Wasn't Fredrick Douglass Killing Vampires in the South, Too?

Rating: 6/10 (1 December 2012)

With all these films with Abraham Lincoln coming out this year, I thought I'd give my two cents, beginning with Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Bekmambetov is a Russian-Kazakh director who does his thing both in Hollywood and on his home turf. Seth Grahame-Smith is a filmmaker from Long Island who has been working with Tim Burton, wrote the screenplay for Burton's Dark Shadows. Grahame-Greene is a good writer. So I was interested in seeing how he would treat the story in this turning point in our country's history. He came with the idea that the South had amassed a bunch of vampires who were living off the blood of slaves. An interesting place to start a film. The film even has a freedman side kick childhood friend, "Will Johnson" in Anthony Mackey, of whom I'm a big fan. But alas, black folks were very much in the shadows of Lincoln and his martial arts master vampire killing sifu "Henry Sturges," played by Dominic Cooper. Mackey get's a tiny bit of martial arts action and even does a move that looks very capoeira-like, but this is a story about Lincoln, played with some charm by Benjamin Walker. It would have been a great opportunity to imagine Fredrick Douglass as an ass kicking martial arts knowing vampire slayer right there with Lincoln. The film is a blockbuster with all the perks of a blockbuster $69 million budget, incredible animation, sweeping animated photography, gravity defying martial arts... it's a lot of fun, really, unless you're Black and keep feeling marginalized by not having enough contribution to the vanquishing of this evil which sank its roots into the origin of slavery in this country.