Review: The Abomination (1986)
Directed by: Bret McCormick (as Max Raven)
Starring: Scott Davis, Jude Johnson, Blue Thompson
Written by: Bret McCormick (as Brando Glutz)
Music by: Kim Davis, Richard Davis, John Hudek
Country: United States
Not currently available on physical media
IMDb
The Abomination is a lo-fidelity symphony of bodily noise. It’s a sloppy buffet of eating, digesting, farting, shitting, puking, and bloodletting. Writer/director Bret McCormick’s visceral Super 8 indie — about a mom living in a drab home with so much wood paneling who pukes up a creature that infects her son, who then pukes up more creatures that need to be fed human tissue that he’s now compelled to provide — is fascinated by the ways our flesh suits expel their contents. It’s also pretty enraptured by the ways our mushy gray matter intakes drivel of the religious kind. Its messy tangle of glorious splatter and existential absurdity makes it a worthwhile curio, a sort of 8-track Cronenberg demo.
This is not a particularly well-threaded tale, which opens with a five-minute spoiler reel of all the movie’s best bloody bits and is plagued by trucks driving along dusty rural roads and cuts to grazing wildlife, but it’s the type of trash-gore marvel that fueled the direct to VHS movement. McCormick supposedly filmed from a short outline instead of a full script and that theory is substantiated by the loosely flowing, sometimes distracted but invariably captivating mosaic of repulsive, cheap, and wonderful assaults on the flesh, sometimes intentional comedy, substantially terrible dubbing that the director goes to skyscraperian heights to mask (almost all scenes of chit-chat are focused on the listener, while the speaker proselytizes off screen via ADR), and extended moments of Scott Davis pedo-grinning in sunglasses and flannel (obviously an inspiration for Roddy Piper) while an acquaintance is fed to his kitchen cabinet-bound Audrey II knock-off (sans velvety cruciferous vocal cords).
As often happens with these no-budget forays through the most sordid and audacious corridors of the genre, it’s sometimes the stuff any sane or competent editor would cut that imbues the film with its distinctly pungent charms. One of The Abomination’s most excessive scenes is the 10-minute death knell of our main character’s mother, in which she is devoured at an excruciatingly leisurely pace as her son observes with debaucherous glee (technically I don’t think he’s masturbating, but his smile says otherwise) and the audio palette is flooded with the abomination’s constantly clipping hisses. On paper, it’s so long and someone should have cleaned up the sound levels and McCormick should have panned away from Davis’ uncomfortable voyeurism, but it all seeps together into a disturbing miasma that another movie could not have captured.
The enjoyment derived from sewer-dwelling flicks like this can vary wildly, but if your enthusiasm is piqued by gross-out DIY splatter (the climax deploys enough cow guts to keep the local abattoir running another month), flatulence-based humor, monsters made from plywood and toilet paper and red dye, mustaches, pickup trucks, and overly loud dialog that never matches on-screen lip movement, this is very much going to be something you dig. It was my thing, my nasty, gloopy, scuzzy, lovely thing.
Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10
