DVD: The Abandoned

• This little-seen horror film should remain that way.

Genre: Bad horror films
Director: Nacho Cerda
Release date: June 19, 2007
Cast: Anastasia Hille, Karel Roden, Valentin Ganev, Carlos Reig-Plaza
Verdict: &

I'm pining for a horror film that doesn't rely on booming bass to scare me in lieu of actual frightening cinema. And it's not just because I'm an apartment dweller with a subwoofer that must be turned down during these films lest I get evicted — it's that it has become such a predictable crutch for these empty films. The best that can be said about The Abandoned — the most visible of the eight films that made up the "After Dark Horrorfest" — is it benefits visually from its remote Russian setting. Anastasia Hille, doing a Marg Helgenberger sort of thing, finds that she has inherited her late mother's decrepit old home in the middle of Russian nowhere. She travels there and runs into an alleged twin brother with whom she spends much of the movie attempting to avoid a couple of zombie replicas of themselves and reliving past horrific family events. It's so numbingly uneventful that I found myself wondering if there was a functioning toilet in this old dump and if Marie (that's the lead character) found a stash of wine and cheese to enjoy between hours spent running from one empty room to another. In the end, Marie finds the past is best left buried, as is this movie. // DVD notes // For the truly perverse among you, there's a making-of featurette.