There are certain things it is perfectly acceptable to exclaim while watching a horror movie. Screams are acceptable, as are “ewwwws.” Even “Don’t go in there!” or “Bitch, he gotta knife!” though while annoying, are to be expected.
“Oh, are you fucking kidding me?” is not one of them. I said this quite a bit, and loudly, during THE ABANDONED because, well, I was the only one who bought a ticket. I know horror movies by nature are outlandish, but even I have my limits and future-self-zombies and magical time-travelling flashlights went far beyond them.
But while THE ABANDONED is as unbelievable as Britney Spears showing up at a PTA meeting, I can’t really be angry with it. Sure the script may seem like it’s written by the especially poo-flingy monkey at the zoo, but its set design, cinematography, makeup and editing faculties are second to none. It’s like Michael Mann adapted a four-year-old’s drawing of “the pretty horsie.”
Anastasia Hille plays Marie, a Russian born, English educated American film producer who goes back to the motherland to find out what happened to her parents before she was adopted. She finds the farm where she was born and stumbles across the twin brother she never knew she had, Nikolae (HELLBOY and 15 MINUTES baddie Karel Roden). Needless to say, eerie shit starts happening all over the farm like strange noises, and apparitions of their future-selves after they’ve died. They can’t really be ghosts because you can hit them and shoot them. And they can’t technically be zombies because they disappear and reappear in the damnedest of places. No movie this fundamentally goofy has a right to such a straight face.
This major inconsistency is just the tip of THE ABANDONED’s flaw iceberg. Creepy stuff happens only to be forgotten about in the next scene. The pace is so uneven that the first fifteen minutes feels like an hour and and the last half hour feels like a blink. And there is no character development whatsoever, for the living or for the dead. It’s not that the house is haunted and the people are in danger, but why. If we’re paying good money to see a horror movie, we better have some investment in the characters. Everything’s scarier that way.
I will say that Karel Roden is slowly but surely gonna enter Christopher Walken territory one day, where we perk up whenever we see him on screen. And just like Walken and his heir apparent Johnny Depp, he seems to be right at home in both good guy and bad guy roles.
So with all I mentioned, THE ABANDONED still has a lot going for it. Nacho Cerda (who apparently directed that bogus “Alien Autopsy” footage that aired on Fox fifteen years ago) is the real deal. The film is dripping with atmosphere and even without character or plot properties, he manages to make the film creepy and in a couple of instances, genuinely frightening. Remember the magical time-travelling flashlight? This leads up to a part where I jumped out of my seat, only to get back in with a huff at the absurdity of it all. He has a future. Give him a real script and he’ll set some shit on fire.
Movies with nary a brain in their heads breed reviews as short as this one. THE ABANDONED has all the stuff that make horror movies fun without any of the stuff that make them actually good. Whether you will forsake one to indulge the other, I will leave to you.
2 1/2 out of 4
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