‘Abigail’ Review: A Remake of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ Turns Into a Brutally Monotonous Genre Mashup

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic From the moment the film was announced a year ago, “Abigail” has been marketed as a remake of “Dracula’s Daughter,” the 1936 Universal Pictures curio.

So it’s no spoiler to say that the title character of “Abigail” is…Dracula’s daughter. Yet if you went in not knowing that, it might be the only real surprise in the movie, apart from what a brutally monotonous blood-vomiting genre mashup it is.

For a while, we think we’re watching a standard kidnap thriller. It opens with Abigail (Alisha Weir), who is 12, on the ballet stage rehearsing “Swan Lake,” a most definite vampire homage, since Tchaikovsky’s gorgeous heart-swelling score is the same music that played over the opening credits of the 1931 Bela Lugosi “Dracula.” That lyrical entré ends in about three minutes, as the kidnappers, all overstated profane synthetic crudeness, jam themselves into a van and abscond with Abigail, who they take to a hideaway mansion and stash in one of the bedrooms.

If the crime goes off as planned, each of them will get $7 million in ransom money. But with their fake names and bumptious bickering, which starts in scene one and rarely lets up, they’re like characters in a bargain-basement gloss on “The Desperate Hours” crossed with “Reservoir Dogs” crossed with the worst A24 house-party horror film you could imagine. “Dracula’s Daughter,” made to cash in on the original “Dracula’s” success (though it had none of the same actors), was a rather stodgy London-fog monster movie starring Gloria Holden, who plays the title character like Greta Garbo as an aristocratic mesmerist.