Review of Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2011) by Robert B — 25 Jan 2012

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (Kevin Munroe, 2011).

I'm a huge enough fan of Tiziano Sclavi's that I new eventually I was going to have to break down and see Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, the first American-produced piece of film based on a Sclavi work, and the first piece of film at all based on his stuff since Michele Soavi's close-to-perfect Dellamorte Dell'Amore from 1994. Both of those things point to me writing a long, rambling review about how much better European movies are than American movies, especially given that every other movie Soavi has made has been credible at best, but that would be too easy. I'm going to try and ignore the fact that Sclavi wrote the source material for this and judge it by itself. Otherwise, I would hate this so much I would have to attempt to eat the DVD. Which would be difficult since I caught it on Netflix Streaming.

This is the place where I'd normally try to put a short plot synopsis, but let's face it: there's not much plot here. There's Dylan Dog (Chuck's Brandon Routh) and his annoying sidekick Marcus (Fanboys' Sam Huntington, trying to act like Shia LaBeouf in Constantine but coming off more Adam Sandler in... well, anything, really), and there are a lot of vampires. And a love interest in Elizabeth (La Monja's Anita Briem, a fine young actress whose manager seems to make very, very bad choices). And... an otherwise pretty decent cast, wasted. Peter Stormare, Taye Diggs, Dan Braverman, Laura Spencer, Kurt Angle (okay, threw that one in to see if you were paying attention). None of them manage to make this good. I'm not as down on it as many people, probably because I've seen very few movies so far actually made in 2011 and so can't call anything the worst of the year yet, but I saw two or three dozen older-but-recent movies last month worse than this incoherent mess. At least Routh and Briem are very pretty when no one's asking them to actually act-which would be this entire movie. That, however, is not enough reason to put up with Marcus. **.