'Abigail' review: When the victims aren't exploding, the vampire story is meandering
The little girl (Alisha Weir) abducted by kidnappers turns out to have an ancient vampire trapped inside her in “Abigail.”
Universal Pictures
We’ve been told the gooey, gory, gross and grating comedy/horror film “Abigail” is a reimagining of the 1936 Universal Classic Monsters film “Dracula’s Daughter” and it does contain a few basic elements of that film. Mostly, though, as directed by the Radio Silence Productions duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, it plays like a spiritual sequel to their far superior 2019 slapstick gore-fest “Ready or Not,” with echoes of “The Usual Suspects,” “Reservoir Dogs” and a zillion slasher movies about a group of good-looking idiots who are trapped in a remote house with an unstoppable killer and keep making bad decisions while they’re picked off one at a time.
The acting, practical and special effects and production design are all superb. The script is repetitive, tedious and a whole lot of ho-hum.
As was the case with “Ready or Not,” our story is set primarily on an enormous and remote estate with seemingly endless hallways, high ceilings, mahogany bookcases and forbidding décor, and there’s a plucky and resourceful heroine who essentially winds up the target in a deadly game of hide-and-seek.
In this instance, the heroine is Melissa Barrera (from the recent “Scream” movies), a candy-loving, tough-talking, single mother, who has been teamed up with a bunch of criminals she’s never met (shades of “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Usual Suspects”) to pull off a dangerous but lucrative job: to kidnap and then hold hostage 12-year-old Abigail (Alisha Weir), the daughter of the rich and powerful and extremely dangerous Kristof Lazar, whose powers are so all-encompassing some say he’s nothing but a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night — you know, like Keyser Söze.
An underused Giancarlo Esposito is Lambert, who has put together the team. When they arrive at the aforementioned Haunted Mansion with an unconscious Abigail (who has been injected with a knockout drug), Lambert tells them all they have to do is keep Abigail captive for the rest of the night and await the ransom payment. Simple! Oh, and Lambert insists nobody give use their real names, so he dubs them Mr. Pink, Mr. Blond, Mr. Orange and—
Just kidding. In this case, Lambert invokes the Rat Pack from the 1960s. In addition to Barrera’s “Joey,” the team consists of:
- “Frank” (Dan Stevens, sporting a hardcore New Yawk accent), a former police detective and the putative leader of the gang.
- “Sammy” (Kathryn Newton), a free-spirited hacker.
- “Dean” (the late Angus Cloud from “Euphoria”), a dope-smoking, mischievous party guy who is the wheel man for the kidnapping.
- “Peter” (Kevin Durand), a hulking muscle guy who isn’t too bright.
- “Don Rickles” (William Catlett), a Marine and sharpshooter.
Other than Barrera’s Joey, none of these characters is particularly well-drawn; like the clichés in so many other horror films, they’re given one or two personality traits, and once the bloodshed begins, they’re prone to saying stupid things, yelling at each other, wandering off alone, and, well, let’s just say not everyone is going to get out of this movie alive, but you already knew that, didn’t you?
It’s no spoiler to reveal that sometime after Abigail awakens, it turns out she isn’t a sweet and innocent girl who dances ballet to “Swan Lake," is terrified by these big bad kidnappers and is praying Daddy comes through with the $50 million in ransom money. She’s actually an old-timey vampire trapped in the body of a little girl, and once she bares her rows of sharpened fangs and starts flying around and cracking jokes along the lines of, “I like to play with my food,” it’s not looking good for this bumbling gang of fools, many of whom got high and/or drunk once they had “secured” Abigail in an upstairs bedroom.
The screenplay has the almost expected meta humor, with the characters referencing “True Blood” and “Twilight,” and ticking off the list of items they’ll need to take on Abigail, e.g., wooden stakes and crucifixes and garlic. (One chuckle-inducing scene has Sammy triumphantly returning from the kitchen with a bag of garlic, only for Frank to inform her those are onions. Apparently, she’s not one to cook.)
As for the mayhem on display here, and oh is there a lot of mayhem: Have you ever seen those videos where someone uses a hydraulic press to crush various items until those items suddenly burst into hundreds of pieces? That’s pretty much what happens to a number of the victims in “Abigail.” They don’t just die, they EXPLODE, with thick rivers of blood and bits of viscera raining down everywhere. It’s pretty impressive stuff, and you have to admire the proficiency of the team that made these human fireworks happen. The problem is all the exposition, all the loony twists and turns, in a story that becomes ever more tedious and just wears us down, to the point where we’re hoping the sun will come out and we can get a break.