ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER - REVIEW


If you're going into this movie expecting something NOT silly, you're not paying attention.

Read the title again.

Ok? Good.

Yes, as it turns out good old Abe Lincoln spent his time in Springfield not only working on his speeches and ageing into a rubber prosthetic but also wielding an axe, slicing vampires in half.

Fair enough.

You gotta hand it to the guy: he kept busy.

The movie starts off sort of like a superhero movie with a young Lincoln defending his friend from those cruel vampiric-looking slave traders. But just when you think the film might pause and take a subtle, interesting look at the hellishly divided society of the time... the other kid gets whipped in the face with the whip snapping right in our faces with some of the best 3D effects I've seen in a while. From then on, you know that slavery, the Civil War etc. those aren't events we'll be studying with any sort of intellectual validity in this flick.

After all, this is a movie where Abe Lincoln slices a tree in half with a single chop.

The ever-reliable Dominic Cooper plays vampire hunter Henry Sturgess who takes Lincoln (played by Benjamin Walker) under his wing and gets him to clean up the town from those pesky bloodsuckers. Whether Sturgess' hair actually time-travelled back from the 1980's is never made clear or even mentioned, I like to think that it did. He basically trains Lincoln in a silly montage you'd find in Rocky IV or Commando and sets him loose on the vampires who have infiltrated society and live among humans undetected. This is all so Abe can get revenge on the vampires who killed his parents.

Because we all know it happened just like that.

History is so LOL

But yeah, you all know what happens next: Lincoln knocks out every vampire bastard one by one, then focuses on politics, becomes President, leads the vampire-infested Civil War, gets back to being a vampire hunter and it all leads to a bloody climax where Lincoln faces-off against the head vampire, played by Rufus Sewell, a natural for playing villains... in everything. It's all predictable, completely absurd and ridiculously overblown but a hell of a lot of fun. Everyone plays it straight but they're all well aware of how random their movie is which makes for some good old-fashioned, trashy B movie gold. The 3D is fab, you get people throwing horses at each other, doing physically impossible movements like slashing someone's neck with one awkward head move, crazy slo-mo shots you don't really understand but can't help but lol at, hilariously awful old age make-up and inventive deaths to say the least. When Lincoln gives up being a vampire hunter, the film loses pace a little bit and you just sit there waiting for him to pick up that freakin' axe again and get to work.

Which he does, so no big deal.

For fans of silly-but-good horror genre-mashups: this is one to check out, definitely. Others might not quite "get" it or dismiss it before even seeing it. It's one to watch with a tongue-in-cheek approach and a sense of humour, no one is taking themselves seriously here so just sit back and enjoy this alternate US history lesson for what it is: a nutty piece of mindless popcorn entertainment.

lols aplenty :)

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