phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

Abigail



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2024
Runtime: 1h 49m
Country: USA, Ireland, Canada
Language: English
Genre Tags: Comedy, Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: After a group of criminals kidnap the ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, they retreat to an isolated mansion, unaware that they're locked inside with no normal little girl.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: This is fine, I guess. It’s action, comedy, and horror that’s not as thrilling, funny or scary as it thinks it is. The characters are all paper thin, incompetent boobs, and do nothing but bicker. There is zero reason to care if they live or die, and bickering and swearing is not funny in and of itself. Even if they’re just supposed to be vampire food, the action is so over-edited and poorly framed that it’s just boring movement on the screen. There is a lot of non-CGI blood and guts, which is refreshing for contemporary mainstream horror, but that’s about it. The really scary thing is that a centuries-old vampire in a child’s body still acts like a child and interacts with her cruel “father” in that dynamic. That’s centuries of zero emotional growth and traumatic family drama. Yikes.


Outside Reviews:

Simon Abrams
2 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

You already know what you’re in for if you’ve come to “Abigail” to watch a body count caper featuring plummy character actor performances from That Guys like Kevin Durand and Dan Stevens. Most of their co-stars keep up in less attractive roles, including Melissa Barrera’s thinly drawn anti-heroine team leader. There’s also plenty of viscous-looking blood splatter and some modestly good-looking vampire makeup—the fangs, in particular. Some action scenes are well-choreographed, but generally over-edited and shot just ahead of whatever’s moving on-screen. The rest of this 90-minute genre exercise is unfailingly conventional, though that’s also a big part of its ostensible appeal.


Luke Y. Thompson
A- - A frequently funny dance of death

You could try to guess who’ll survive, and probably be right, but that’s not really the point. For a movie that loosely follows a slasher formula, Abigail invests you in the story more than any one individual. Sure, the set-up might fall apart if you think too hard about it, like how criminals this collectively moronic ever got anywhere prominent enough in the underworld to earn a job like this one. But if that’s where your head’s at when the blood starts flying and bodies start dropping, this was never going to be the movie for you. If you relish the absurdity as much as the tension, this could become a new, endlessly rewatchable horror-comedy classic, like Fright Night or The Lost Boys. The horror threat is never the butt of the joke—except to the extent that bodies exploding into ginormous tsunamis of gore is viscerally funny (pun intended)— but how the victims react is.