Honest Abe, esq. – Vampire Hunter
Let me first say, I have not read the book, but have heard a lot about it. And I had to hear about how the movie didn’t use “any of the stuff” from it, while watching the film.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter was a good action movie. Not an explosion fest so much as everybody kung-fu fighting (there’s even the classic battle between two men atop a herd of stampeding horses), and physics be damned.
The book / movie is an interesting look into the power of print. Historians have apparently received questions about the historical accuracies, or not, of President Lincoln’s life, as portrayed in the book. One site even felt the need to address whether or not there were Vampires roaming the pre-Civil War American South. (As far as historians are concerned, there were not.) I do not think anyone will be asking questions about the historical authenticity of the movie. Some well known events are touched upon, but otherwise it’s pretty clearly fiction throughout.
Put it into print that Lincoln kept a journal about killing vampires, and, in the same source, say historians dispute it; people believe the journal is real and historians are lying. Put it on a movie screen, no one suggests that it’s a documentary. Marc and I would postulate a theory about brain chemistry and operation of memory, whereby the effort exerted in reading text results in it being processed differently.
Of course it might also just be how the stories are told. The book is an historical fiction story, where the movie is a period set action film. That doesn’t detract from the film being good, in fact it was quite enjoyable. Characters were interesting, dialogue was clever, costuming and set dressing were very well done, and action sequences even go so far as sports movie slow motion to make sure we can see what’s happening.
It’s just one of those movies where you have to keep your critical thinking in check.
Vampires usually need to do a little more than put on sunglasses to be rendered immune to sunlight. And, whilst hunting vampires in the 1800s, wouldn’t Abe be a little suspicious of someone wearing those weird lenses?
Axes do not swing and cut like swords. They tend to get imbedded in the (now grievously injured/dead) body in the first blow.
Freight cars do not rise, throwing people into the air, when the bridge they’re crossing collapses (they fall).
If silver is anathema to Vampires because of Judas Iscariot’s wages, wouldn’t the Vampire who is five thousand years old be immune to that little flaw? Seeing how Judas v. Jesus was only seventeen hundred or so years earlier, “Adam” would have been a vampire for three millennia and then suddenly silver is poison to him? Yeah, yeah, power of God retcons silver to apply to all vampires. As possible as any other explanation I suppose, but it then leaves the question, “why didn’t God just destroy all the vampires when Judas hanged himself?”
The Amazing Spiderman is in second run theatres right now. A few months ago, thumbing my nose at other reviewers, over Avengers, I said that summer wasn’t over because “The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spiderman both [had] release dates.” The only correct fact in that particular sentence was that the Sun’s rays were perpendicular north of the equator. Between Avengers, Dark Knight, and Spiderman, only Avengers lived up to the hype.