★★☆☆☆
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, best known for their recent Scream requels, have another quasi-ironic stab at genre cinema. This time we get a two for one with a mash up of crime caper and classic monster movie. A horror-comedy of sorts, Abigail has a great deal of bloody schlock and post-post modern humour with a screenplay penned by Guy Busick (also of Scream) and Stephen Shields. Sadly neither are enough to muster shrieks of fear or humour.
To give the film its due, Abigail’s marketing campaign has done the film’s best hand dirty, revealing in the trailers its big twist. Thus, the first forty minutes or so are robbed of any suspense as anyone who has seen the trailer will spend that time two steps ahead of the cast. The spoilery premise is this: a group of six professional thieves, each with a special skill, has been assembled by Giancarlo Esposito’s Lambert to kidnap a wealthy man’s daughter, the eponymous Abigail (Alisha Weir) for ransom. But surprise! The wealthy man is terrifying Keyser Soze-esque underworld myth Kristof Lazar (Matthew Goode) who will definitely kill them all horribly for the kidnapping. But then extra surprise! Sweet, ballet dancing little Abigail is actually a murderous denizen of the undead: a vampire!
It’s a really fun, schlocky premise, a mash up of Reservoir Dogs and From Dusk Till Dawn, set in the sort of Gothic Old Dark House only ever found in classic monster films, and that first act is promising, if lacking the sparkling writing and visual flair of the films to which it aspires. Abigail is allegedly a loose reworking of the 1936 Universal Studios film Dracula’s Daughter, but it’s difficult to see how, beyond a musical nod to the original 1931 Dracula and the fact that Abigail is, well, a vampiric daughter. Sadly, Abigail fails as both a tribute to the Universal monster films of the 1930s and as schlocky ultra-violent postmodern entertainment.
The first rule of the caper flick is that its cast must be, if not likeable, at least compelling. For a picture that makes explicit reference to Tarantino with its pseudonymous cast, Shields and Busick’s script forgoes actual characters over types seemingly borrowed from a lesser Saw sequel. Melissa Barrera’s lead is a junkie estranged from her son; Angus Cloud’s (in his final performance) Dean is intensely annoying as a skeevy wheelman; elsewhere we have Angry Former Cop (Dan Stevens), Dumb Lunk (Kevin Durand), Annoying Hacker Girl (Kathryn Newton), and Army Veteran (William Catlett), the latter of whom is so jaw-droppingly bland that it feels certain that something else must be going on, until we realise that the only thing at play is an off the shelf script ticking over in neutral.
It’s not that Abigail is terrible: all its pieces slip together where they should, but its for all its excessive violence and gore it is a dull, lifeless experience. Little of the imagination or wit that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett brought to Scream is evident here, with a workmanlike visual style that rarely takes advantage of the Gothic setting and a cast that simply isn’t up to bringing life to Busick and Shields’ pallid script. It’s easy to give Abigail a pass for its spoilery trailers, but the truth is films need to stand up beyond their premises: no amount of trailers can spoil a film reliant on horror clichés – ironic or not, splitting up to cover more ground is always distractingly stupid – or magically make characters dull or irritating. From Dusk Till Dawn remains intensely watchable because it is a brilliantly executed genre flick, not because its shift from crime film to vampire slaughterfest is always and forever a surprise. It’s a shame that most audiences won’t see Abigail for the ‘first’ time, with its first-act reveal intact. But then, if a film only works once, then perhaps it never worked at all.
Christopher Machell
