Camp doesn’t quite cover Ryan Schifrin’s free-for-all, unrepentantly escapist slasher-cum-monster flick, Abominable which, if there is any justice in the world, will proudly assume its place in the archives as a work of minor cult horror. If nothing else, who has the mind to create an homage to one of the worst epochs (it seemed that long for some of us) in cinema history–1980’s horror–and do so with a straight face while putting forth the effort to posit just enough dry wit and in-jokes to make it worthwhile?
Preston Rogers (Matt McCoy)–victim of a rock climbing incident six months prior, leaving him a paraplegic and a widower–is sent by his therapist to stay for three days at the tragic site in order for him to confront and cope with his pain. As a handful of college-aged girls arrive for a weekend outing in the cabin next to Rogers’s, he believes he witnesses some type of creature abduct one of the girls. Stranded with no one willing to believe his paranoid claims, he is forced to watch as a Bigfoot-esque beast (Michael Deak) preys upon the females before it comes for him.
The fun of Abominable for any semi- to well-versed film goer is its obvious tongue-in-cheek reliance upon the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window as Schifrin replaces Raymond Burr with a literal monster. We watch as Rogers, confined to a wheelchair, spends most of the film peering helplessly through a set of binoculars as he is forced to witness atrocity after bloody atrocity at the paws of an impossible creature while remaining impotent in regards to helping or escaping. Not content to make this his trick pony, Schifrin piles on the wry wit by casting McCoy as Rogers, a Norman Bates look alike who, at every turn, makes the viewer grimace in that he was that close to convincing someone of the imminent threat in every other scene.
While landing each and every blow just above the belt as he maintains his focus in creating an homage to the truly unworthy–1980’s horror–Schifrin pummels us with much satiric guilty pleasure gore and superfluous nudity amid a slew of cameos from various horror veterans of the genre’s most blush-inducing period, such as Jeffrey Combs, Lance Henrikson, Tiffany Shepis, and Dee-Wallace. Wink and a nod indeed. For good measure, we also have famed producer Neal Fredericks (The Blair Witch Project) overseeing the work.
Even the score for the film is grossly (in)appropriate as Lalo Schifrin (natch, the director’s famed dad) gives us heroic trumpets and a steady calvary motif when we are in the homestretch with our excessively sympathetic hero. Fun fun.
Lastly, aside from drenching us in his straight-laced sardonicism throughout, Schifrin makes the viewer ironically aware of how closely Oliver Platt resembles a big furry beast (with a more furrowed brow) as the intentionally less-than-convincing Sasquatch monster could plausibly appear alongside the actor in a family portrait and everyone would readily assume at a glance that the furry one is Platt’s overgrown brother.
Though not as witty nor as black humorish as Mary Harron’s American Psycho or even John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, Abominable is nonetheless as self-professed guilty pleasure flick whose inspiration is firmly rooted in the least admirable of films–1980’s slasher pictures. Thankfully, Schifrin wasn’t setting out to praise the era but single-mindedly mock it by producing a film highlighting all of the era’s absurdities, which he accomplishes by ironically reveling in them. The result is an amusing outing that never claims to have reinvented the wheel, merely appreciates it for what it is. My only complaint is the pain brought forth in seeing Jeffrey Combs’s peppered beard alongside the way-too-premature vision of the actor on an oxygen tank. To think that some day we might be without Doctor West is indeed horrific.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
