Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

The movie follows Abe’s life fairly accurately though it adds some ludicrous vampire stuff along the way.  It opens in 1818 when Abe’s father runs afoul of Jack Barts, his employer.  Barts fires him and demands that Mr. Lincoln pay the debt he was working off.  Lincoln declines and Barts says he can get paid in other ways.  That night, Abe witnesses Barts biting his mother who dies shortly thereafter (Abe’s mother really did die in 1818).  The story follows his move to Springfield, his time as a shopkeeper, a country lawyer, an aspiring politician, and finally president, all true.  There is also his courting of Mary Todd.  It ends with his leaving for Ford’s Theater.

 

These are not your traditional vampires.  First, they hang out in the daylight with nothing more than sunglasses.  They have the ability to turn invisible.  Also, they are killed by silver, supposedly because it is related to mirrors where they have no reflection.  Okay, that’s a bit odd.  When they vampire-out, they have a maw full of jagged teeth and their face is grayish with veins standing out.  Not pretty vampires.  Also, it turns out that the vampires love slavery in the South because it provides an easy source of blood with no recriminations for killing humans.  Lastly, vampires are incapable of killing other vampires; “Only the living can kill the dead,” the lead vampire explains.

 

Abe is on his first vampire-killing mission and flubs it.  He finds himself hanging from his ankles in a basement filled with corpses also dangling by their ankles and drained of blood.  He is unable to reach his silver axe which is just beyond his reach on the floor.  Curses!  If only he could cut himself free.  Then the vampire arrives and ties his hands behind his back and is about to cut Abe’s throat to drain his blood into a bowl when Abe’s knife slips out of his waistband (why didn’t he deploy that while his hands were free?).  He catches it in his teeth, slices the vampire, manages to bend so that he cuts the rope holding him aloft – physically impossible by the way – and then frees his hands before hacking the vampire with his axe.  Abe goes to the trouble of burying the vampire in the forest but no mention is made of what happened to all the corpses and bowls of blood in the basement.

 

In another fight, Abe battles a vampire in the middle of a stampede of horses.  They jump from horse to horse – standing, mind you – and have at each other.  Professional riders have a difficult enough time standing on a bareback horse but jumping from one galloping bareback to another in the midst of a stampede is a recipe for suicide.  This wasn’t cool, it was just stupid.

 

It is the Civil War and Abe is President.  The first day of Gettysburg went badly because a horde of vampires were in the southern army.  The only hope is that silver can be delivered.  So, in one day, Abe has every ounce of silver confiscated, melted down, molded into silver bullets, cannon balls, and bayonets.  The issue is how to get it to the troops.  Abe and two of his most trusted advisors get on a train and head for Gettysburg.  However, they are just a distraction.  The real equipment is being marched to Gettysburg at night.  Sigh.  As the distraction, the train is assaulted by a horde of vampires.  The train finally plunges into a ravine but Abe narrowly survives.  Of course, the vampires are routed on the second day of Gettysburg.

 

At one point, the vampires get at Abe by killing his son Willie.  Abe had 4 sons, only one of whom is ever shown here.  Willie died in 1862, when he was 12 years old.  For some reason, a 7 year-old actor plays him.  In 1862, the Lincoln’s youngest son, Tad, was 9.  Tad doesn’t appear in the film.

 

Abe’s chosen weapon is, unsurprisingly, the axe (he is famed as a rail-splitter).  His is a special axe.  Not only is the blade coated in silver but the handle houses a gun.  This comes as a bit of a surprise when he is fighting Jack Barts and finds himself on the wrong end of the axe.  Well, just deploy the trigger and blammo!  Sigh.

 

The CGI is terrible, the worse so because it is so plentiful.  The stampede of horses was probably the low point but there was also the thick fog fight on top of the train.  Of course, every time the fangs came out, they looked almost cartoonish.  These guys can’t close their mouths without stabbing themselves with their teeth.

 

Now for the funniest (or saddest) thing of all:  Ever since it became a requirement in films to have the women be in the thick of fighting (e.g. Maid Marion was a warrior in Robin Hood, Guinevere was a warrior in King Arthur, Alice fights the dragon in the recent Alice in Wonderland, Snow White was a warrior in both recent films, etc.), I have parodied the trend by saying Mary Todd Lincoln, Warrior First Lady!  Well, my joke has come to pass.  Yes, after delivering the silver to the Union forces at Gettysburg, Mary Todd Lincoln faces off against a vampire, dispatching it like she’s an old pro.

 

The movie fails because of its scope.  Had it limited itself to an incident in Lincoln’s youth where he found himself fighting a nest of vampires in the backwoods of Illinois, that would have required less suspension of disbelief than that the South was harboring hordes of vampires that took an active role in the Civil War.  The movie proposes that the absence of a single journal that Abe had kept through the years explained why we modern folks are unaware of the true story of Lincoln.  Sigh.

 

Lastly, it is played too seriously.  The story is silly and yet all the actors play as if this is high drama.  If it had had some campiness to it, it might have played better.  All in all, disappointing.