Abigail
This is a high-concept gunk movie, with kids. It kinda works, but there are some ham-fisted decisions that make it falter. It should have polished its stakes a bit more.
The worst part has got to be the music. One of the worst uses of rap music in the closing credits, Jesus H. Christ. I get it the lyrics are relevant, but come one! Just flip the order, put one of the endless Swan Lake remixes as the proper end, and move it to the credits proper.
The tone is too Joss Whedon / Marvel like. There’s no serious moment that is not interrupted by a stupid joke, the drama is constantly being sucked out of the film’s veins. Plus the sarcastic quips, so interesting. Anne Rice, shut up Nosferatu, you Dracula Twilight! Name dropping incoming!
The crew kidnaps the girl, have a purely exposition scene where the final girl grades all other people by minute details, then gets the tables turned on her. Ridiculous, the writers confuse Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.
The final girl dresses in skimpy clothing (might as well make use of that R rating), but the nerdy hacker is the one being flirted with. Flirting is only implied towards the Sniper dude, but he dies right away.
That R rating did nothing to assuage the inherent creepiness of having so many adults pinning down or being pinned down by a 12 years old. Hopefully they have all the intimacy coordinators they need.
The “reveal” about the little girl comes at about half way, but the trailers and the posters already spoiled it anyway! Fucking morons.
It’s fitting that they got Kevin Durand replaying his character from Dark Angel. Besides the other hacker girl from Detective Pikachu, I don’t know anyone else. Giancarlo Esposito has a kind of cameo, the one shoot in a day, while Mathew “Ozymandias” Goode has an even more cryptic cameo towards the end.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.