Now, I love me some bigfoot movies, despite (or because of?) their bad reputation. I expect to be watching many more in the near future. But I'd heard Abominable being referred to as the best "serious" bigfoot horror flick (as many of them bleed over into horror comedy). That bar is pretty low, but I guess I'd have to agree. It's got a decent enough story (cribbing from Rear Window, of all things), decent performances, and enough gore to keep creature feature fans happy.
Abominable centers around Preston Rogers (Matt McCoy), a man six-months removed from a rock climbing accident that took his wife's life and left him paralyzed from the waist down. Per his doctor's orders, he and his aide Otis are going back to the house in the mountains that the couple used to share before the accident - which happens to be extremely wheelchair un-friendly. Basically, Otis carries him up the two flights of stairs and he's stuck there. The still grieving Preston has very little to do but sit on his porch and check out his surroundings with his binoculars. He sees the neighboring home being taken over for the weekend by a group of five young women celebrating a Bachelorette party. At night-fall, Preston sees a mysterious figure swipe one of the women - and wouldn't you know it? There's a storm and the phone lines are down! And no cell phone service out in the mountains either. Preston must find a way to convince everyone that he's not going-crazy/not a peeping-tom and get out of there before the creature kills them all!
I think the easy thing to do would be to have just followed our bachelorette party for the whole runtime, until we hated them all and wanted them to die. So by focusing our story on Preston, we get a couple of benefits (1) We get a relatively unique take on the monster tale - the hero can do nothing but watch (2) We get all of the perks of the cabin-in-the-woods type tale of the Bachelorette party (plenty of victims) and none of the drawbacks (long scenes of annoying dialogue, forced interpersonal drama). I like it when filmmakers take an established idea and just throw horror elements in there. Writer/Director Ryan Schifrin admits that he got the basic idea from Hitchcock's Rear Window (I haven't seen it - I know, I'm a terrible person) - he maybe wears his other influences too proudly on his sleeve, but overall he made a solid fright flick.
What I liked
The kills. There are some good (and one great) ones. They take a while to get going, but once they do they are pretty solid and the gore effects are fun. The first big one (Tiffany Shepis in the shower) is really pretty amazing... it's probably the moment where the "bigfoot movie baggage" works in Abominable's favor. You are sort of lulled in - yeah, you've seen some movement in the bushes, and a couple of people get mysteriously dragged away, the same old same old. But when this one hits it's the real deal. I actually exclaimed "Holy Shit!" while watching alone, which is rare. While the rest of the bigfoot damage doesn't reach this high-water mark, it's still more good than bad.
And overall, it's just admirable that they take the whole bigfoot thing seriously. I think having your characters and your film in general show some respect for the monster goes a long way to building a credible threat in these types of movies. Often times, you get a whole "haha-nudge-wink we know we're making a big hunk of cheese" with bigfoot flicks. Yeah, there are some attempts at humor here, but never as it pertains to our creature.
And you see the bigfoot a lot too. He looks okay - the face isn't fantastic (it looks pretty lifeless), but it's far better than some of the CGI BF's I've seen lately. And I admire that they are not afraid to show it. He's probably in the last act just as much as any other character. Again, showing some respect to your big bad goes a long way. You can tell they are actually trying to make him more realistic/neanderthal-like too - broad forehead, set apart eyes. The bigfoot cave also has what appears to be a gorilla skull strewn about with the other remains. As a (disgraced) anthropology major I appreciate that they were trying to make that connection rather than just making some sort of random face.
What I didn't like
Schifrin cops to being a big fan of 70's-80's monster movies. That love served Abominable well in many ways. But there were a couple of times where the influences were a little too obvious/tongue-in-cheek. For instance, I would propose an eternal ban on "we're going to need a bigger ______" ("knife," in this case). Also, since I am obliged to put newspapers in here:
I know it's supposed to be cute, but I prefer the more serious tone we get in the majority of the movie. Also, for some reason there is more than one poop joke, and they are actually kind of gross. Sadly, when I think about this movie in the future, poop is one of the things I'll think of. (Probably half of Lance Henriksen's screen time is spent on a diarrhea story. Not good use of the man.)
I did notice that the music/score was particularly grating too. You know the sound when a score is trying to amp up the tension by just having all of the strings just slowly screech higher and higher and higher? This movie does that a lot. It just seems like it's trying to artificially create tension that isn't there. I think a more low key (synth?) score would have been more fitting. Imagine my surprise when I watched the extras and found out that Ryan Schifrin is the son of World Renowned Film Composer Lalo Schifrin, who did the music for Abominable as well. Four Oscar nominations - a high pedigree for a BF movie. So what do I know?
Ultimately
I know I've seen Abominable pop-up on SyFy every now and again, and it certainly deserves a better fate than that. Faults and all, there is some really good stuff here, and it's a good update of the 80's style creature-feature that we all know and love. As a regular movie, it's pretty decent. For a bigfoot movie, it's awesome.
I would recommend this film.
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