Abby does imitate, quite well at times, Friedkin's style and his use of subliminal shock cuts. Like The Exorcist, Abby has a long scene where the title character (Carol Speed) is given a series of tests at a hospital only to be referred to a psychiatrist. And like Linda Blair's possessed child, Abby foams at the mouth and swears like a sailor. None of this is especially inspired, and the demon possessing Abby talks so much that the film soon becomes silly instead of scary. Nonetheless, director William Girdler almost pulls off a couple of good scares, and a few early scenes are mildly unsettling.

The best thing about Abby, however, is its cast, and their success at creating an authentic portrait of middle class African-American life. Pictures like Superfly and Shaft's Big Score! had idealized heroes straight out of the pages of Ebony, and the women in those films were little more than sex toys. In Abby though, two of the three male leads are pastors and the other is a cop. Abby herself is a Christian marriage counselor, who lives with her pastor husband (Terry Carter) and religious mother (Juanita Moore, virtually reprising her character from Imitation of Life). Carter, along with William Marshall (as Carter's pastor/archeologist father) and Austin Stoker (as Abby's policeman brother) are uniformly excellent. They even almost make the big exorcism scene work, but the earlier, matter-of-fact scenes in the picture that establish their domestic tranquility, oddly enough, stand out more than the later, more routine horror aspects...