Abattoir

Abattoir gets past its clunky storytelling with a great look - dark, shadowed, with a 1940s hardboiled feel - along with some well-staged shocks and scares.

While Bousman's climax is a not terribly original effects-laden haunted house, the house's builder, and his motives, have enough of their own flavor to please a hardened horror fan.

Though it’s handsome enough to look at, Abattoir can’t quite seem to decide just how supernatural it wants to be or how meta its horror content should play

Thankfully Bousman’s endgame does deliver the supernatural slaughterhouse of the title to great effect with inspired spectral victims looped in suspended animation. It’s so memorably jarring that you wonder if the whole was just sloppily reverse engineered from this massive undertaking.

Ultimately, this film has a memorable villain and a stunning location, and not much else.

The germ of an interesting idea was here, and the collection of murder rooms makes for a dazzling third act setting. But the movie flatlines every time a chewy supporting player (Michael Pare is another) isn’t on the screen.

The dialogue isn’t just awkward and unbelievable — it’s as if it was written by a teenager raised on only bad horror movies.