Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Picking up from the closing moments of the delightfully gonzo first movie, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opens with blood-soaked survivor Grace MacCaullay (the ever-superb Samara Weaving) being taken to hospital.

There, she is reunited with her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton aka the MCU's Cassie Lang, daughter of Ant-Man), but they very quickly discover that the games aren't over, when both are kidnapped to the Danforth Estate, another home for the elite and filthy rich.

There the sisters are to be pawns in a contest for the surviving four families of the Satanic cult Grace faced in the first movie. The prize is now for control of the council of families and thus THE WORLD.

With the same directors - Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett - and writers - Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy - as the original, the transition from one film to the next is seamless.

While Ready or Not 2 may initially give the impression it's simply going to be going over old ground, but with two protagonists and four families of antagonists, it is so much more than that.

Once again hitting the ground running, the 108-minute continuation of the story rockets along with the same ferocity as the first movie, blending in some epic, Grand Guignol violence and dark, often dry, humour.

Supervised by Mister Le Bail's representative, the unflappable and nameless Lawyer (Elijah Wood, who you may know from a little trilogy called The Lord of The Rings), leading the charge for the bad guys are Ursula Danford (Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her sadistic twin brother, Titus (Shawn Hatosy).

While all the members of the families, in their own ways, are evil, the psychotic Titus is the most genuinely disturbing. His horrifically savage beating of one of the lead characters being the most difficult scene to watch in a movie filled with exploding bodies and gory slapstick. This exhibition of cold brutality isn't played for laughs or supernatural chills.

Supplementing these powerful performances are a couple of stand-out cameos from big name stars, whose impact on the story far exceeds their amount of screentime.

The developing bond between the feuding sisters is the heart of the film, with the plot twisting and turning around that so that the surviving characters end up somewhere totally unexpected for the grand finale.

There's nice foreshadowing along the way, although you might still be surprised by its implications.

The conclusion is very satisfying, but definitely closes the door on any possible threequels.

However, I wouldn't say no to a Kill Bill: The Whole Blood Affair-style stitching together of 2019's Ready or Not and this year's Ready or Not 2 into a single, 200-minute glorious entity, as - as is joked about at the end - both movies unfold over a handful of consecutive days.

If I had a gripe with the second movie, and it's a silly one, I just find the title is a case of a hat-on-a-hat. Make up your mind, people, call it Ready or Not 2 or Ready or Not: Here I Come. 

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is just awkward.

"Uneasy Lies The Head That Wears a Crown"

Trailer above for episode four of this season of House of The Dragon, with a couple of spoilerific "making of" pieces below:

Vintage Guide To Conan's World Now In My Collection

Crom may not care, but I do! Hence the serious face

As we're talking about reading today, I thought I'd share my latest non-Amazon purchase that's just arrived: A Gazeteer of The Hyborian World of Conan and An Ethnogeographical Dictionary of Principal Peoples of The Era.

Compiled by Lee N Falconer and published by Starmont House in 1977, I have been after a copy of this (rare?) guide to the world of Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian since I first heard of its existence several years ago.

Eventually, one popped up on eBay. But it was in a store in the United States. After a bit of umming and ahhing, I thought 'this could be my only shot at getting this book', and so I pulled the trigger.

As I found out a year ago, once you've accepted the shipping costs, it is very comforting ordering from the States via eBay because your trans-Atlantic package is tracked all the way from the seller to your door: every single stop, every depot, every sorting facility, as it passes from the USPS to DHL and finally Evri  in the UK (which delivered it far quicker than I was expecting).

And the 49-year-old paperback arrived in top grade, ship-shape condition, complete with that nice old book smell that takes me back to my youth and rifling through the shelves of second-hand bookshops.

The bulk of the 127-page book is an alphabetised catalogue of places in Howard's Conan and Kull stories, followed appendices covering chronology, key peoples, heraldry and cartography.

The book closes out with three maps of the Hyborian World, including one based on Howard's own sketch and one superimposed on modern Europe. 

This is a very exciting addition to my small Howard library and makes me very happy to think that, once again, my (rare) patience paid off.

Originally the Gazeteer (sic) came packaged with a stunning, full colour map.

However, I've never seen one of those particular maps for sale... and, anyway, I  don't have wall space for a 28" by 40.5" map (as much as I love fantasy maps).

READING REPORT: Sailor Tom & Reconcile

 

I had a pretty impressive - for me, anyway - weekend of reading. I finished two books (one cover-to-cover in a handful of hours) and started a third.

First up was Mark Finn's homage to Robert E Howard's Sailor Steve Costigan: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey. 

One of the big differences between Sharkey and Costigan is that Sharkey was a real professional boxer in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Finn has simply given him, via the use of "tall tales", a pulpy life outside the ring and past his retirement.

Another big difference is that Sharkey's two-fisted adventures are much wilder and weirder than Costigan's, this collection includes weird science, ghost stories, battling robots, dinosaurs, and monsters (of several stripes). 

Because of his time in the ring, Sharkey is also a celebrity and is often recognised on his various travels, freely giving out autographs to his admirers.

Each story is short and succinct, but told with great gusto by Finn channelling Sharkey's voice.

My next read - which thankfully only took a couple of hours - was far less inspiring: Bruce Campbell's Western novella Reconcile. 

I hoped the A.I. art of the cover was just a glitch, a slight error of judgement. But the more I read of this short work the more I began to wonder if A.I. hadn't also infected the text within as well.

The adventure is set in Oregon in 1866 and within a few pages we meet a tribe of Northern Paiute Indians... playing (American) football!

If it had been kickabout proper football it wouldn't have stuck out so much like a sore thumb.

So I had to stop and check: American Football was first played between two college teams in November, 1869.

From there, it just kind of went downhill. There's no sense of place and direction for all the scenes that unfold, so when some crash into others it strains credibility.

If only there had been a map included, I might have had a better grasp of how close everyone was supposed to be, and what directions headed where. 

After his family is 'accidentally' massacred by an enraged Paiute, elderly engineer, George (who I think is who Campbell is portraying on the cover) teams up with an ex-army scout Joe (half-Paiute/half-white).

Togther, they seek to thwart the impending war between the natives and the real bad guys, the US Government forces who have just erected a new fort in Paiute land and want to corral the original inhabitants of the land into a reservation (or simply kill them).

The plot is pretty pedestrian, but I couldn't help wondering if the story (which gets quite gung-ho in its finale) wasn't recycled from an old Xena, Brisco County Jnr, or Jack Of All Trades script, because it can't decide if it's cartoon craziness or deadly serious (for instance, the brutal slaying of George's family is quite horrific, but the ultimate fate of the fort's commander almost comes with built-in Looney Tunes sound effects).

A disappointment in the wake of Campbell's excellent series of memoirs, nevertheless Reconcile was a quick read and that freed me up to start Cruise of Shadows.

This is an anthology of weird fiction by Jean Ray, an author I only recently learned about from the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast.

I'm two-and-a-half stories in... and it's very weird. But in a good, Lovecraftian way. 

MUSICAL MONDAY: Veteran of the Psychic Wars (Blue Öyster Cult)

Massive hat tip to Dungeons & Possums, who posted this the other month and wrote:

"This is the live performance of Veteran of the Psychic Wars by Blue Öyster Cult, from the Extraterrestrial Live! tour ca 1981, recorded in Pembroke Pines, FL and released on the 1982 live album of the same name.

"It contains one of the all-time coolest extended instrumentals in rock and roll, a guitar solo journey with spot-on accompaniment that rises and rises and rises in intensity until it feels like a laser beam, a cathartic blast to break the weight of a heavy song that would have surely melted a few faces in that lucky audience."

Your Highness (2011)

In the little publicity over here at the time of its cinematic release much play was made of Your Highness - and even later in the marketing of the DVD - being a "stoner comedy", with much of the humour seemingly derived from pot-related jokes and situations.

But that is so not the case. Your Highness is a brilliant, well-observed, swords-and-sorcery film that happens to also be hilariously, tears-down-the-cheek, laugh-out-loud funny, obscenely lewd and crude (although with very little actual nudity), quite gross at times with moments of graphic violence and only about two or three scenes involving weed.

James Franco is Fabious, heroic favoured son of King Tallious (Charles Dance) who returns home from his latest quest, having rescued a beautiful maiden - the naïve Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) from the tower of the evil sorcerer Leezar (Justin Theroux).

Unfortunately, on the day of Fabious and Belladonna's wedding, Leezar crashes the festivities and kidnaps the bride-to-be - thus prompting Fabious to embark on another quest.

However, the King insists that Fabious is joined by his foul-mouthed, feckless and irreverent brother Thadeous (Danny McBride) to "make a man of him".

After an unfortunate, early betrayal, the brothers  - and Thadeous's page Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker) - team up with lethal, no-nonsense warrior Isabel (Natalie Portman) who saves them from an acid-spitting hydra - and manages to look utterly gorgeous throughout the movie.

The dialogue is a hearty cocktail of cod-dramatic, almost Shakespearean, seriousness and jaunty slang - with the only true anachronism in the story being the appearance of a plate of fishfingers!

The marketing for Your Highness was so intent on pushing the "edgy" drugs angle - which is such a small part of the humour anyway - that it failed to even hint that this was a film with magic and monsters in!

In fact, this is everything I had hoped for from Kröd Mändoon And The Flaming Sword Of Fire (remember that?) and failed to get.

Old School gamers, in particular, will get a kick out of this because Your Highness is basically a true representation of "in-character" dialogue between participants in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure - swearing, banter, crude jokes, sexual innuendo and a lot of laughing - while slashing their way through a "rescue the princess" scenario.

There's a chance this could become the gamer's 21st Century go-to movie for "at table quoting" - alongside earlier classics such as Monty Python And The Holy Grail and Army Of Darkness.

It also made me think: there aren't enough "rescue the princess" scenarios in gaming these days. It's all about finding a special treasure (which Thadeous does) and averting prophecies (which they do), but Your Highness is a great example of how you can blend the classic dungeon-crawl, hack'n'slash mentality with a genuine romantic story as well - and not let the latter get so soppy as to overwhelm the former.

This sort of adventure is heightened by giving the player-characters a personal stake in their quest - which is why it's always good, eventually, to find out a bit about a character's backstory or try to inveigle them into some kind of in-campaign romance or relationship.

Hawk The Hunter: What Could Have Been

Terry Marcel, director of Hawk The Slayer, talks with Oliver McNeil, of The Fantasy Podcast and The School of Wizards and Witches, back in 2015, just as it looked as though we might get a sequel (Hawk The Hunter) - with the aid of Kickstarter.

Sadly, as we know, that never happened.

However, the interview also covers the samurai roots of Hawk The Slayer, the film's Easter Eggs, its world's creatures and magic, the casting of Lost's John Terry and Jack Palance, Terry's tantalising plans to take the Hawk brand to television, the Dark Knight TV series, how we almost had Tom Hardy as Hawk back in 2009, and handing over the reins to a younger director.

Ah, those were the days! What could have been...

Honestly, it breaks my heart to hear all these plans and imagine a world where Hawk got the Renaissance it deserves, and we could all be watching a TV show, reading an ongoing comic book series, and even playing video games based upon the most Dungeons & Dragons film of all time.

While we bathe in the warm glow of "what might have been", here also is a selection of interviews that Rebellion conducted with the lovely and optimistic Terry Marcel prior to the launch of the doomed Kickstarter:

Twilight Sword PDFs Now Available to Purchase

Those of you who've followed my coverage of the Twilight Sword roleplaying game, but didn't back the crowdfunding campaign, may be interested to know that the official PDFs of the anime-inspired ttrpg are now available for purchase on DriveThruRPG.

Italian publishers Two Little Mice are currently offering a bundle deal, which saves you 30 per cent off the RRP, and includes: 

• Twilight Sword: Core Rulebook
• Lands of Radia
• Starter Set 
• Card Chest
• GM Screen

SHOW ME: Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)

Who's The Mummy? Katie (Natalie Grace)
Mummy's Love? n/a
Where? Egypt (Cairo/Aswan) & Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
How Long? 134 minutes

Television reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is stationed in Cairo, Eygpt, with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams).

Just as the family is preparing to move back to their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Charlie has a new job offer, Katie is kidnapped from their back garden by a mysterious woman known only as The Magician (Hayat Kamille).

The police investigation, led by a suspicious detective (Husam Chadat) and his English-speaking assistant Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), gets nowhere.

The story jumps ahead eight years and the Cannons are settled back in Albuquerque, sharing their house with Larissa's mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon).

Katie's bedroom remains a shrine to her, while the other two kids, Sebastian (Shylo Molina)  and Maud (Billie Roy) still share a room.

However, in Egypt a small plane crashes outside of Aswan and in the wreckage is a 3,000-year-old black, basalt sarcophagus.

When opened by a pair of archaeologists, they are very shocked to discover it contains the mummified body of Katie (Natalie Grace) - still very much alive.

A brief aside here, because this issue crops up several times in Lee Cronin's The Mummy, but if the police had investigated the two men who had died in the plane crash, the story would have been a lot shorter. But, for some reason, this obvious angle is never pursued or even really mentioned again until the final act revelation of what's been going on this whole time.

Katie is, unsurprisingly, in a very bad way, and apparently in a locked-in state, yet her doctors in Cairo - without any real medical justification or investigation - tell her parents that the best "medicine" would be to take her home to Albuquerque!

Clearly that serves the movie, but - like ignoring the inconvenient aspects of the plane crash - makes no logical sense.

Determined not to rely on actual specialists or anything sensible like that, the Cannons bring their traumatised daughter back from Egypt and Carmen insists on caring for her daughter, pretty much on her own.

Meanwhile, journalist Charlie is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Katie in those missing eight years.

However, as Katie begins to wake up it very quickly becomes clear that she is not the Katie her family remember.

There is something very wrong with her. And it starts to spread to other members of the family.

As Lee Cronin had written and directed one of my favourite horrors of recent years, Evil Dead Rise, I cannot express just how excited I was to learn that he would next be tackling my favourite classic monster archetype, the mummy.

Add to that the fact that during pre-release promotion for Lee Cronin's The Mummy he teased that he considered this to be - unofficially - set in the same world as the Evil Dead movies.

However, I was still expecting a "mummy" movie, not an in-your-face (albeit "unofficial", I guess) addition to the Evil Dead mythos.

Sure, mummification processes are involved - and mentioned once - but Lee Cronin's The Mummy is not a "mummy" movie as such, but way more a mix of Evil Dead with a side order of The Exorcist thrown in for good measure.

This is a film with demonic possession, levitation, telekinesis, corpse defilement, bodily transformation and decay, ceiling scuttling, and creepy voices, with quite a bit echoing Cronin's brilliant Evil Dead Rise.

For a pulpy horror the 134-minute runtime is too long and The Mummy starts very slowly and juddery, despite an intriguing pre-credit sequence.

However, it does gains momentum as the horrors escalate within the Cannon home.

The narrative then gets slightly confusing as it jumps all around the place, between America and Egypt, with different avenues of investigation being pursued, while the demon within Katie gradually spreads its evil to her young siblings.

I also found the prevalence of video cassettes and - more tellingly if this was all taking place in (as it appears) a contemporary, 21st Century setting - VHS players rather jarring.

Perhaps Charlie needed one for his job, but I do think - if that's the case - a passing comment might have it made it stand out less as a plot convenience.

Not as convenient, though, as Chekov's morse code: when we first meet Katie and Charlie he is testing her on morse code, apparently for a badge with the Egyptian eagle scouts or something. It's really obvious that this is IMPORTANT. Again, it's never explained, it's just some heavy-handed foreshadowing.

While the film is disappointing in general, with plot holes that if addressed could have shortened the movie, at least when it gets to the horror parts Cronin doesn't let us down, delivering twisted gore and putrescent body horror of the finest kind.

Not that I mind having my expectations subverted - this the horror genre after all - but when the subversion changes the subject into something else completely, it becomes rather bemusing.

I just wish, rather than saying he's making a "mummy" movie, Cronin had been allowed to make another Evil Dead movie, introducing the indestructible, family-hating,  Nasmaranian demon into that canon if he so wanted.

Because I really can't help feeling that's where it belongs. Kinda like Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.

When I come to file my Blu-Rays, Lee Cronin's The Mummy will be sat next to my Evil Dead collection, rather than my Mummy movies.