Abigail (2024)

I am going to have to make a decision here, whether to include some spoilers in this review or not. Although I would normally work hard to avoid spoilers, Abigail has arguably already been spoiled for you if you have seen the trailer or some of the alternate poster designs. I understand why. It makes more sense to draw in the horror crowd it is aimed at, which wouldn’t necessarily happen if it was sold to look like a straightforward crime thriller. So . . . I am going to discuss it as if it is a pretty straightforward crime thriller, but I am assuming that you will all be aware of the fact that it is more than that.

Things start with a kidnapping. Six people work together to snatch a little girl (Abigail, played by Alisha Weir) before driving to an isolated country home where they have to stay holed up for 24 hours. If all goes well then the payday is $50M. All isn’t about to go well though. It turns out that not only is Abigail’s father very rich, but he is also very powerful and dangerous. And Abigail may share a few of his traits. 

Written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, this is a very smart and funny horror comedy that makes a lot of things very obvious from the opening titles (for those familiar with the music cue). The twists and turns aren’t presented as major rug-pulls, nothing here will surprise fans of the tropes being played with, but they keep being thrown into the plot with a sense of glee, curveball after curveball for our main characters to deal with. With directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett at the helm (directors of the last two Scream movies, as well as the very enjoyable Ready Or Not), everyone going into this should have an idea of what they are getting into. It’s playful, it’s bloody, and it’s a fresh take on some very familiar material.

The cast are all on the same page, happy to fit into their archetypes and just allow themselves to be part of a group that descends into chaos as everything around them starts going wrong. Melissa Barrera is much better here than she was in the Scream movies, making for a great central character to root for, and Dan Stevens is having a whale of a time as the cold-blooded leader of the group. Kevin Durand and Kathryn Newton are much simpler, more sweet-hearted characters (relatively speaking), and both Angus Cloud and William Catlett do well in their respective roles, even if they seem less important to the group than some of the others. Everyone is a bag of clichés, but it doesn’t matter when they are being used in such a fun way. Weir is the star though, and proves more than capable at conveying the many different moods her character goes through during the unraveling of the kidnapping scheme. It is also worth mentioning a couple of excellent cameo turns from Giancarlo Esposito and Matthew Goode.

Unabashedly profane and bloody throughout, Abigail is the most fun I have had with a mainstream American horror movie in a hell of a long time. It’s well-paced, it looks gorgeous throughout (even as the sets become drenched in blood), it’s inventive, and there are numerous easter eggs dotted throughout that can be enjoyed or ignored without changing how you feel about the rest of the film. All in all, it’s a bloody good time for fans of those involved.

8/10

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Shudder Saturday: Hunted (2020)

This is a very strange film to review. Mainly because I didn't like it. Then I did. Then I started to really like it. And then it just ended. I knew it would end at some point, of course (not every film has to be a Lav Diaz epic, thank goodness), but the ending felt a bit abrupt and disappointing. Which led to me remembering how I hadn't been won over by the beginning. So I had to work a bit harder to retain the positive thoughts I had about it, and to not let the weaker moments bookending everything affect my whole viewpoint.

The central part of the film, the best through line, concerns Éve (Lucie Debay), a young woman who is saved from a pushy guy at a bar by a man who seems to be normal and nice (Arieh Worthalter). Unfortunately, he's exactly the opposite of what he appears to be, and he wants to abuse Éve and kill her, helped in this by his accomplice (Ciarán O'Brien). Things are complicated by the tenacity of Éve, and also a woodland encounter with a woman credited as The Huntress (Simone Milsdochter) and her son, Jeremy (Ryan Brodie).

A heady brew of recalibrated fairytale elements and ugly misogyny, Hunted is most effective when boiling everything down to the basics. A bad man wants to hurt, and kill, a female victim. It remains effective in the scenes that have that bad man lashing out at the person supposed to be helping him. And any moments involving The Huntress and Jeremy work brilliantly. All of these scenes have an undercurrent of viciousness intertwined with a strangely surreal quality, and they feel like the movie that director Vincent Paronnaud most definitely wanted to make.

But then you have the rest. The opening is easy to forgive, when you see how the rest of the film plays out it feels like a nice bit of scene-setting, but the last 10-15 minutes are astonishingly bad, throwing in some other characters, including a bunch of paintballers and some people viewing a house. This may have been done to emphasise the idea of the pure hunt crashing through into something close to our actual reality, I guess, but it feels ridiculous and out of step with the atmosphere that was so nicely created throughout the rest of the film. Writers Stephen Shields and David H. Pickering may have come up with this idea, or perhaps it came from the draft tweaking from Paronnaud and Léa Pernollet.

Nobody stands out, performance-wise, but everyone does a good job. Worthalter is an incredibly effective psycho, and deserves some credit for his absolutely unhinged turn (especially in the second half), but everyone feels like they're being puppeteered by Parronaud, in a way that is almost literal. I wouldn't be surprised if there were storyboards for this that initially had the whole thing planned out for something that was to be fully animated (especially when you consider how well Parronaud has worked in that form previously).

Hunted may lose you. It may prove to be an ultimately disappointing viewing experience, especially if you don't appreciate the atmosphere and dark playfulness of it. But it may just be one that you end up appreciating a lot more when you think of the reasoning behind some of the decisions made. That's where I ended up anyway.

7/10

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Netflix And Chill: The Hole In The Ground (2019)

An acclaimed debut from director Lee Cronin, who also co-wrote the script with Stephen Shields, The Hole In The Ground is a well-made little horror movie with a couple of good ideas. It's just a shame that it didn't really work for me, especially during moments that felt a bit too vague, and in a way that seemed like a cop out as opposed to an interesting artistic choice, while so many other moments left no room for anything ambiguous.

Seána Kerslake is Sarah O'Neill, a single mother with her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey). The two have recently moved into a fairly isolated house in the midst of some woods, of course, and things get a bit strange as Sarah starts to suspect Chris of changing somehow. This idea firms up in her mind after she discovers the backstory to a local woman, Noreen (Katie Outinen), who some say killed her young son when she became convinced that he had been turned into a demonic entity.

Although this is an original horror, always something worth celebrating among the selection of remakes, reboots, and sequels, The Hole In The Ground doesn't actually FEEL very original. All of the component parts will be very familiar to genre fans, and some aspects are almost laughable. Let me pick one main example, this could have felt even more unique, and interesting, if set in a town environment. Need a massive sinkhole for the child to discover? Have him clambering over a fence and into an abandoned building site. There. Anyone who wants to remake this movie in about twenty years can make that change, at least, and thank me in the credits.

Cronin knows what he's doing, the technical side of things is generally quite perfect (including the dreary colour palette), but the script disappoints, with character development not as good as it could be and the tendency to weave between over- and under-explaining things.

Kerslake does as well as she can in the lead role. She's a good actress, and Markey works well alongside her. Both are hampered by the motions they have to go through as the plot plays out. Outinen does well as a female version of Crazy Ralph - "you're doooooooomed" - and James Cosmo is excellent as her caring husband, but there aren't enough other strong supporting players given a chance to lift things up slightly.

I can't call this a bad movie. It isn't, even though it didn't work for me as well as it seems to have worked for many others. Everyone involved knows what they're doing, to a degree, and it's good to see some praise being given to something trying to be a bit different from the many films trying to capture that Wan-iverse vibe. I just can't call it a good movie either. None of it worked for me, not when it came to the horror movie moments. I was never tense, never scared, never really bothered by where things were going. And the final scene just had me rolling my eyes, especially when viewers know that there's absolutely no need for it.

5/10

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