Part heist movie, part vampire horror, ABIGAIL (2024) is a movie about a team of criminals recruited to kidnap a young girl for ransom, only to find out they kidnapped the last kid they should be messing with. It was overall pretty fun, though the filmmakers, as if they didn’t trust themselves or the audience, lean on the tropes so hard the whole thing feels a little tedious. Let me explain.

The movie starts with a team of criminals who don’t know each other and have been recruited by a mysterious figure to kidnap a rich man’s daughter for ransom and keep her in an old mansion until they receive further instructions. We don’t know their true names and little about their backgrounds, and they follow the heist movie tropes of being overly tough and constantly bickering and getting on each other’s nerves. The main protagonist is “Joey,” a military veteran and former drug addict trying to do right so she can get her son back. Melissa Barrera puts her heart into trying to make the audience care about Joey, though it’s all fairly generic; where she shines is when she interacts with the team’s other would-be leader, “Frank” (Dan Stevens), a self-serving ex-cop, alternately as an enemy and an ally. When they play off each other, it’s a lot of fun.

Once the twist is revealed (which is given in the trailer as it’s always the main hook, and it’s a great hook) things start to get rolling, but there’s a problem: The vampire is so powerful that the movie should be over in five minutes, despite her liking to play with her food. As a result, the screen time is padded with tropes used over and over, like the monster wasting time howling at instead of simply killing them, our heroes attacking the vampire one by one, yelling a loud war cry when they attack to let the vampire know they’re right behind her, the villain dancing and being gleeful as a way of expressing evil, and the villain throwing the hero across the room repeatedly instead of simply killing them.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with a good trope. They’re staples of storytelling, and Hollywood relies on them. Tropes become tropes because audiences like them, and then over time audiences expect them, and woe to storytellers who flaunt expectations a bit too much. The problem I had with ABIGAIL is these tropes were all packed in and used over and over to the point of being tedious. In the last act, a few more twists are thrown in that don’t accomplish must other than to make it all feel even longer.

All that bitchiness aside–I am a jaded horror viewer, after all–ABIGAIL overall is pretty fun and doesn’t demand anything really of its viewers other than they chill out, sit back, and have a good time. There’s a lot of action, a little campiness, a cool location in the dilapidated mansion, plenty of gore, some twists, and a plucky heroine, elevating it from the usual horror B movie while planting it firmly among the pack. It’s a great movie for those times you really need a simple chicken soup horror film to watch. So be sure to check it out for yourself.

When I first caught the trailer for SPUTNIK (2020), I was pretty darn excited. The old Soviet Union, a ship crashing with alien life aboard? Count me in. Unfortunately, I never did find it, and it slipped off my radar. A short time ago, I found it for rent and grabbed the chance to watch it. Totally worth the wait: I loved this one.

The movie starts with two Soviet Union cosmonauts preparing to bring their spacecraft home in 1983. Unfortunately, something comes home with them. While a commander lies to the regime, which lies to the citizenry about the fate of the cosmonauts, a controversial doctor is recruited to come to a secluded facility. There, she learns one of the cosmonauts is being held against his will and studied. Her task: separate him from the thing that lives inside him. The title, SPUTNIK, refers not to the 1956 space launch but to its literal Russian meaning, which is “companion.”

I loved everything about this movie, from the drab dystopian and analog aesthetic to the faceless soldiers who seemed to be everywhere to the creature itself. Thematically, the film explores how an oppressive system coerces and controls through fear, how people can be selfish to get along or take risks to do the right thing, and the stupidity of a system itself when it’s scared and therefore tends to regard everything as either a threat or a weapon.

The first two acts are almost perfect in my view, as the doctor discovers the nature of the parasite, how it feeds, and what the base’s commander wants. The last act becomes a bit convoluted, and the protagonist comes off a little erratic and coldly aloof, but overall it didn’t detract much for me. My only real peeve is it’s in Russian; while I don’t mind subtitles, in fact I enjoy hearing a foreign film in its original language without what often ends up bad dubbing, the subtitling had a small type size, making it a bit hard to both read and watch at the same time.

Overall, again, I loved SPUTNIK and would recommend it as a very cool and different little sci-fi horror gem.

In THE FIRST OMEN, we get the prequel to the classic 1970s film THE OMEN that no one wanted but nonetheless turned out surprisingly good.

This movie might have slipped past my radar but for that killer trailer with a lot of creepy images playing backwards and set to the wonderfully moody “If I Had a Heart” by Fever Ray. Though I knew not to ever get my hopes up too high based on a trailer, the effect grabbed me and enticed me to watch as soon as it started streaming.

In the movie, Margaret, a young American notiviate (preparing to become a nun), travels to Rome to work at a Catholic orphanage, where she uncovers a conspiracy to produce the birth of the Antichrist.

So, did we need this? Not really, though the film isn’t a cash grab on familiarity but instead uses it as a launch pad to find its own creepy identity. Since this is a prequel, we know basically where everything is going, and while the result isn’t very surprising, it’s great to look at, and it keeps you invested by focusing on atmosphere, mood, and imagery instead of jump scares. A really interesting aspect of the creepiness itself is the self-effacing rituals of the Catholic Church itself, which contributed nicely to the mundane sense of general threat and eeriness. The movie also captured that ’70s horror aesthetic really well, respecting its source material and adding to it, and also presenting a few aesthetic nods to other punchy horror films of the era like THE EXORCIST and POSSESSION. Nell Tiger Free was a real surprise as Margaret, giving her heart and soul to the role and bringing a lot of layers to the character.

Overall, I liked THE FIRST OMEN a lot. It didn’t wow me and produce the same sense of wonder like THE OMEN did back in the day, but it’s a respectable companion to it, and a worthwhile horror movie even without the franchise.

In BUG (2006), a psychological horror film directed by William Friedkin (THE EXORCIST) and written by Tracy Letts (based on his 1996 play), a lonely woman connects with a paranoid drifter and engages in a race to delusion and madness. This is a good movie about delusion and the dark if occasionally comforting places it can take us.

Agnes (Ashley Judd) lives in a motel and works at a bar. She struggles to find moments of happiness, often aided by drugs and alcohol, after losing her son years earlier to a kidnapping and her ex-husband (a very menacing Harry Connick Jr.) tried to kill her and went to jail. A friend introduces her to Peter (Michael Shannon), who is courteous if incredibly socially awkward. He is so non-threatening and bumbling that she likes having him around; his presence is a comfort.

When her old life threatens to return and rob of her of any control she has left she latches onto Peter, who becomes increasingly erratic, claiming massive forces are pursuing him and have infected him with a strange parasite.

The result is psychological horror, a locked room where the participants have locked themselves inside their own world, and a lot of the room is their shared head space. No matter how crazy Peter acts, Agnes goes along with it, weaving an elaborate conspiracy crashing toward a final scene that is simply breathtaking in its passion and audacity. Judd and Shannon give the roles their absolute all, sweeping us along, and we are terrified, not so much scared for ourselves but for where this is all going for these people who obviously need help.

Overall, I found BUG to be a nice surprise. When I first saw it come out, I pictured it as a typical horror grossout, but it’s far more complex than that, far more psychological, powerful, and yes, relevant. In today’s world, where conspiracy theories get mainstreamed by the internet, you might even find yourself saying, Oh, I know a guy exactly like that.