Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Abomination

Cody Lee's mom coughed up a "tumor" one night, which came to life and fed itself to Cody while he slept. Then he coughed it up, became possessed by it, put on sunglasses to prove that he's evil now and then went around killing people to feed to his ever-growing "tumor".
The Abomination is low budget, poorly acted, poorly written, full of religious jargle I didn't really understand and long, drawn out boring parts. It was filmed without sound, with dialogue dubbed in later. There are scenes of people just screaming, which is really hard to listen to, and it is in no way a good movie.
However, there is something about this lousy, terrible movie that made me want to watch it all the way to the end. More than that, there's a scene that genuinely creeped me out:
Cody is in the kitchen. The walls and cupboards are spattered with blood and the many giant, slimy, bloody puppet mouths of the abomination are emerging from various cupboards and washing machines. There's a bloody skull and hand on the table, along with a washtub filled with soggy yellow sheets that I guess are supposed to look like guts, which he's stirring and feeding to the monster with a pitchfork.
It felt like a room in a haunted house walk through. Which maybe isn't saying much; a lot of walk through haunted houses are pretty lame. But it was just tableauy and unsettling enough to be a gorgeously horrific moment in an otherwise lousy movie. Much as I may make fun of The Abomination as a whole (I think it would make a good episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 if it weren't so damn gory), that one scene will haunt me for all my days. I don't really know why, but it had an intangible creepiness that really got to me.
Back before I used to watch horror movies, my brother used to try a lot to get me to watch The Abomination. He tried to convince me that the special effects were so crummy that it wouldn't scare me. Having seen it now, I can safely say I was right to not watch it back then. It would have scared the crap out of me. I was a coward for a very long time.
I'm not entirely sure what changed that turned me into the gorehound I've become.

End of line.
-Sally

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