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