It’s been a rough road to promoting the latest Universal picture film entitled Abigail for a multitude of reasons.

Actress Melissa Barrera Was cast as the lead role in this film based on the work that she had done in the recent Paramount series Scream 5 and Scream 6.  However, it would be a few months later that Barrera was fired by Paramount for taking the side of Palestine in the ongoing conflict with the nation of Israel.  Since then the actress has been on Hollywood’s bad side for her refusal to walk from her support in the Middle Eastern War. It doesn’t help bring attention away from the lead actress when the two directors who worked on the last Scream movie are also the directors of this movie as well.

Her co-star Kathryn Newton Was just in the box office flop entitled Lisa Frankenstein Which didn’t even make back its 13 million dollar production budget along with being critically panned as well.

To make matters worse, last summer actor Angus Cloud died of a drug overdose Just a mere days before completing his scenes for the movie meaning that the actor would have to be given immemorial treatment before the film’s release.

Needless to say, Universal has had a tough time navigating around the controversy to promote their latest film entitled Abigail. Abigail is the latest horror film about a group of kidnappers who take a 12-year-old girl overnight An attempt to hold on to her for 24 hours with the promise of a 7 million dollar payout for each kidnapper.

 The job seems simple enough at face value until the group of criminals realizes that they have been locked into the home that they are protecting from the inside. As members of their team begin to get picked off one by one they realize that they have been led to this house under pretenses because the home is not the home of the kidnappers, it is the home of the little girl herself who has a big secret that she’s been keeping from the group… She’s a vampire.

The criminals have no choice but to survive the night against a bloodthirsty ballerina vampire who has turned her kidnapping into a hunting game for sport.

Abigail is a film has a lot to like for horror fans looking for a new throw ride. The premise is pretty straightforward, Six people are locked inside of a mansion under the guys that if they wait 24 hours a massive payday awaits them.  Melissa Barrera plays an ex Junkie looking to reconnect with her family,  Catherine Newton plays a rich girl who has an Infinity for cybercrime, Dan Stevens Is a dirty cop looking to advance by Dirty means, Kevin Durand Is the muscle who is pretty much good at nothing else but being the biggest man in the room, Will Catlett Is the black guy who dies second, and Angus Cloud has the task of playing a drug-addicted wigger Begging the question whether he was acting in the movie.

The group has excellent chemistry working with one another as their characters are given more Dynamics how they interact and how their stories align with one another so the film never comes off as generic. The film is a night and day comparison to what the creative team behind this movie has done with the latest scream films that Focus too much time marking off its DEI checkboxes than making an entertaining film.

 With a low-budget Thriller that doesn’t have a franchise name attached to it, the writers and the directors can produce a lot more entertainment than they have in their previous outings. There isn’t much moral ambiguity in this film as our characters are a group of people who will kidnap a young child to find out that that child is the living embodiment of evil.  On one level it’s hard to feel sorry for the fate of our characters. At the same time, their deaths are so over the top it does provide an entertainment factor to it.

 The biggest flaw in Abigail comes in the third Act when the movie tries to draw a line in the sand about who is considered good and who is considered evil.  Without going into spoilers,  the ending of the movie is a series of cop-outs that the writers came up with to avoid delivering the deserved fate of a Teenage demon child. 

The poor creative decisions in the Final Act hurt the film from being a great movie rather instead of a really good movie. Abigail is a bloody and bombastic horror movie And it has just enough Charisma from a talented cast to separate it from the sea of generic and dry horror films that Hollywood has produced over the last several months. 

Abigail may have stumbled at the finish line but it was still a good race overall.

3.5/5

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