"The endings are often a little bit gory," sang Alisha Weir in Naughty, a tentpole tune from 2022’s Matilda the Musical. Graduating from bookworm to blood-sucking ballerina, Weir causes naughtier, gorier trouble in this horror from Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (Scream 2022), a blood-bomb of fun with a key caveat. From the reveals about Weir’s title vampire on, Abigail barely offers more surprises than Matilda’s riff on pre-existing material.
A kind of haunted-heist movie with fangs, it begins at an elegant clip with a criminal gang in the middle of a job for Giancarlo Esposito’s Lambert, who names them after the Rat Pack (Frank, etc) for secrecy. Their mission? To kidnap ‘Tiny Dancer’ and hold her at a country pile for 24 hours, awaiting the ransom.
