Abraham Lincoln is an American icon who has fallen victim to the recent obsession with taking classic books and dropping zombies, werewolves, vampires, and other such silliness into them. And while I like titles like Mr. Darcy, Vampyre and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, I haven’t actually read many books in this sub-genre. So I walked into Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter with very low expectations and a maybe a bit of dread.
Turns out that this is a standard issue Hollywood film, lots of special effects, good sets and costumes, a number of familiar faces, and a fairly straightforward story. We open with a young Abe running to the defense of a young slave being whipped by an evil man. The man turns out to be a vampire, who kills Abe’s mother and sets Abe on the path of being a Vampire Slayer.
His mentor tells him that he can’t have friends, or family, or any kind of personal life at all-he has to devote his entire being to killing vampires. Abe ignores this advice and somehow manages to get married, become a lawyer, and run for political office, all while staying up all night killing the vast horde of vampires that live in Springfield, Illinois.
The action scenes are pretty much Abraham Lincoln in The Matrix. Abe hops from horse to horse as they stamped across an endless plain which happens to be right beside a cliff. He swings his axe like an Army drill team swinging a 1901 Springfield. We drop into slow motion as his silver coated axe slices through body parts and blood flows in dark ribbons across the screen. These are pretty damned good scenes, even if they were all a tad on the ridiculous side.
Like Titanic, it’s hard not to get a bit involved with the real details of the story, such as Abe telling Mary that they may have to move to New York once the Union loses the battle of Gettysburg. Of course, the reason they were losing was because the vampires were on the Confederate side and they were pretty hard to kill.
All in all it was a lot better than I thought it would be.
At the end of the film we find ourselves in the present in a bar in Washington, DC where a vampire meets a man getting drunk. Many people seem to think this man is Barack Obama. Maybe he was in the book, but it was pretty damned vague in the movie. Besides, I tend to think the President of the United States would have better places to get drunk than a busy night club.
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