Abigail

I don't know that I've heard Tchaikovsky ever used so menacingly before, but here his "Swan Lake" and some deadly pas seul are used to good effect! A group of kidnappers has been assembled by "Lambert" (Giancarlo Esposito) to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy man. They are to whisk her away to a remote, quite spooky, manor house where she is to be held hostage til dad stumps up $50m. Thing is, this butter-wouldn't-melt little girl has a secret even bigger than most of the rather disparate gang of folks who used their complementary skills to snatch her. These folks are led by "Frank" (Dan Stevens) and it's "Joey" (Melissa Barrera) who is left to keep an eye on the young "Abigail" (Alisha Weir). Quite quickly we realise that it's not her who i...

Abigail isn't exactly a novel idea but its executed convincingly enough to offer up a moderately watchable, horror, experience.

In spite of its grounding in vampiric horror, I didn't find Abigail especially frightening. There's no sense of creeping menace and frankly, that's a shame. It does "have a go", so to speak, at first but never really takes it far enough or handles the material subtly enough, to pull it off.

Instead, Abigail is more in line with you standard vampire fare, where for the majority of the film you know who and what, you are dealing with. This tends to move the narrative and exposition, more towards a bloody action framework.

This film is not unwatchable, don't get me wrong. The acting is decent, the setting ap...

Boy did this one catch me by surprise! I absolutely loved watching 'Abigail'! An unexpected gem!

I knew nothing pre-watch aside from that it was classed, on Wikipedia at least, as horror, so was simply expecting the usual fare à la 'Imaginary' and/or 'Immaculate' (former bad, latter good fwiw). Clearly, what I in fact saw knocked my socks off! I had a tremendous amount of fun with every second of this, it's unsettling as it is amusing... every department did a grand job!

Not even sure where to start with my list of many positives. Alisha Weir is the star of the whole thing, what an utterly brilliant performance from the youngster - so damn convincing, particularly early on. Melissa Barrera is also outstanding, I previously found her f...