Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is a brain-dead undead movie that takes America’s 16th president, the Great Emancipator, and turns him into the Great Decapitator, using his hitherto unknown kung fu fighting skills and silver-tipped axe to dismember dozens of ghouls. One can only imagine what further pseudo-historical travesties Hollywood has up its sleeve: “Mahatma Gandhi: Chainsaw Hero”? “The Apostles: Fists of Fury”? “William Zombie Shakespeare: Cursed be He Who Moves My Bones”?
Regardless, it would be hard to imagine that any of them could suck any harder than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” The film’s screenplay is by Seth Grahame-Smith, who had a novelty best-seller with his Jane Austen parody, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” and clearly surrendered to that age-old impulse to “do the same thing, but different” with more 19th-century horror. Any similarity to “Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter” by A.E. Moorat, which was already on the shelves when Grahame-Smith was getting, uh, inspired to write the book from which this film is adapted, is purely coincidental. (Although as Carl Jung says in “A Dangerous Method,” there’s no such thing as a coincidence.)
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