"What are we talking about, like an Anne Rice or a True Blood? You know Twilight? Very different kind of vampires."
A laugh and gore filled mash up "Fright Night" and "The Legend of Hell House", ABIGAIL is a fast paced, R-Rated, profane blast of vampire fun.
The film opens fast & furious, with an eclectic band of kidnappers abducting a 9 year old girl after she arrives home from ballet practice.
The fact that the practice takes place in front of no one, just an empty theater in front of a giant red curtain raises an eyebrow.
After the young girl, Abigail, steps into the waiting, chauffeured Rolls Royce and is returned to a mansion, it's clear she belongs to a family of considerable wealth and power.
Our kidnappers is a well cast bunch.
Melissa Barrera (so great in "In the Heights") is Joey, the lethal, cat burglar like member whose chosen to be the only one that meets Abigail.
Kevin Durand spent several great seasons battling vampires in FX's "The Strain" as genre beloved Vasily Fet, which serves him well as Peter, the mega-Brawn/mini-Brain member of the squad.
Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire) plays against type as a former detective turned killer for hire who attempts to run the unruly bunch.
Kathryn Newton proves she survived the godawful "Lisa Frankenstein" by starring as Sammy, a hacker who gets off plenty of good one-liners as the fangs are exposed around her.
The late Angus Cloud stars as the least likable member, Dean, who seems more interested in getting high than stealing the girl. Sadly, real life reflected the role when he died of a drug overdose in July 2023, before the film's release.
The previews have revealed the story, with our wanna-be kidnappers trapped in the mansion as the latest feeding for Abigail, who may look like a little girl, but has hundreds of years of killing under her tutu.
Alisha Weir (Wicked Little Letters, Matilda: The Musical) has a blast as the tiny vampire, soaring through the air and kicking the hell out of people four times her size.
The mansion itself is another character unto itself, serving up endless kill rooms, swimming pools filled with corpses and a few more giant windows than you might expect for a breed wanting to avoid sunlight. It was filmed in the famous Guinness Manor in Dublin, Ireland, a great choice.
The filmmakers are smart enough to make the $50 million bounty for kidnapping Abigail big enough to be tempting, while being clever enough to feature Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None" as a plot point. It's a big laugh as our squad gets picked off one by one by the Tiny Dancer with a big bite.
For me, vampire movies live and die by their gore level, and on that scale, ABIGAIL is a 10. They used "blood cannons" on the set, creating some of the most explosive deaths on screen since John Cassavetes exploded at the end of Brian De Palma's "The Fury".
We had a lot of fun watching ABIGAIL. It's a razor sharp blend of laughs and scares, earning a B bathed in buckets of blood.
"What can I say? I love playing with my food...."
Here's the Red Band Trailer.
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