Abigail

  Six thugs kidnap a young ballerina (Alisha Weir) and take her to a Resident-Evil-style mansion at the behest of one Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) with a promised reward of a few million each. Once the deed is done, they need to hole up there and babysit the kid for twenty-four hours until the ransom is paid.

 Simple. Except that, as the movie's trailers and marketing make abundantly clear, the kid is a vampire.

 Imagine how good a twist that'd be if it hadn't been spoiled months before the movie came out! It's easy to understand why they've done this - it'd be a hard sell otherwise. But it's harder to swallow that the movie acts as if it was a big twist for half an hour or so. And while the vampire isn't turning the screws, we're expected to give a shit about half a dozen of poorly written caricatures traipsing through sub-standard tough-guy (and gal) posturing and some of the lamest attempts at humor I've seen in a while.

 The crew are: Joey (Melissa Barrera), the soulful one who balks at inflicting violence on a little girl; Frank (Dan Stevens), a domineering asshole; Peter (Kevin Durand), a dimwit muscle-head and piss-poor comic relief; Rickles (William Catlett), a nice-guy sniper cypher; Sammy (Kathryn Newton), a perky hacker; And finally Dean (Angus Cloud), a mushmouth sleazebag. The actors are clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery, and sometimes they make it work - but the lines provided to them fall way short of the achingly clever, witty banter the script clearly thinks it's delivering.

 Things pick up considerably once the vampire finally bares its fangs and starts chasing these idiots around, acting for all purposes like a blood-splattered, murderous version of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. The script (by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick) remains pretty fucking dumb, but the mayhem is well choreographed and the gore is pleasingly over-the-top. It's pretty watchable until it gets to the home stretch and it starts piling up twists like the world's stupidest pancake stack, especially during a final confrontation against a new menace that pissed away any goodwill the film had accrued up to that point.

 Directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (who did segments for V/H/S and Southbound, and then cashed in their success with their excellent feature debut Ready Or Not to do a couple of Scream sequels) bring the movie to life whenever the undead menace is prowling (it's never scary, which is par for the course in horror comedies, but the action is well staged) but don't really do enough to elevate the shitty script in its slower moments. Oh well - at least they (and DP Aaron Morton, who's been pretty busy between this and First Omen) make some of the scenes look pretty good, almost monochrome. Some are sepia, but one of the exterior shots is all subdued pinks, which I thought was cool and unusual outside of a Miami scene.

 They also give (an abbreviated version of) Blood and Tears an airing in an appropriately bizarre dance number - I know she's rich, but It's still pretty impressive how Abigail got a hold of a shellac edition of Danzig II for her gramophone.

 It's hard to criticise a movie that's clearly going for 'dumb fun' for being overtly stupid, even when that equation leans 90% dumb and 10% fun. But there's a point where cheap contrivances, plot holes and hoary dialog start reeking of half-arsedness, and this movie crosses that threshold very early on; I only have myself to blame for the mild annoyance, because it was patently clear from the trailer that the writing would be terrible.