Abominable (2006)
Directed by
Ryan Schifrin
Rated (R) 94 mins
Review by Cirio Santiago
Trust me when I say ‘Abominable’ is great and it’s well worth sitting through the first half of the movie.
The movie follows Preston, an ex-mountain climber, who became a paraplegic after an accident in which his wife died. His doctor thinks it will be good for him to return home (with the most obnouxsious, asshole, male nurse ever) to confront his loss. Soon after arriving at his home in the woods (with a great view of “Suicide Rock,” where the accident took place) Preston is left alone, while his nurse goes to get him soy milk. With Preston back home, our story begins to take shape. First, three backwood hunters, made up of genre vets Jeffery Combs and Lance Henriksen, venture out into the woods to help a local farmer catch the thing that has been eating his cattle. Next, five young girls show up to the house next door for a weekend of camping (I guess you could call it that), and I start rubbing my hands in anticipation of a high body count and bloody movie experience because I know what is stalking them all in the woods. And it looks hungry!
Minutes later, the local weirdo (Combs as a gas station owner who chain smokes while on an oxygen tank) tells the legend of the creature, just so we get the backstory out of the way. Preston spys one of the girls being abducted by a shape in the trees, but of course neither his nurse, nor the local police (who he E-mails rather than calls), believes him. Things start to look good at the point when one of the hunters (Henriksen) finds the girl still alive, but ripped half apart, in Abominable’s lair. After she is sucked deeper into the cave and Henriksen makes his escape, you would think it is time for the movie to get bloody. All we get, however, is the hunters getting dragged into the woods one by one, at which point one starts to wonder if we’re going to be treated to a bloodless and boobless bore fest (it did, after all, premiere on the Sc-Fi channel). But just when my finger started twitching for the fast forward button, the monster makes amends by ripping apart the nubile co-eds, and only five minutes after one gets naked in the shower! Phew!
Time and time again I keep hearing the word “throw-back” in reference to a new horror film, and time and time again I have been let down. You know the saying, “I was trying to recreate those old drive-in films you used to see” or “I love those old blah, blah type movies and wanted such and such to represent that,” but they never seem to pull it off, or the movie just plain out sucks. ‘Abominable,’ from it’s wonderful 70’s style cover art, to it’s well done guy-in-a-monkey-suit monster special effects, is what all these movies have been trying to accomplish and couldn’t. Not to mention poor, cripple Preston gets to live out every, horny, loser, horror fans dream by watching a house full of cute girls shower then get ripped apart by some unknown creature, all from the safety of his own home while he is unable to help. It is why we watch these things isn’t it? Then to make the fantasy complete, he gets to save the last girl when she escapes to his house for help. One of the great WTF momments of this movie is that the “last girl” is beaten, tossed off a roof, and thrown through a car window but somehow her lips always stay glossy and moist. Like she always found a moment to spare to put on some lip balm, even though her face is battered and bruised by the end of the movie.
What also impressed me is that they never gave us a cheesy flash back of Preston’s wife dying. There was only one great dramatic speech that actually fit into the movie. It even snows at the end when everything is better (just like in that movie ‘Crash’), but it stayed focused and never got mushy or over dramatic. Abominable delivers just what it promises: a big fucking ape tearing people’s faces off and smashing their guts out, and that’s all I can ask for from a movie with that title.
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