I’ve seen The Abomination about five times now, which means that it’s the movie I’ve seen the most out of my collection gore/exploitation/bad movie flicks—not counting Manos: The Hands of Fate, which I’ve seen about fifteen times. The first time I saw it was by myself—the second, with a friend and my family, and then with a group of friends, and finally twice again by myself. It’s good. It’s not the perfect gore film—that honor, in my humble opinion, goes to Don’t Go in the Woods—but it’s very good. I almost feel bad saying that—that it should rightfully be more, but I can’t go that extra mile. Lemme talk about it a little bit.
Cody Lee is a teenager (I think) who enjoys barbecue, his girlfriend, and ignoring his religion-crazed mother. She is a little crazy and if the lighting’s just right she looks like she’s rotting. She can’t take her eyes off Brother Fogg, a televangelist who talks about the Whore of Babylon. Cody has dreams about killing his friends and feeding them to a mouth-in-a-cupboard called the Abomination, which he states (to his psychiatrist in a frame story I failed to mention), is that described the “Prophecy of Daniel” (weren’t there several?). “Max Raven”, in reality Bret McCormick, obviously has something against religion—let’s keep watching.
Cody’s mom believes she has a lung tumor, which Brother Fogg heals her of—she coughs it up. Then, it crawls inside Cody’s mouth while he sleeps, and he begins to become fond of wearing sunglasses. Those sunglasses mean trouble for anyone who gets in Cody’s path, and soon he starts committing the murders he sees in his dreams, taking small periods in between to cough a lot and yell at his mother. And that’s essentially the whole movie up until the climax—killing, yelling, killing, yelling. Cody’s mom goes to Brother Fogg to pay him for removing the tumor, and mentions that she wants him to exorcise Cody, whom she (correctly) deduces to be possessed. Here the sound sync on my tape goes a little off, so a silo laughs instead of Brother Fogg—one of Cody’s friend’s head hits the ground and makes the noise of the shovel that killed him, while the blow itself is completely silent. It’s mildly amusing.
It’s around this time, too, that the movie starts to get a little weird. Remember how I said that Cody was explaining everything to his psychiatrist in that frame story? Throughout the entire film, Cody appears desperate to find peace from the demonic thing living in his head—but after this point, his voice deepens and he starts preaching about how humanity should exist only to be sent down the gullet of the Abomination. I understand that he’s supposed to be possessed, but it’s a weird shift overall. It’s off. I can’t quite properly explain it.
So, to wrap things up, Cody feeds his mom to the Abomination in a long (very long) sequence, stirs a pot of viscera, is impaled by his girlfriend who gets eaten anyway, and then it was revealed that yes, Bret McCormick was one of those exploitation filmmakers who thought that taking the concept for an ending from The Wizard of Oz was original (no offense, Bret). Still, the ending dialogue between Cody—now revealed as a lunatic (shock!)—and his doctor leaves me satisfied.
I couldn’t hope to bear a sixth view of The Abomination—it was great at first but now I just need to rest. I guess that means it’s not one of my favorite movies, because when I designate a movie as my favorite I could watch for the next sixty years nonstop and never get sick of it. Maybe I’ll review one of my favorites someday. Still, finding a copy of this beast is about as tough as it gets—I got lucky. Shortly after I got my copy I actually had the honor of communicating with Glen Coburn, the director of the 1984 Bloodsuckers from Outer Space, who is a close friend of Matt Devlen, creator of The Abomination’s sister film, Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants; via him I communicated with Matt, now the owner to the rights of both films, to try to secure some kind of DVD release for The Abomination. Unfortunately, that went nowhere, making this a sort of Holy Grail, one of many in the horror film biz. We can all dream, can’t we?
7/10
- Adam "Mudman" Bezecny
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