Review of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) by Deathbysmiley — 12 Jul 2012

I really wanted to like this movie, but there just really isn't much there. The action scenes are repetitive, and the basic continuity of the film is flimsy. While the book strived for historic accuracy, and followed Lincoln's life, this book really did no such thing.

Even the production of the movie is poor. In addition to continuity issues (the movie seemingly forgetting its own rules later on), we have almost laughably poor make-up, poor editting (one scene, where Sturges is telling Lincoln about "Adam", Lincoln's eye is still messed up from a savage beating, even though his eye had healed 3 cutaways prior), and bad use of 3-d (A major rule of 3-d is to never have objects very close to the far left or right, since they can only get picked up by one camera, and make the film hard to watch. This rule is violated every 3 to 5 minutes). The most laughable moment is when they show "Fort Sumter" on the bottom of a screen, then cut away to a battle in a field with troops charging each other (with no explanation that it wasn't Fort Sumter, which had no land battle, and only the death of one horse).

The book and the movie are completely different in many ways. The book is about making fun of history, the movie is about having an excuse to kill vampires with an axe. The stories are completely and utterly divulging. The book tries to stick to historical events. The movie makes up far more, and doesn't do a good job sticking to Lincoln's actual life. The most important difference: the book is good. The movie isn't.