Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Hey, I liked it. And the most surprised person to hear that is, well, me.

Going in I was a little worried. I might be tossing money in the gutter. Wouldn’t this make a better rental, part of my brain accused, or better yet, a freebie from the local library? But something about Abe Lincoln twirling a bloodied axe like a set of nun-chucks, beheading the undead Matrix-style, said to my very core

This will either be the greatest movie ever made or it will be worse than any abomination surfacing from the cesspool that is the Syfy channel.

Well, in actuality it was neither, though it was much, much more closer to the former than the latter.

I won’t go into the story because it doesn’t really matter. We could nitpick details of the flick; it’s flawed in that regard. It’s also flawed, to my line of thinking, relying on the tired cliché of the screeching-hissing-slimy-fanged vampires you see in every single vampire movie. Yawn.

But the genius of it all is, obviously, setting the tale during Abraham Lincoln’s lifetime.

For me there we two dynamics working here, two dynamics that just were not at odds with each other or, say, 180 degrees apart. These two dynamics were completely foreign to each other – like two distinct different languages like Mandarin Chinese and ancient ecclesiastical Latin. No – even that doesn’t come close to what I’m trying to say. These two things are completely incompatible because they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Like womyn’s feminist poetry and Riemannian Zeta function analysis.

First there is the lush, plush, vivid and exciting glimpse into America as a young country, from roughly 1820 to 1865. Now I’m not certain what liberties were taken, but I forgive them all. The cabin in the woods, the river docks, young Springfield – all the way to the Mississippi at New Orleans and the battlefields of Gettysburg – all were gloriously filmed and looked wonderful in 3D. A runaway train whizzing through forest and mountain passes and over rickety wooden trellises took my breath away. In that regard, Abraham Lincoln is a festival for the eye.

Second, the fight scenes – and there were plenty, probably close to twenty of varying lengths and numbers of combatants. These struck me as utterly bizarre. Not uncomfortably so, because I am a connoisseur of the bizarre. To see Abraham Lincoln, the Father of our country, twisting in the air, slo-mo, like Neo in The Matrix, hacking down legions of undead bloodsuckers … well, I’m still shaking my head, and I still don’t know what to make of it all. So out of place, yet, perhaps, perhaps it just works. I don’t know. Verdict is still out. But the fact I can’t out-and-out dismiss is means it must count for something.

Being the amateur Civil War scholar I am (hey, I read eleven books about the conflict over the past year!), I have to admit to being kinda concerned whether an un-suppressible part of me would view the whole thing as sacrilegious. Blasphemy. Post-Modern hipness urinating on yet another cultural icon in its unquenchable quest for complete and utter moral desolation. And though, yes, 21st century attitudes judge the 19th century characters all throughout the tale, no, I did not find it overbearingly blasphemous. In fact, I think I detected an air of respect and pride on behalf of the filmmakers towards the titular character.

Bottom line: I had a lot of fun watching this flick. (And I generally hate vampire movies.)


Grade: A-minus.