Monday, July 2, 2012

Movie Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

My rating: 4.75/5

From IMDB.com: "Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, discovers vampires are planning to take over the United States. He makes it his mission to eliminate them."

Throw in horse-hurling vampires and President Lincoln kicking a decapitated head off a train like a soccer ball, and that pretty well sums it up. It isn't especially gory (I can't stomach movies that are), but enough so that everything is excitingly dangerous and death-defying.

Don't go into this movie expecting any kind of serious treatise on Lincoln, the American Civil War, or history.  Don't even expect a good treatment of vampires (though I do appreciate an anti-Twilight treatment), as the movie's explicit rules governing their behavior are broken (which is the main reason I didn't give this movie a straight 5/5; that and some pretty terrible acting in the very beginning). Do expect this movie to take itself so over-the-top serious, while surreptitiously realizing its own ridiculousness, that you burst into laughter on multiple occasions. Which, in my honest opinion, was done on purpose, and was done beautifully.

The best movies I can compare this to are the campy '80s vampire/horror flicks, like Fright Night and Lost Boys, that were goofy, scary, funny, and good, all at once. The martial arts-style fight scenes and the special effects here are much better though; jaw-droppingly so and physics be damned.

Rarely do I love a movie so much more than the book it's based on (see my review here). I have not been so entertained by a movie in a very long time.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Let me know what you think!