’s the work of people who simply want to entertain without pretense, bullshit, horseshit or dogshit. There may be a little subtext about how the rich are different, but at least that’s funny. I always thought they were different because they could afford to hire people to brush their teeth, not because they sacrificed goats.

Samara Weaving plays Grace, a former orphan about to marry into an old-money family full of fuck-ups and weirdos. They made their fortune selling board games and it affords them a massive, byzantine old mansion. The kind with secret doors and corridors, halls, old weapons, big game taxidermy, and rooms just for music or books. In Mrs. Filthy and my basement apartment, the books and music are all in the same room, which is also where we keep our toilet, sink, a turtle in a terrarium, a stuffed owl and my autographed poster of the Candy Bottoms classic Ram-ho: Fist Blood. It’s not Candy’s autograph, it’s mine. I just got super excited after seeing that movie.

The stage is set, then: Creepy giant mansion. Not an original locale, for sure, but time tested and like a Hitachi wand in a convent, used often because it gets the damn job done. The family has the big house and all the money because a long, long ago ancestor started his game business after a deal with a surrogate of the devil named Mr. LeBail. That deal had conditions, some mortal fine print that would cause many deaths. Sort of signing a lease for a Hyundai.

The deal is that whenever someone joins the family, as Grace just has, she must play a game selected by the ghost of LeBail. It could be checkers or darts or Duck, Duck, Goose. But if the ghost picks Hide and Seek, all hell breaks loose. The bride must hide and the family must find and sacrifice her before dawn or they will die.

Ready or Not’s writers and directors make no apologies for a backstory that’s as hard to swallow as a horse tranquilizer (which, actually, aren’t as difficult to swallow as everyone says – the hard part is prying them out of the horse’s mouth). That’s because, like a can Four Loko Watermelon, they deliver the good shit as efficiently as possible. Sure, it’s harsh. Sure, it’s raw, but it gets you there.

So many turdfests featuring men in tights, monsters and horror movies fuck it all up: they spend so much God damn time trying to justify the ridiculous. Those movies stop being about what the audience wants and becomes all about some fucking hack writer trying to flex his pop psychology muscles and make the ghost of Joseph Campbell proud. They’re like the scotch connoisseur talking just to know they're still alive.

Hell, audiences pay to be at the movies. We don’t need an earnest hour explaining why a dude dresses in tights, or some bad science mumbo jumbo to justify monsters. We want monsters because we want shit destroyed.

Ready or Not delivers exactly what it sets out to: homicidal maniacs chasing an unprepared young woman through a creepy mansion. Not original in premise, not impressive in character definition, and the dialog ain’t particularly good, but it’s still damn fucking fine in execution and detail.

Grace starts out as a blank, a woman giddy to be marrying into a storied family. But, as people with guns, crossbows, poisons and battle axes chase her, she gets tougher and more determined to make it out alive. She takes more beatings than Ash in Evil Dead 2, her wedding dress going from white to black. Her hand shot, her back ripped open, her face pummeled a few times. But, as the Harelip used to always say after coming back from turning a five-dollar trick in the alley, “You should see the other guy.”

Speaking of Evil Dead, tis movie owes a shitload to Sam Raimi because its as self-aware as any of his movies. It's smart enough to know it's treading well worn ground, and smart enough to know how to use that to its advantage by tripping up our expectations.

Ready or Not doesn’t really flesh anyone out other than Grace, and their motivations can sometimes be a little squishy. That’s fine. Weaving is worth rooting for. She does a hell of a job with a script that mostly has her reacting to bad things by saying “Fuck,” or “shit.” I won’t surprise anyone by telling you she survives, but her path to survival has her punch a kid, escape a pit where the family keeps its sacrificial goats and chop the head off a maid with a dumbwaiter.

The one thing I won’t tell you is whether LeBail’s curse is real. All I’ll say is that the family is unhappy to see the sun rise with Grace still alive. And they are still unhappy a couple minutes later when the sun shines in on them as they cower like vampires who forgot to go to bed.

I’m giving Ready or Not Four Fingers because it’s fun. It’s like a high-gravity malt liquor. It has no pretense, it doesn’t spend hours justifying its existence. It’s there for one reason and it does it well. And that’s a hell of a lot more fun than listening to some fat guy with a beard tell you every reason why I’m drinking the wrong beer.