Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Abattoir’

Written by Scott Edwards

​When you are going house hunting, it is always important to know what happened in the walls before the house becomes your home. I mean if there was a meth lab inside the house before you moved in, you might have junkies rolling up to your door on a daily basis. But if there was a murder inside the house, you might find yourself receiving all kinds of visitors, outside and inside, who are just trying to get a better look. Buying a house is a very big deal and for most of it, it is a lifetime of savings going into it, so you better be sure that if there are strings attached, they can only be pulled by you.
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While working on a new story about mortgages, investigative reporter Julia is starting to see a pattern emerge when she uncovers the deaths of a few homeowners. Not getting cleared by her boss to continue with her telling of the story, she gets a phone call from a stranger where he admits to killing her sister and her family. Rushing to her sister’s home to see that everything that the man said was true, the murderer is taken into custody, but there does not seem to be a reason behind his crime. 

Laying her family to rest, Julia, and her cop boyfriend Declan return to the scene of the crime only to see that the murder room has been torn out of the house. Wanting to know who bought the house, Julia turns to her real estate source and is able to get the name of Revelation Holdings, who has been infamous for purchasing houses where tragedies have taken place. Being able to track down several of the houses they own, Julia finds that wherever a death has taken place, the offending crime scene is removed, just like in her sister’s house. Even though the current residents don’t seem to mind it, there are strange sounds coming from the areas, but there is nothing left inside the walls to cause them to happen.

Trying to explain to her boss what she has been working on for the past week, Julia receives a video tape from a town named New English that shows the murder of her sister’s family, but there is something very odd with the video, as the walls do not seem to be joined together as they should. Talking to the man that murdered her family, Julia gets confused by his riddles, but seeing that he is from New English as well, a pattern begins to form. With so many of the murder victims of the houses that had the murder rooms removed being from New English, as well as Julia, she believes it is time to stop by the town to see what the connection really is. Not being received nicely by the locals, Julia talks to an old woman, Allie, who is willing to tell her story, but that is when things start to take a turn for the worse.

I firmly believe that houses hold on to memories, be it good ones or bad ones. Seeing this being put into action on the screen is something that I never imagined I would see, and I kind of liked it. As an old preacher made promises to the town of New English, and was not able to deliver, he then turned away from God and gave into the easy way. I really liked the small town and the layouts of the murder rooms in the open and in the massive murder room house were pretty inventive. The only thing that bothered me were the outfits that Julia and Declan wore throughout the movie, as they seemed to be 50s costumes, not something from today, which is when I am led to believe the movie took place. With a little bit of blood, a missing murder room mystery, a small town that wants to be left alone, a freaky ghostly forest and a house full of murder memories, this movie comes together rather cleanly when all of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed. Stay Scared.

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