The Abandoned - Movie Review

The Abandoned

This movie is part of the “After Dark Horrorfest” of 2006; “One Of The 8 Films To Die For”. When I first saw the trailer for the eight films, I thought that maybe I would finally get some decent horror movies that would scare me, a combination of horror and thriller. However, the commercials promised what the product couldn’t produce. Since the start of these movies, they have shown only to be B grade horror movies. Usually there are maybe one or two that are good or decent, but the rest are just rubbish and bollix. So the question is, is this Nacho Cerda’ horror movie to die for or should this movie be abandoned?

The story is pretty simple. An adopted woman, Marie Jones (Anastasia Hille), sets out to Russia to find who her family was. Once there, she finds out who her mother was and where she lived. When she sets out to see if she can further uncover what happened to her mother, strange things begin to happen. Along the way she runs into people who act freaky around her and don’t answer her questions. She also runs into her brother, Nicolai (Karel Roden), that she never knew she had. Together, they try and find out what is going on.

Grade – F

This starts out as pretty much a typical horror film. Things go bump in the night, a car runs out of power in the middle of nowhere, and the main character goes out into woods and to an old house shouting, “Hello?!”. However, once you find yourself halfway through the movie and there’s not much happening, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know who the characters really are, and you don’t really care about anything in the movie you’re pretty much screwed. You’ve already wasted 45 minutes on the movie, you might as well press on. The editing of this movie is just awful. Jump cuts, freeze frames, unnecessary shaky views of household items permeate this picture. For example, Marie hits a guy with a big log and runs away from him. He catches up to her, she asks, “Who are you?!”, he gives her an evilish look…and then cut and all is calm and they’re sitting down talking calmly.

There are two main problems with this movie. First of all, none of the characters are built up. This sounds like there might be a slew of character this movie focuses on, but there are really only two people in this whole movie. You aren’t given what drives them, who they are as people, any background, or really even what kind of personality they have. There is one scene where Marie starts to freak out and she starts rambling about her freaking out but her character isn’t hashed out at all for you to understand what the heck she is talking about. About two thirds of the way through the movie, right as you’re about to get to the so-called climax of the film, the movie tries to build background for both characters in a jump shot of five minutes. Yet, there is no building up of the characters for us to care or even understand what they are going through. I found myself rooting for whatever was trying to kill them because I thought maybe it would be more interesting than our main characters!

The other thing this movie fails at is having a coherent plot. The storyline tries to unfold like M. Night Shyamalan of “The 6^th Sense fame” but ends up unfolding worse than M. Night Shyamalan of “The Happening” fame! Nicolai is trying to find out what happen to his parents and is just as in the dark as Marie. Then with freaky stuff is coming to a head, he suddenly knows what the heck is going on. How?! I don’t know! He seems to just be there to advance the plot. Also, the “reveal” is utterly confusing and I really have to say it makes no sense whatsoever. They’re dead, but not really, but they are, but they’re not, yet their ghosts, but their haunting themselves, but they….*sizzle, fry, burst into flames*. Captain Kirk just needed to show the androids in “I, Mudd” this movie for them to destroy themselves. This movie also has one count of unnecessary nudity. Flag on the field! Ten yard penalty!

This movie is just abject failure. Characters who are almost one dimentional, you don’t care anything about go on a mission that they think they will just happen upon only for stupid things to occur to them until they find out what’s going on which you won’t know yourself. Good job, Horrorfest, way to let me down. However, I can’t really blame them. After watching this dreck, I really felt this was a film that was going to kill me, or at least, make me kill myself from its stupidity.