Vampiress Review: Abigail

The Gist:  A group of criminals are tasked with kidnapping a 12 year old ballet dancer not realizing that not only is she the daughter of a powerful mob boss but she is also an unstoppable vampire. 

Clarification: I would best describe this film as if Home Alone was a horror movie. I mean it's literally about a little girl who is left at home alone who must deal with a group of criminals trying to get her and using underhanded tricks and tactics to protect herself.  She's basically girl MaCauley Culken with fangs. 

Female Vampire Factor:  Of course we have the title character Abigail played by Allisha Weir.

She is basically what happens if Claudia from Interview with a Vampire made it to modern times and became a mafia assassin. The anti-hero of the film, we find out that she's a woman eternally stuck in the body of a twelve-year-old who is an assassin for her fathers criminal organization specializing in getting rid of those who wrong him.  The criminals who kidnap her then find out the hard way that the kidnapping was just an elaborate plan to get them trapped in the house with her so that she could kill them.    

Once she reveals herself she spends a majority of the movie being very sarcastic and sadistic, working in a lot of ballet dancing in with her pursuit of her victims showing that she's toying with them more than anything. 

At one point she does bite and turn of her kidnappers in the computer hacker "Sammie" played by Kathryn Newton.

Sammy gets bit while the crew were trying to subdue Abigail.  At first it seems that she will be fine but we then find out that in the vampire mythos of this film anyone bitten by a vampire can be controlled by that vampire to the point that the person becomes an extension of them which is what happens to Sammy. Abigail eventually takes over her body and uses her to attack her fellow kidnappers. 

Problem is, even though she herself is not a vampire but the puppet of the vampire she still has the same weaknesses.  Because of this we also learn that sunlight unlike in other movies where it's a agonizing painful burn is an insta kill. 

Final Thought:  I give this one a Vampire Beauty Rating of 2 out of 5 as clearly you aren't getting much out of a movie about a killer 12 year old but from a purely entertainment standpoint it's a 5.   Like I said above, if you like the movie Home Alone and you like horror films it's a perfect combination of the two genre's and it's not bogged down with a lot of backstory.  The plot is exactly what's happening from beginning to end and anything you learn about the characters is learned while the events are happening and not through flashbacks that kill the mood of the film.  I definitely recommend it. 

 

NBC's "Dracula" cancelled after 1 season.

The NBC fall lineup was announced earlier in the week and amongst the shows who got the ax was the Friday night vampire drama "Dracula".

Dracula which starred Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the Hungarian count rebuilding his life as an American entrepreneur living in London (confusing right?) debuted last fall to a lot of hype and high ratings but failed to live up to that hype and was downright bashed by many critics followed by viewership regularly falling as the weeks went on.  With the vast popularity of the vampire drama amongst the female demographic how exactly did this show go wrong?

IF IT ISN'T BROKE FIX IT ANYWAY
This seemed to be the idea used with the plot of this show.  The character "Dracula" has a following that spans almost a century and the idea of building a show around his love life should work as that is what is currently popular amongst fans of the genre (see Twilight, Vampire Diaries, True Blood and the return of Anne Rices "Lestat").  But instead the show seemed to spend more time building the character as a hero and political figure.  Over 5 million viewers mostly women tuned in on October 25th for the debut of the show to see a sexy young Dracula swoon, slobber and bite women and instead they got a show about POLITICS.

Dracula spent most episodes having flashbacks, complaining, performing experiments to try to cure his vampirism and attending board meetings.  Imagine Vampire Diaries but instead of all the relationship rollercoasters and supernatural creature fighting it was an hour of the mystic fall kids worrying about their grades.  While there was tons of room for improvement in a season 2 it really didn't feel like the plot was moving along fast enough to save the show and low and behold it got cancelled.

THINGS THAT COULD HAVE HELPED THE SHOW
 - Stick with the core Dracula values:  Dracula wasn't an environmentalist and civil rights activist and if he was it wouldn't be for moralistic reasons.   As goofy as this may sound he should have been patterned more like the 1990's teen drama Dracula: The Series which had a similar plot but took place in a more modern era.  

- More eye candy:  Dracula deep down was a love sick puppy who collected women for his amusement but only had sites for one.  If this show was to delve into his everyday life the guy should have been a womanizing playboy.  By this point in the Dracula history he should've had enough vampire brides to make his own Robert Palmer video.

 Instead not only is he brideless but the only person who lives with him is Renfield (who's now a big black guy from the US).

- Turn on a light:  I realize that the show takes place pre Thomas Edison and one of the main plot points is that Dracula was pushing to invent a source of self sustaining energy (have I mentioned NBC Universal is owned by General Electric yet?) but it's a major problem if on a high definition television no matter how much you adjust your TV you can still barely see what's going on.  Any of the scenes at night (IE most of the show) might as well been a radio show.

In the end another one bites the dust which we should be used to by now (Moonlight, the Gates, Dark Shadows remake,).  On the bright side The Vampire Diaries, the Originals and From Dusk Till Dawn have all been renewed, there's still one more season left of True Blood which starts in June and FX debuts The Strain this summer.

The one thing I will give them is they went out on a positive note as the last 10 minutes of the shows existence saw the ONLY female main character who gets turned.  In the series finale episode "Let There be Light" Lucy (Katie McGrath) gets bitten earlier in the episode by an angry Grayson for moving in on his territory (yep she tries to go lesbo on Mina and when Mina rejects her sleeps with her fiance Jonathon for revenge). The first person Lucy sees when she wakes up is her mother and the result is below.

 Yeah it's like shooting off the best fireworks after everyone's already gone home and are in bed but at least it happened.