Abomination (2003)

Posted on Sep 03, 2003 under All reviews, Horror |

Written and directed by John Bowker
Starring
- Kylene Wetherell
- Felicia Pandolfi
- Shannon
- Jon Wilmot
- Warren E.B.B.
Produced by Kevin Lindenmuth

Abomination started life as The Evilmaker 2, sequel to writer/director John Bowker’s 2000 feature. But it’s never a good idea to release a numbered sequel to a movie that very, very few people ever saw. (And possibly even fewer people liked.) You can count me as one of those people who never saw The Evilmaker, and frankly, I’m not too eager to go back and rectify the oversight. I know that the sequel is usually notably worse than the original, but still, I don’t really want to see whatever inspired this mess.

Let’s get the technical issues out of the way first, okay? For one thing, it’s shot on video, and not terribly good video, either. There are plenty of micro-budget features that are shot on video which, while it doesn’t look like film, rivals film for clarity and visability. This isn’t one of them; the images are grainy, and the colors are murky and washed-out. In complement to this, the sound mix is undependable; it’s certainly not the worst-sounding indie feature I’ve seen, the combination of uneven miking and a musical soundtrack that’s often just a liiittle too loud makes for an audience that’s just as wearied by the effort of listening as by the effort of watching.

Evil? Feh. You shoulda seen my sophomore apartment.

Of course, you know me. I grade on the curve. The story is king, and if a filmmaker could only scrape together eleven dollars for a budget, I take that into account as I try to assess how well he told his story given his strictures, and how worthwhile the story was to tell in the first place.

Here, though, I’m going to have to define the word “story” as loosely as possible even to make sense of the question. What we’ve got here is a string of events told in generally sequential order which make very little sense in terms of either story mechanics or even cause and effect.

What backstory we need is told to us in a series of psychic flashes, as Kathy (Kylene Wetherell) wanders around the derelict house where the events of the first movie took place — to wit, her younger Goth sister Rachel (Felicia Pandolfi) and some friends stopped off there for shelter on a road trip, and nobody made it out alive. Sharing a slight psychic ability with her sister, Kathy’s set herself to figuring out the mystery.

All well and good — until Kathy opens her mouth.

No Liz Phair jokes, please.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have found the worst actress ever to grace a screen since Angelika Jager’s triumphant screen debut (and sole credit) in Robot Holocaust. Minus the exotic accent. Okay, Wetherell probably isn’t that bad, but she sure isn’t good. Every once in a while she can muster up some thick, melodramatic emotion; most of the time her thespian skills seem stalled in “nonplussed.” I’ve heard more believable acting from stoned losers on C.O.P.S. who’re making it up on the spot. And we’re going to be spending more time with her than anyone else for the next hundred minutes.

Haunted by nightmares of her dead sister, she spends all of her time trying to track down people who might know about what happened. Her boyfriend, Paul (Warren E.B.B.), is… well, nonplussed. (I guess it stands to reason that she would have a significant other of similar temperament.) She tried to rouse fat ex-cop Charles (Jon Wilmot) to help her, but he was dismissed for his work on this very case, so he’s not really enthusiastic about getting back into it.

He does, however, like to watch old videotapes of news reports on cases he’s worked on, so he helpfully presents us with a broadcast all about the deaths, along with an interview with goth psychic Madame Vladmiria (Shannon), who blathers on at length about how the evil is all through the house and needs to be expunged.

“I’m just lying here in this big old possessed house all alone. Call me. Only $1.99 per minute.”

In fact, the next stage of the plot begins when Vladmiria and her giggling assistant go to the house in the night to perform an exorcism stunt. And that’s when the evil presence in the house shows up in the form of dead’n’spooky Rachel and starts possessing and killing people.

Which is pretty much the rest of the movie. Kathy and Charles each have a compelling dream about Rachel, and decide to team up to go to the house. Meanwhile, a father moves his injured teenaged daughter into the house; the daughter gets turned to Cream O’ Wheat by Rachel (I swear, I’m not making this up), and Dad is throttled in his SUV by Rachel while waiting at a stop sign several miles away. Which makes the whole idea of the evil centering on that house even more tenuous than it was before. (These people only entered the story, by the way, simply to up the body count. If you look closely, you can see “fodder” tattooed across both of their foreheads.)

And what happens when Kathy and Charles reach the house?

Mostly, they give me a headache.

President-elect of the Tor Johnson Fan Club.

Oh, there’s plenty of stuff going on. They each get knocked out or translocated several times, and everybody who’s died or been possessed in the movie up to this point comes back, and most of them try to seduce the living, and Evil Rachel fools Paul into coming up and getting possessed during sex (he rolled over pretty damned fast, even for a guy), and then they end up in a parking garage. (I think someone says it’s the place where Kathy’s and Rachel’s parents were killed, but I’m not sure. Damned sound mix.) And Rachel comes back — the real Rachel, who’s been locked in the evil demon Rachel’s realm (the parking garage) since the murders first take place. There are Tarot cards and strange lights and far too much dialogue about how good and love will always win out over evil and ickiness. Not a whit of it makes a bit of sense, or even manages to stay adequately interesting.

Every once in a while, there is a clever moment or camera trick. When Charles and Kathy approach the house for their last assault (because running away like a sane person would be far too, well, sane), the lights in all the rooms are strobing at different rates. I know it was just having a bunch of production assistants flicking the lights on and off as fast as they could, but it did catch my attention. On the other hand, it may simply be the lackluster standards of what came before.

Much more commonly, we’re wandering the same rooms over and over, listening to Kathy mumble and put on a show of petulant annoyance at the slaughter of her friends and lover, and waiting — desperately — for the ending to come. The fact that it comes almost literally as a deus ex machina (or deus ex auteur, if you prefer) isn’t nearly as troubling as such a crusty old plot device would be in a movie where I wasn’t simply trying to endure to the finish line.

“NO MORE DAVE MATTHEWS!!”

Like I said earlier, I try to grade on the curve. While the technical deficiencies were annoying, I’d forgive or gloss over them if it seemed that there was a compelling story somewhere in there trying to get out. (I might even try to downplay some of the truly godawful acting.) But here, it doesn’t seem like the concept of “story” even came up in preproduction. Things happen. Stuff follows stuff. I can’t for the life of me even see what it was that originally got Bowker excited enough to rally the forces and make the movie. I certainly can’t see anything in it worth recommending to another pair of eyeballs.