Abigail

4 outta 5

It isn’t particularly the fault of Abigail that the main concept, ballerina vampire kid, is entirely spoiled in the marketing. It would be completely befuddling to sell as just “some supernatural bad happens” without showing what that is. Although it is a bit irritating that the film manages to stretch about 40 minutes before the vampire kid reveal as everyone will know it is coming. But when the vampire mayhem kicks in it is gleefully messy and there are multiple twists that come afterwards. Directed by the duo who helmed the gleefully messy Ready or Not and the last two Scream movies, it certainly fits into their past output with laughs and splatter. It keeps things zippy and chaotic with extravagant gore, even if it does try to make the audience care about the lead character’s personal history when people are here for vampire kid carnage.

A gang of criminals are tasked with abducting a child, Abigail (Alisha Weir) and they ship her off to a remote mansion. Their employer, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) says they are supposed to keep her locked up as he can get a ransom of 50 million from her father. To keep the crooks’ identities anonymous, he names them Joey (Melissa Barrera), Frank (Dan Stevens), Rickles (William Catlett), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Peter (Kevin Durand) and Dean (Angus Cloud). Joey oversees talking to the kid and promises that no one will harm her, but Abigail says something horrible will happen to them. When one of the crooks turns up missing a head, they realize they can’t leave, and they have a confrontation about what to do about the little ballerina kid. Then Abigail reveals herself as a vampire and starts to bump them off one by one, and without any means of escape the crooks must destroy the vampire girl to save their own skins.

Joey is sort of the film’s main character, well at least the main human, and she gets a tragic backstory complete with substance addiction and being separated from her child. The directors also did the tragic backstory with Barrera in the last two Scream movies, so it seems like the directors always give her sad melodrama and throw buckets of blood at her. She is at her best when she is snippy about their chances of surviving, and she has some nicely sweet moments with the kid early on which makes the vampire twist hit harder. There’s a moment when Joey takes one look at each member of the crew and figures out their history from looking at them. That is fairly improbable, and makes her some sort of super-genius, but this is a movie about a killer kid ballerina vampire so it’s fine. Stevens’ Frank does a lot of hollering as his character tires and fails badly to hide his New York accent throughout the film. He starts off as evil and becomes progressively more unhinged and by the end he is bombastically evil, and it is kind of awesome.

Also, extremely evil and very compelling is Weir as Abigail, the ballerina vampire. At the start she comes off as a scared little kid that generates sympathy, and it makes the reveal of her being a pitiless bloodthirsty monster more impactful. When Joey says Abigail is really good at playing a kid, Abigail responds that she’s had a couple of hundred years of practice. There is a lot of her dancing to Swan Lake remixes and tearing into people which totally fits a kid ballerina vampire. She loves “playing with her food”, and even at one point she is dancing with a headless corpse because she is just that evil. There’s a couple of neat, classic vampire tricks like turning other people into her willing servants. When the crew first realizes that she is a vampire, they discuss amongst themselves what they know about vampires and there are a couple of funny lines like “They aren’t real!” When Sammy goes to get garlic to fight Abigail, Frank yells at her that she’s come back with a bag of onions.

The rest of the crew are varying degrees of somewhat interesting vampire bait. Durand as Peter plays the likable dunderhead role he does a lot, Catlett as a sniper seems to be set up as a co-lead with Joey until something unexpected happens. Newton as Sammy screams the most and near the end she gets to do some interesting physical acting, Cloud’s Dean is pretty much instantly unlikeable so when something bad happens to him it’s okay. Esposito is always good at methodical bad guy monologues, and he gets to do something different at the end. The movie spends a lot of time as setting up as a criminal caper movie that suddenly becomes a vampire flick, however that basic structural twist already happened decades ago in From Dusk Till Dawn so all the setup seems kind of unnecessary.

Abigail certainly delivers vampire chaos, and there are more than a few moments when characters burst into buckets of blood spraying all over the place. And the main vampire character remains freaky with cool twists throughout. If one wants some solid vampire gore, this may take a little while to deliver but comes in nicely by the end.