Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

director Timur Bekmambetov
viewed: 12/10/2012

Ah, it’s great to see history come alive like this.

Or not.

The less said perhaps the better about this action/horror film adapted from a popular mash-up novel by Seth Grahame-Smith in which history is re-imagined with vampires.  And Abe Lincoln is an axe-wielding slayer of the villains.

Director Timur Bekmambetov of Night Watch (2004), Day Watch (2006), and Wanted (2008) brings visual bombast to this Matrix meets steampunk asskickathon.

I kept kind of waiting for a Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)-style Abe Lincoln spouting, “Party on, dudes!”  But for as camp as this concept has it, when Lincoln twirls his axe like a ninja, the comic effect has its volume muted and the attempt to be cool is amplified.

The metaphor of vampires as being the real reason behind The Civil War…well, I suppose you could make it work somehow, but here it’s insulting.  Isn’t slavery horror enough?  Is the metaphor apt?  Is it just stupid?  These things come to mind much more in a film in which comic asides and self-reflexive awareness of the inherent comedic value of Abe Lincoln looking anything remotely unlike himself could be.

The only extra point of interest here is in this film’s contrast to two other films of 2012, Steven Spielberg’s very serious Lincoln (2012) and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).   Now, I’ve seen neither of these films yet (Django has yet to be released) but something tells me that these films share a confluence of revisionist, post-post-modern perspective in a shared space of history.  And my guess is that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will easily be the odd film out.  Not simply for obvious reasons.  The concept could have been worked somehow to be clever.  But more simply because it sucks.

Fright Night (2011)

director Craig Gillespie
viewed: 12/28/2011

Compared to a lot of modern horror re-makes, Fright Night is indeed a cut above the rest.  Compared to the film which it is remaking and updating, Fright Night (1985), it’s still the lesser entity.

This Fright Night stars Colin Farrell as a hunky loner who moves into an isolated suburbia somewhere outside of Las Vegas.  Anton Yelchin is Charley, the suspicious neighbor who pegs Farrell for the vampire that he is, and who has to try to convince the rest of the community of the same.  The typically appealing Toni Collette plays his mother and this is where there is any qualitative parallel with the original, that the casting is slightly above average.  But the film is not as committed to creating a believable diegetic world and is happy to simply throw up characters as caricatures.

Take the re-vamp of “Evil” Ed from the original.  In the original is played with nerdy aplomb by Stephen Geoffreys, one of the film’s best characters.  Geoffreys was also given a few scenes before the drama started going to build his character and his relationship to Charley.  Here “Evil” Ed, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin of Superbad (2007) and the villain of Kick-Ass (2010)) is thrown on screen as the dweebish/insane former friend with whom Charley was a nerd before Charley got cool enough to land a super hot blond girlfriend.  Ed’s already onto the vampire, he’s the one who’s figured it out here.  But he’s also just a cheap nerd type.

Similarly, Peter Vincent, vampire slayer, has changed from the classic character of Roddy McDowell to a lampoon figure of a Criss Angel/Russell Brand (in a role that was seemingly written for Brand).  In the re-make, he’s played by David Tennant, who does pretty well with the foppish, drunken bad boy of the Las Vegas strip.

I highlight these changes to underscore the alterations as variance from the original but also steps down from the original.  Still, it’s a sight more than the average A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)-type of re-make of 1980′s horror films.  It’s still got more going for it than most of these cynical enterprises.

I watched the films back-to-back because it had been a long, long time since I’d seen the original and it seemed a good way to go with a re-make, too, which had actually gotten mixed but decent reviews.  It offered me a melancholy perspective on how the 1980′s were oddly enough still quite a fecund period of genre exploration in horror.  Fright Night (1985) was in many ways a throwback to the horror films of the 1950′s, teens in trouble kind of adventure, with a healthy amount of comedy supporting it.  It is an original story at the least.

While the new film maintains aspects of the qualities of the original, including the levity, it’s still a shell of a thing, not entirely by the numbers, but certainly lacking any original verve.

Fright Night (1985)

director Tom Holland
viewed: 12/28/2011

Though I think I somewhat confused aspects of it with 1986′s House, another horror/comedy film from the mid-1980′s, I always recalled liking 1985′s Fright Night.  With the release of a re-make of the film, it seemed an apt time to re-visit director Tom Holland’s film about the vampire that moves in next door.

It starts out with a make-out session between protagonist Charley (William Ragsdale) and Amy (Amanda Bearce, later of Married, with Children notability) while on the television, a local horror movie compendium is hosted by former film star Peter Vincent, known as the “vampire slayer” (played by the inimitable Roddy McDowall).  Charley becomes distracted when he sees that they seem to be moving a coffin into the house next door.  And the next thing you know, a series of murders, disappearing women, and other shenanigans have Charley convinced that his new neighbor is a vampire.

He’s right, of course.  It’s Chris Sarandon as a smarmy very 1980′s oozy vampire.  And now it’s up to Charley to convince his mom, the police, his girlfriend, Peter Vincent, and his oddball friend “Evil” Ed (played by a very good Stephen Geoffreys) what is really afoot.

The tone of the film is combination light comedy mixed with some eventually pretty great horror effects, a throwback of sorts to a classic type of teen horror film updated for the 1980′s.  And Holland really pulls it off.  In part, it’s good casting.  McDowall is quite memorable as the washed up horror star, turned semi-cowardly reluctant hero, and Geoffreys plays the nerdyish weirdo with a unique flair.

The film also boasts a pretty good 1980′s pop music soundtrack featuring Sparks, Devo, and The J. Geils Band , especially over the prolonged dance club sequence.  And as I noted before, the various analog creature effects are really good, too.

It’s really quite a good 1980′s genre film.

Nadja

(1994) director Michael Almereyda
viewed: 11/06/2011

Shot in black-and-white, using a cast straight out of a Hal Hartley film, and produced in part (and briefly featuring) David Lynch, Nadja is a somewhat post-modernist take on Dracula.  Actually, Nadja is Dracula’s daughter.

Not Dracula (1931) nor Dracula’s Daughter (1936), though Nadja is frightened by a generic vampire image, roughly hewn from the cast of Bela Lugosi.

She arrives in New York with her Renfield, a long-haired handsome Irishman to collect her father’s body.  A long-haired Peter Fonda is the Van Helsing in this picture.  And the Lucy for this vampire is played by a woman called Galaxy Craze who looks vaguely like Molly Ringwald.  This Dracula/Lucy thing is a lesbian affair.  Oh and Najda herself is the remarkably beautiful Elina Löwensohn, who appeared in Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994).  She goes around in a remarkably gothy cowl, looking sad a lot.

The film attempts moments of humor, but also attempts a deadpan style not unlike that of Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch.  Only this whole film feels like a bad film student’s final project, only featuring some famous faces in the stilted settings, wonky acting, and moodiness.

The film occasionally flips over from nice-looking black-and-white photography to a pixilated black-and-white.  I did try to figure out the significance of this mode, but gave up.

I had stumbled upon Nadja somewhere and had it queued up in my Halloween set of films.  It is in some ways a product of its time, an indie film from the mid-1990′s, with good indie movie cred.  Unfortunately, it’s not really very compelling, funny, or for that matter, memorable.  I will say that there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than gazing on the lovely Elina Löwensohn, no matter what mood she’s in.

Stake Land

(2010) director Jim Mickle
viewed: 08/19/2011

An earnest low-budget Indie post-apocalyptic thriller, Stake Land is no great shakes, but is some pretty decent ones.  It’s a vampire movie that’s more akin to a George A. Romero zombie flick than a vampire film.  While some films play for laughs, some play for scares, some play for social commentary, Stake Land plays for a believability of humanist characters, focusing on the protagonists’ relationships rather than on gore or shocks.

From the beginning, a teenage boy named Martin is rescued from an attack by these zombie-vampires upon his family.  He is the only survivor and winds up teaming up with and learning from a man he calls “Mister” (actor/co-writer Nick Damici).  They are vampire killers, collecting fangs as they go, searching across America, moving northward, to a place less crawling with creeps.  There are worse creeps than the vampires, a cruel band called The Brotherhood, a quasi-religious faction of vampire killers and thugs show that humans are still as bad as any other villain.

Of course, when the leader of the Brotherhood becomes a vampire himself…

As I said, the film is no great shakes, but has a subtle charm, emanating from the characters.  One of the film’s biggest shocks is Kelly McGillis, for whom my mental images are comprised mainly of her from Witness (1985) or Top Gun (1986).  Sure, that was 25 years ago and, sure, she’s in her mid-fifties now, but wow, I wouldn’t have recognized her.  She’s an attractive middle-aged woman, a faux-Grandmother figure to the boy, and another of the film’s qualities, a role for someone of this age, not another half-naked 20-something.  It’s part of the agelessness of cinema, a Dorian Gray-like fixture of beauty kept pristine for eternity, while, in this case, in the real world, we all age something fierce.