Reviews
‘Don’t Mess With Grandma’ Review – Home Invasion Goes Awry in Violent Comedy [FF 2024]
Home invasion films are a dime a dozen nowadays, with this year alone seeing the wide releases of The Strangers: Chapter One and Abigail. But surplus can often breed creativity, with filmmakers forced to seek innovative ways to make their films stand out from the pack. That’s just what Jason Krawczyk (He Never Died) does with Don’t Mess With Grandma, a gleefully violent comedy that has fun subverting various home invasion tropes.
While working for his company Trusted Trays, a meal delivery service that caters to the elderly, mild-mannered Jasper (Michael Jai White) also drives two hours outside of his hometown every night to do chores for his cantankerous grandmother Granna (Jackie Richardson). While fixing her bathroom sink one evening, Granna’s house falls victim to a home invasion by a ragtag group of bumbling thieves led by Stan (a nearly unrecognizable Billy Zane). Little do these masked burglars know that Jasper is a decorated marksman who will go to any lengths to protect his Granna, including working overtime to ensure that she never finds out the invasion is even happening.
Krawczyk, who also penned the screenplay, subverts expectations by eschewing the terror from the home invasion in favor of a gleefully violent comedy anchored by a very game White, who proves himself to be as good a comedian as he is a martial artist (though this should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Black Dynamite). There is a distinct lack of suspense to the proceedings, as there is never any point where the burglars have the upper hand on the situation. This forces Krawczyk to put a heavier emphasis on comedy, which reduces the film to a(n albeit humorous) series of gags. There is a slight mystery as to why the burglars specifically targeted Granna, but it’s just that: slight.
This means that the success of the film relies solely on its effectiveness as a comedy, and Grandma earns solid marks in that department. It is at its funniest during Jasper’s dialogue-driven interactions with Stan’s crew, who shoot out as many social niceties as they do bullets. There hasn’t been a group of criminals this incompetent since the Wet Bandits in Home Alone, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of their misguided attempts to enter Granna’s house (a running gag involving Jasper throwing them out of doors and windows never gets old). Given the Billy Zane of it all, it’s surprising that Krawczyk gives each member of his crew their own moment to shine. This unfortunately means that focus is pulled from Zane in favor of the ensemble, but Zane, who spends most of the movie with several rolls of toilet paper strapped to his mauled ass cheek, is just as effective a comedian as White.
It is White who carries the film, though, and watching Grandma reminds one of not only how talented he is, but also how Hollywood has underutilized him for years. Krawczyk’s screenplay sometimes fails the actor, with Jasper frequently talking to himself for the sole reason of spelling things out to the audience, but White is so charming he is able to overcome the occasionally stilted dialogue. This is to say nothing of Rufus, Granna’s dog who is initially aggressive towards Jasper, but slowly comes to embrace him as the night goes on, aiding him in his takedowns of the robbers. It’s this relationship, rather than the one between Jasper and Granna, that unexpectedly forms the heart of the film.
Don’t Mess With Grandma is another solid product from the consistently surprising Tubi, a streamer that is really starting to corner the market in better-than-you’d-expect low budget genre fare. Leaning into heartfelt sincerity, hilariously awkward confrontations and plenty of violence, Krawczyk has crafted an enjoyable crowd-pleaser that’s sure to earn plenty of laughs.
Don’t Mess With Grandma had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and will debut exclusively on Tubi. No release date has been set.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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