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.)
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" was rather cheekily billed as "transforming a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read," assuming of course that "you" are a fanboy who's never read anything more demanding than "Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu." A similar arrogance is also apparent in "AL:VH": The book and film insist that nothing the historical Lincoln did — rising from indentured labor as a child to become president, guiding the North to victory in the civil war, preserving the union and ending slavery in America — is of any interest whatsoever unless he can run up walls and massacre ghastlies in bullet-time slow-motion with "cool" steampunk weaponry.