Not Hunting for Votes Anymore

Tim Burton’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter opens June 22. If the just-released trailer shows the 16th president as an ax-wielding animated superhero, the imagery is so compelling I’m convinced this movie will be more than a mashup of Axe Cop and Van Helsing. 

(“Animated” because the trailer seems mainly composed of computer-generated action and effects although this is a live-action movie.)

In the unlikely event any of you don’t know the work:

Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the screenplay based on his book of the same name, chronicles Lincoln’s humble upbringing through his rise to the presidency, the Civil War, and the emancipation of slaves. All this is set against the backdrop of Honest Abe slaying evil spirits and seeking revenge upon the vampires who killed his mother when he was a young child.

5 thoughts on “Not Hunting for Votes Anymore

  1. This could be bad… very bad. But the saving grace of Tim Burton is that even when he *is* bad he’s always interesting.

    With only one exception. No matter how you look at it, his remake of Planet of the Apes is neither good *nor* interesting.

  2. Or how about “Count Dracula, President of the United States?” Oh wait, we almost had that when Dick Cheney was Vice President…

    I looked up that website and was disappointed. Had it been a fully animated bit of Tim Burton insanity, I’d have been more interested. But live action? Nobody ever does a convincing Lincoln… Few actors are that tall, skinny and ugly for one thing, and they never get Lincoln’s high-pitched voice right. (There are no recordings, of course, but descriptions exist.) The guy doing what I assume was Lincoln’s voice on the trailor was Midwestern enough, but a normal baritone.

  3. I might be stating the obvious here, but this seems to be a sort of “Snakes on a Plane” thing in that the premise is so over-the-top ridiculous that’s what people will come to see. If the analogy holds, like Snakes on a Plane everyone will go see this opening weekend making it the No. #1 movie, then word-of-mouth will kill it and it will die a quick death.

  4. Coming soon: the movie version of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the best-seller that prompted this novel. Not sure what to make of “Abraham” etc.; as noted above, the voice seems wrong, and the Washington Monument was not completed until after Lincoln’s time. Of course, I don’t recall him fighting vampires, either.

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