Abaddon’s Pit

Supernatural flick starts pretty interesting and then totally loses the thread. A man who feels responsible for the car crash that kills his wife discovers a triangular and apparently bottomless pit that the locals have been throwing their trash into for decades. He decides to explore, sending down, over the course of the first half of the movie, just a rope, then a block of ice, a dead fish, and a live pig, with increasingly bizarre results each time.

It's just interesting enough to command some attention. The prominent presence of local religious fanatics, played as typical over-the-top movie religious fanatics, is a bad sign, and none of the things that happen, while cool enough on their own, add up to much of a story, or even make much sense. There's a lot of fridge logic here.

But then, when it really goes wrong is when he goes down the pit himself, and the movie shifts into wannabe-David-Lynch mode. He experiences what I assume is a vision of hell, which seems to consist mostly of improv exercises. He goes into a cabaret where his dead wife sings him a song; he is made to reenact the car crash over and over, he finally is told "to go forward, you must embrace yourself", and a nearby figure who has hidden their face this whole time lifts his head and, as the viewer figured out would happen 20 minutes ago, it's him, so he hugs himself, and then evaporates into a dust cloud. We see the religions fanatics on the surface, who now appear to be dressed in what look like satanic robes, singing around the pit. And this is somehow the end of the movie.

Too bad. I enjoyed the first half, even though it was a stretch.


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