Festival of Frights

This past weekend, I caught the movie The Abandoned. At a swift 90 minutes, the movie tells the story of a woman in her early 40s who goes to the Russian countryside to investigate the truth of her real birth parents, and once there is swept up in a supernatural hauntstravaganza. This was the winner of last year's After Dark HorrorFest, a showcase of low-budget horror films whose winner received a wider theatrical release. Logic would dictate that the winner of such a festival would probably be a diamond in the rough that is 90% of all horror movies. And to some extent, it was. But it was not that wonderful.

In the plus column, there are lots of sequences in this movie that are genuinely scary -- and not just the "cheap tricks" of sudden noises and rapid cutting, but some drawn-out moments of dread and tension. Though speaking of sudden noises, the sound design in the film is excellent. Very evocative, very effective -- definitely a movie to showcase a home theater system on eventual DVD. The acting is quite good (without even having to qualify the statement with "for an independent film"), and the directing ably sets up the dread and tension I spoke of.

On the flip side, the writing is very weak. Even the supernatural needs to follow some sort of logic and rules (at least one sensical within the context of a given story), and this story fails to do that. Also, the notion of "pre-destination" and fate plays a big role in the story, and unfortunately it's so significant and telegraphed from miles away that the last 15 minutes of the film deflate all the tension -- you know exactly how it's going to conclude. (And the film's partial aversion to logic isn't so extreme that it shuns this inevitable outcome.)

Still, a grade A horror film is a truly rare bird to find, and this movie has a lot more good than bad about it. I give it a B. If you're into the genre, I suspect you'll find something about it to like if you check it out for yourself.