‘Happy Gilmore 2’ (2025)
Nepotism abounds in the surprisingly tight sequel to the one-note 1996 comedy about a failed hockey player with anger issues turned pro golfer with anger issues. The success of that film made former SNLer Adam Sandler a household name and box office force to be reckoned with (and the run since has been long and profitable). Of those family ties, “Happy 2” features Sandler’s wife (Jackie), two daughters (Sunny and Sadie) and mother (Judy) in small parts. Loyal to the calendar, we’re 30 years out, Happy Gilmore (Sandler) is married to golf tour publicist Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen) and now has a brood of four: Hanson-esque hockey hooligan boys and a lone daughter, Vienna (Sunny Sandler), who wants to go to ballet school in Paris. Before we settle in, Virginia exits the picture and Happy, distraught, starts boozing wildly. The slide into financial ruin and derelict dad-dom is meteoric. That said, things are arguably worse for old foe Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald, funny and sinister as always), locked up in an insane asylum. Nearly every page from the original gets a nod, including the sadistic opportunist Hal (Ben Stiller, sporting a massive handlebar ’stache) who held Happy’s grandmother under duress as a maniacal nurse at her living facility, and here has moved on to running an AA-adjacent recovery program that Happy is ordered to dry out in. Needless to say, the only way to save the house and send Vienna to pirouette school (he needs $300,000 and then some), is golf. Added is Benny Safdie, co-director of Sandler’s “Uncut Gems” (2019), as the smarmy head of an upstart golf league called Maxi Golf (like Liv Golf on neon-infused crack) who wants to challenge the pro-golf tour, and Haley Joel Osment as the top pro on the tour – and subsequent Maxi Golf defector – who can drive the ball farther than Happy because of a radical hip ligament surgery. Many of today’s top players, including Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau, appear in the film, as well as old schoolers Lee Trevino, Fred Couples and legend Jack Nicklaus, who, when asked by a waiter (Travis Kelce, slick and sassy) what he wants to drink, says, lemonade and ice tea. The waiter pauses and asks Nicklaus if he’s not Arnold Palmer (cue rimshot). It’s a shaggy-dog laugh fest that pays astute homage (Sandler and original scribe Tim Herlihy doing a nice stitching job, plotwise) to what came before while expanding it. The best might be party-hearty golfer John Daly with a Santa beard as Happy’s next-door neighbor who’s forever in his PJs and sucking on nips. A surprising and unlikely above-par revelation, this “Happy” beats the cover off the old ball while notching a few new spins and a dizzying array of hip cameos.
‘Until Dawn’ (2025)
Based on the 2015 video game – for which Oscar winner Rami Malik was a motion-capture actors – this big-screen blowup is a fairly formulaic horror actioner that layers in some decent bump-in-the-dark chills. To get to the bloody mayhem we embed with a quintet of highly generic 20-somethings on a quest into the remotes of a Mountain West township where the sister of one of the five went missing a year earlier. If not for differences in gender, race or hairstyle, you would not be able to tell the difference from any if the imperiled five; there is no soul, only posture. Along the way, the Scooby gang gets caught in a torrential downpour; the driver can’t see, panic fills the Jeep and, just as things seem to be at a breaking point, the rain parts and an abandoned mountainside inn reveals itself. Natch, once inside, all five split up and go exploring. It’s all clue-finding until a masked maniac (hello, Michael Myers!) starts slashing and bashing them to death. We’re 10 to 15 minutes in and our fantastic five are all dead – is it game over? Nope, like “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) or “Groundhog Day” (1993), it’s a wash, rinse and repeat reset after each gory go-round. Nonsense about a wendigo (Larry Fessenden, who made a similarly titled film about the deer-antlered humanoid of lore in 2001, scripted the game), traumas and psychological experimentation (think “The Cell”) try to keep the ball in the air for the cheap scares or made-you-wince chills from director David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation,” “Shazam!”). The film is filled with complete ripoffs from Neil Marshall’s truly gruesome spelunking-girl misadventure “The Descent” (2005), “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) and the basic blueprints from the “Scream” and “Final Destination” series. To the film’s benefit, Sandberg keeps the bloodletting at a rapid pace, and veteran character actor Peter Stormare, who was part of the 2015 video game cast, is compelling in a thankless reprisal of his role as the mad shrink and puppet master. You’ve seen all this gore before and better. When searching late night, this is a cheap, bloodlust fix you can settle on and get your kicks from if you can’t find any of the other films mentioned in this review.
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