Review #51: The Abandoned (2015)


This review was originally written in October 2017.

Horror Movie October day 26: The Abandoned

As with a lot of these movies, I noticed this on Netflix and it sounded interesting. Last night, after watching the first half an hour and kind of hating it, I put it down and came back to it tonight, to give it another chance.

This movie is about a woman (named Streak... seriously people, why are all of these protagonists given such terrible names?) who takes a job as a night security guard in a gigantic abandoned apartment building. (I say "abandoned", but a building with a full suite of active surveillance cameras and two full-time security guards isn't what I would call abandoned.) An abandoned apartment building sounds like a rad setting for a horror movie, right? I'm picturing characters going into apartments, finding old belongings, it's probably haunted by the tenants, and so on and so on. Well, this movie gives us the best part of an abandoned apartment building: The part that doesn't resemble an apartment building at all!

Instead of going into apartments, the main character discovers a locked door in the basement that leads to a crypt or something? And in that crypt there used to be a bunch of deformed children that were hidden away, and I wasn't clear whether the children were still alive down there or if we were seeing their ghosts. In any case, this could have been placed anywhere rather than an apartment building and nothing would have been different.

I should mention that I hate both of the primary characters. The main one, Streak, acts incredibly stupidly (Oh, breaking open a locked door she was forbidden to open on her first day of a job she really can't afford to lose? Sounds like management material to me) and the male lead can't decide whether he's a jerk or a worse jerk. There's supposed to be some pathos, some twists, some reveals, but none of it made me care about them and only served to make me dislike them even more.

Oh, and there's a "twist" at the end of this movie that makes no sense. Like, literally no sense. And yet I saw it coming anyway because this movie was that bad.

Final Rating: 2/10 Hobos with Knives

Things To Do On Your First Night At A New Job: Shut up and follow directions, and don't break open locked doors or invite hobos to spend the night unsupervised

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #181: The Evil Dead (1981)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #36: The Evil Dead (1981) As much as I'm trying to make these reviews as standalone as possible, I feel the need to tie this one (at least a little bit) into the last one (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and the next one (Evil Dead II). So, bear with me I guess. I'm a huge fan of the Evil Dead series as a whole. Evil Dead II was one of the first horror films I ever saw, and for many years was my favorite movie of all time. However, I was never a very big fan of the first movie; I only saw The Evil Dead a couple times and when I did, it felt "lesser" than Evil Dead II in every way. I'll save most of my comments about EDII until the next review, but I just want to say that in this particular rewatch, I came out liking The Evil Dead WAY more than I used to, and liking Evil Dead II a little bit less (though I still love it). If you aren't familiar with the series at all, The E
Read more

Review #153: The Endless (2018)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #8 - The Endless (2018) A disclaimer: Most of this review is going to be me complaining about the logistics and mechanics of this movie, and it's going to be full of spoilers. I'll try to summarize my non-mechanical thoughts as concisely as possible. The Endless is an interesting film created by writing/directing duo Benson and Moorhead. Apart from Spring (which to my knowledge doesn't fit into this film's universe, though I could be mistaken) this was the first Benson & Moorhead joint I'd seen, and I was instantly intrigued by the premise: two brothers escaped a cult ten years ago, and after hearing that the cult was seemingly getting ready to kill themselves, they go back for one last visit to get some closure. When they get there, they realize that the cult's supernatural beliefs seem to be true, and they get caught up in a strange web of timey-wimeyness under the u
Read more

Review #179: It (2017)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #34: It (2017) I read It about twenty years ago; it's probably the longest book I've read in full. I think the book is very, very good (though also very, very Stephen King, which means there's a lot in its pages that makes it quantitatively worse than it could be) and for the most part this movie is a faithful adaptation... of half of it. I'll save most of my book vs. movie complaints for later on, but I'll just say that the book itself is two very important and very intertwined halves of a story, and while I understand the reasoning to cut it in half (doing the whole book justice would take well over four hours' worth of screentime), I really do think it does the whole story a disservice when this entire film starts and ends with the characters as kids. The book is constantly jumping back and forth between the child half of the story and the adult half, to the point where
Read more