The Damned South

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2012)

Leave it to a Russian to paint American history with such accuracy. This is not an historical drama, nor does it purport to be, but it bears more stinging truth then the whole of the History Channel.
The Southern Confederacy, desiring to hold on to the last vestiges of gentility lest they get their white hands dirty, declared itself free from the Union in order to retain the right to own people as if they were property. The parasitic white slave owners fed off of the blood of the workers like vampires. Bekmambetov simply takes this allusion to the next logical step. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, did not merely take up arms against the act of slavery but against the very thought of it, the idea that it is somehow acceptable.
Abraham Lincoln, played by Benjamin Walker -- a young Gary Cooper who astoundingly triumphs in an iconic role that could have failed so easily -- learns quickly that his town of Springfield is rife with vampires: the pharmacist, the blacksmith... because you never know where your neighbours' loyalties lie. But where the metaphor that the southern states are best represented by the living damned is most outspoken is when the vampires take up the Confederate Gray and join the Civil War.
This not-so-subtle allusion will, no doubt, anger the staunchly southern states that fly the confederate flag with pride. But pride cometh before a fall, and Lincoln fells with one chop.