I caught Abominable at a recent New York City screening and I have to say it was a pretty good time. Like Slither, this is a return to old-school late 70's/early 80's style horror. Basically the story is Rear Window meets Bigfoot. Our wheelchair-bound lead, Preston, has returned to his cabin in the hills after being institutionalized for 6 months following a climbing accident that killed his wife and left him crippled. He is accompanied by a guardian from the institution in whose care he has been placed. Five lovely young women are staying in a nearby cabin.

With this setup the film wisely works the tension angle revealing our creature slowly as the film progresses. While there is a bit of gore this is more an old time monster movie like Alien or Jaws relying on effectively building tension surrounding a creature we don't get to see too well, at least until the end. Genre regulars Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, and Tiffany Shepis (as one of the neighbors) put in all too short appearances.

Good stuff: The acting and production values were quite good. There was some humor, but not over-the-top or out of place and it worked well. The movie was able to effectively build tension and the the majority of jump scenes didn't feel forced. And then there's Tiffany Shepis, who came through as always supply the only nudity in the film. I'd like to complement her acting but the fact is the film was mostly centered on Preston and very little time was spent with the five girls, and not enough to really give any of them much character development. It really was a crap shoot as to who would survive since none of them were really singled out as final girl material. I also thought the end was pretty cool.

Bad stuff: Probably the main criticism was that a lot of the isolation and inability of Preston to communicate with the neighbors seemed forced and contrived. Also there was a higher than usual incidence of characters behaving less than rationally simply to advance the story, at least until near the end. Also there were a couple of things that bothered me and I assumed were plot holes, but they were explained much later on that would have been less distracting had they been explained at the time.

All in all I thought it was a fun little 70's style monster flick. It's supposed to be picked up by the SciFi channel. Unfortunately I'm sure they'll cut Tiffany's shower scene so I suggest catching it on DVD. 7/10, some gore, some nudity.