A few months ago I did a post about how paranormal presidential fiction was becoming a new genre in film with the summer release of FDR: American Badass! and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (still no word from Hollywood on my script for “Andrew Jackson: Mummy Exterminator”).
I actually got to see a free screening of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter last night and I have to say it was pretty badass.
“How do we make Lincoln even more badass?” “Let’s have him cut off a bunch of vampires’ heads with an ax!”
The film, based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (also being turned into a film) was actually done well. When dealing with such silly material it’s so easy to go campy and over the top –
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R898wegx6Y&w=560&h=315]
(don’t get me wrong I’m still totally going to go see this)
But everybody treated the material with a straight face, like it’s just a dramatic action movie that happens to be about Abraham Lincoln killing vampires. The acting was spot on, the action scenes were awesome (with the exception of a little superfluous 3D blood splatter) and the cinematography was stunning. That serious treatment of such a goofy subject made it all the more entertaining and hilarious.
In fact, this is probably the best vampire movie I’ve ever seen. That’s not really saying much, though. Ever since Anne Rice came around it seems like every vampire in fiction has been some foppish Eurotrash that’s made blood drinking a kinky sex thing.
I’ve really wanted to love vampire movies but vampire movies make it so hard for me to love them. Sure, the Blade movies are alright but they’re just mindless action and even in those ones you still get some bullshit “immortal children of the night” blathering from the vampires. Here’s the 3 worst vampire movies I’ve seen in the last decade or so.
Underworld (any of them):
Kate Beckinsale jumps around in tight leather.
Why I saw this: I was young, there were a lot of gunfights and Kate Beckinsale jumped around in tight leather.
Plot: Modern Vampires are like fey Victorian aristocracy and lounge around mansions looking bored and drinking blood. Werewolves are like Dickensian paupers, scurry around sewers and are slaves to vampires even though they have equal superpowers and fewer weaknesses. Of course this means a Vampire and Werewolf bang and piss everybody off so they throw on leather trenchcoats and shoot each other.
30 Days of Night
Felt like 100 years of suck.
Why I saw this: I read the comic this was adapted from and it was awesome. The idea was clever (Vampires ransack an Alaskan town that’s so far north there’s no sun for 30 days) and the art by Ben Templesmith was wonderful.
Plot: Vampires come up to an Alaskan town that doesn’t see sun for 30 days, slowly drag their gross, long fingernails across everything and whine about how hungry they are.
Twilight
Yes I saw Twilight
Why I saw this: It was free On Demand, I had the day off and I wanted to see if it was really as bad as everybody said it was. The horrible acting, the sparkling, the weird “pussy vegetarian vampire” thing. It was all true. I’ll never get that hour and a half back. Never.
Plot: Something about high school and this girl and they play baseball or some bullshit. There’s one shot where all the vampires go nuts and rip another vampire’s head off and that was the only moment in the movie where I didn’t want to rip my own head off. Just don’t… I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
For more information about how Twilight sucks, go to George Takei’s facebook page.