Having suffered exactly the kind of early-life traumas required of superheroes (parental loss, financial hardships, injustice witnessed first-hand) poor-boy Abe (Benjamin Walker) goes on to save the nation with a facial hair-and-hat arrangement every bit as distinctive as Batman's cowl or Superman's cape.Īt the centre of all this jolly nonsense is a promising premise about abolitionists fighting vampires in a culture wherein the slave trade turns people into raw meat, and in which the sight of rich white Southerners feasting upon their poor black prey ('Dinner is served!') is a fleetingly chilling high point. On the downside, despite the Spinal Tap maxim that there's a very thin line between clever and stupid, this sometimes proves that there's an even thinner line between stupid and just plain dumb.Īdapted by screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (author of the bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) from his own novel, this splattershot romp recasts America's 16th president as a heroic Van Helsing figure whose hatred of slavery dovetails neatly with a lust for vengeance upon the bloodsuckers who killed his mother.

On the plus side, it's nowhere near as terrible as the all-title-no-trousers catastrophe of Cowboys & Aliens, a movie so awful that even the head of the studio that made it labelled it 'crappy'. I t should come as no surprise to learn that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is neither as good nor as bad as its laugh-out-loud trailer suggests.

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