'Abigail' Flies into Theaters This Weekend

Is Abigail a vampire horror movie or a bloody crime thriller? It's both! The genre mash ups in this week's new release shoot for clever edginess, but critics say it falls short. It does, however, plenty of blood and dark comedy, so it might click with audiences over the weekend, especially given that the line-up of hold overs it's competing with are starting to look pretty stale. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

From the moment the film was announced a year ago, “Abigail” has been marketed as a remake of “Dracula’s Daughter,” the 1936 Universal Pictures curio. So it’s no spoiler to say that the title character of “Abigail” is…Dracula’s daughter. Yet if you went in not knowing that, it might be the only real surprise in the movie, apart from what a brutally monotonous blood-vomiting genre mashup it is.

For a while, we think we’re watching a standard kidnap thriller. It opens with Abigail (Alisha Weir), who is 12, on the ballet stage rehearsing “Swan Lake,” a most definite vampire homage, since Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous heart-swelling score is the same music that played over the opening credits of the 1931 Bela Lugosi “Dracula.” That lyrical entré ends in about three minutes, as the kidnappers, all overstated profane synthetic crudeness, jam themselves into a van and abscond with Abigail, who they take to a hideaway mansion and stash in one of the bedrooms.

If the crime goes off as planned, each of them will get $7 million in ransom money. But with their fake names and bumptious bickering, which starts in scene one and rarely lets up, they’re like characters in a bargain-basement gloss on “The Desperate Hours” crossed with “Reservoir Dogs” crossed with the worst A24 house-party horror film you could imagine.

“Dracula’s Daughter,” made to cash in on the original “Dracula’s” success (though it had none of the same actors), was a rather stodgy London-fog monster movie starring Gloria Holden, who plays the title character like Greta Garbo as an aristocratic mesmerist. Yet the film has a cult dimension; there’s a scene with Holden and the woman she fastens on to model for a painting that has homoerotic overtones (at least, for 1936). I hadn’t seen the movie in decades, but it reminded me of something I’ve always liked about studio-system horror films — that there’s a dramatic lightness to them, even when they’re all about the darkness. Whereas “Abigail” is so heavy and excessive that if Sam Peckinpah saw it he might say, “Jesus! Tone it down.”

Abigail’s father, we learn early on, is Kristof Lazar (Matthew Goode), a demonically vicious and omnipotent underworld boss who has a way of slashing his enemies to ribbons. (He can get into places where there’s no explanation for it.) And Abigail, though she apparently doesn’t like her father very much, is a chip off the old ripper. Before long, she sprouts razory teeth and turns into a feral child, going at the kidnappers, one by one. She’s toying with them as a kind of game, and a few of them get turned into vampires (which has the remarkable effect of changing their personalities without making them any less boring). One or two…explode, sort of like John Cassavetes at the end of “The Fury” though with more splatter and less apocalyptic elegance.

Get the rest of the story at Variety.