That was an excellent one.

A Masterpiece!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Newspaper reporter Julia Talben (Jessica Lowndes) is tired of doing stale real estate stories. Her sister Amanda's entire family is massacred. Julia and police detective Declan Grady find a blood-drenched Richard Renshaw inside the house. Renshaw surrenders but Julia finds no easy answers. Somebody quickly buys the house and the crime scene is mysteriously ripped out. It's one of many murder rooms collected over the years by Jebediah Crone (Dayton Callie).This is trying very hard to be a brutal noir. Any bright joy is stripped out of the frame. Even daylight looks bleak. While I appreciate the attempt, it is not all together successful. It struggles visually with the lower budget and weak directing. The intentional lifelessness leaves the movie lifeless. It looks more cheap than stylized. As a horror, there is nothing to be had until the last part with the rooms. Simple jump scares are beyond this movie. Crone doesn't even appear for the first half. This fails on a very basic level.

Stylistically, it's all over the place. The female lead is the from the 50's? The male cop who was her boyfriend/fling, still is, who ever cares? There's literally no reason why they should even be in the same universe together. Their acting is one 2-hour class above The Room, and sounds more like someone learning English via a script than it does anything else. The premise is interesting. Someone is buying houses where murders happened, taking out the rooms for some reason, and... you leave the theater knowing that much. The woman's sister is killed by someone (who? some guy). She returns to the scene of the crime (why? no reason)to find out the room is gone. So, she does the next logical thing and finds a bunch of homes where murders happened, and goes to find out if there rooms were stolen too! Shocking to no one, they have been. So, she heads home (why? who cares)to a small town the town folk have been convinced into following a man who has apparently died before and been to hell (why? who knows), has seen many bad things (what thing? who knows), and he wants the town members to help him building this Frankenstein of a haunted house. Why a house? Not explained. Why do the people help him? Also, not really explained. In the end she kills her boyfriend/fling/whatever for pretty much no reason, and then she also dies for pretty much no reason. The bad guy is told to return to his family, who is supposedly in hell for an unknown reason, and he walks down the stairs... presumably to where hell is. That's it. Just be happy you only wasted the time necessary to read this.

Like many of your readers, I see a lot of films & check IMDb to see if a movie is worth downloading or not. Now to be honest I didn't read the reviews, just the high IMDb score. Having seen a large amount of horror films in the past few years, I've seen all kinds of stuff. This was a real surprise, a clever film. I hadn't heard of this Abattoir before. From the poster JPEG I thought this could be like Evil Dead remake/Sawish. After it's initial 15 minutes normally I would phase out, however that's when Abattoir started to kick in. Everything in the story plays smartly and is all concluded by the end. Oh my, the end! It finishes as it started. In conclusion, SEE THIS FILM.

This is a wholly original concept realised in a traditional manner, at least for the first two thirds of the running time. The exception is the lead character Julia (Jessica Lowndes) and her detective boyfriend, who appear to have walked out of a 1950's film noir project – her make-up, style and car are very reminiscent of that era, and Detective Grady (Joe Anderson) poses and shoots foxy small-talk as if he is a modern day personality of the Humphrey Bogart school of presentation. Not that this is a problem; it is unusual and arresting. The fact that no comment is made of their anachronistic personas places them in a kind of limbo.The central concept, of someone who makes a habit of buying houses where gruesome murders have taken place, and then sets about removing the rooms where the victims died to make his own Frankenstein-style hybrid construct, is pleasingly perverse and outrageous. Events take a long time to reach this magnificent set-piece, but the wait is very much worth it.As the strange Allie, Lin Shaye plays a seemingly tortured character who's true nature is not (partially) revealed until the final frame. A scene in which she stares into her mirror, pulling the skin on her face taut, reveals inner demons that are never fully addressed. Without dialogue, it is a mesmerising moment, and Shaye adds to an already very strong cast.Pieces fall further into place once Jebediah Crone turns up, surrounded by townsfolk followers. Dayton Callie plays him with a gentle, but persuasive authority, a sort of genial cousin of Danny DeVito's Penguin character from 'Batman Returns (1992'). The resultant patchwork 'house in the woods' is exactly the kind of impossible and monstrous dismembered collection of rooms such a mad-hatter character would construct. And here is where every apparent anachronism finds an environment in which it makes sense. These are the realms of the fantastic, and this is a pay-off I certainly was not expecting. Special and directorial effects (the latter courtesy of Darren Lynn Bousman) that have thus far been highly restrained, take on epic proportions suddenly, and are utterly brilliant: the true stuff of nightmare.