On Friday night, when I came back to town from work, I met up with my Dad for dinner, and after dinner I didn’t feel like staying home, so I decided to take a walk down to the theater and catch a flick. I suppose I was feeling a bit restless and did not want to stay at home.

Abigail was a movie I’ve been wanting to see for a while because I love vampire movies. When I say vamipre movies, I mean movies like From Dusk Til Dawn, John Carpenters Vampires, Daybreakers, Queen of the Damed, anything out of the ordinary that isn’t Twilight-esque Vampires are meant to be killers and put fear in you. Coming from directors, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Ready or Not and the last two Scream films, these 2 gentlemen have made a mark in the horror movie world in my opinion. The plot is about a group of would-be criminals who kidnap a 12 year old girl, who is the daughter of a much feared underworld crime lord and holds her hostage at an old goth style mansion in the woods for 24 hours to receive a 50 million dollar ransom.

When it came to the team of crooks, that is where the film took the Reservoir Dogs approach, meaning that they don’t reveal their real names and they don’t give any personal information about themselves. While using fake names to avoid any member from identifying the others, the group consists of Joey, a former Army medic and recovering drug addict Joey. Frank, a former NYPD detective. Sammy, a thrill-seeking hacker. Rickles, former Marine sniper. Peter, a dimwitted mob enforcer, Lambert, the ringleader who hired the team for the job, and Dean, a socio-pathic wheel man. It reminded me of a rag-tag crew who did not take themselves too seriously. Some of the banter between them was pretty funny, mostly from the dimwitted Peter character who just ended up being all muscle and no brains. The film does pretty well for comic relief in horror, which keeps me engaged, at least. I kind of think that when a horror movie takes itself too seriously, it gets pretty obnoxious. You gotta have fun with it, especially when it comes to creature features like this.

I’ll do my best to avoid any spoilers by not explaining too much of the plot in this review but similar to the idea in Ready or Not, the simple job that these hired thugs that were supposed to do ended up turning into a full blown game of survival. What I really appreciated about the film was that it took a lot of building up for Abigail to reveal her true self as a deadly vampire, and that’s when the blood-soaked fun start. I think the build up took a page from 1996s, From Dusk Til Dawn, where you don’t get to see any of the vampires until an hour into the movie where you think your watching a movie about 2 theives trying to escape into Mexico but ends up taking a hard right turn into a strip club full of vampires.

What was authentic I found about this plot it that typical rules to kill a vampire in the movie flew right out the window. The team discusses ways to kill her on how you would on a traditional vampire. Crosses, garlic, wooden stakes, and sunlight. Soon after that discussion, the team hears distant music on the next floor. It reveals Abigail dancing ballet with a headless corpse of Dean to a distorted version of Swan Lake. Once she recognizes the team there in the room with her, she goes on the attack. That’s when the team realizes the crosses and garlic do not work. Abigail rips the crosses from Peter’s necklace and starts stabbing puncture wounds in Peter’s chest and wipes the blood on her face. Abigail grabbed the garlic from Sammy’s hands, put it right up to her nose, and took a huge whiff, come to find out the traditional ways from movies and books do not work on this sadistic little girl. What did work is sunlight, of course. In a scene where Abigail has Frank pinned to the floor, getting ready to decapitate Frank, Joey runs in and rips off a piece of wood from the kitchen window and a beam of light shines on Abigails arm and explodes, immediately after her arm starts growing back in the most gruesome way I’ve seen in a movie in a long time, and all this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I won’t give too much away, but overall, this is a movie worth watching. For a while, the gory vampire genre was dying (no pun intended), but with recent movies like Day Shift and this one, it’s clear that this genre is still somewhat alive. I really enjoyed this, and it exceeded my expectations. When I saw it in the theater, I was the only person in there, and that made it really enjoyable. Not only because people now don’t care if they are rude while watching a movie anymore, but imagine watching a movie as haunting but fun as this, keeping you on the edge of your seat. It had all the jump scares and plot twists of what a good horror movie is meant to be, with some witty and humorous banter where the film didn’t take itself too seriously. Abigail was a bloodbath of a good time that will keep you guessing til the very end because I’ll tell ya, I wasn’t expecting that ending, now that was a twist I was not expecting. Well done!