Guest Movie Review: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Like all movie adaptations you always want more than the movie can give you, and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is no different. I had thought we’d get a closure rendition since Seth Grahamme-Smith helped write the screen play but he took it in a different direction. Instead of starting at the beginning we start when Abe’s an adult and see glimpses of his past. So we don’t get the full effect of why he becomes a hunter. Seth cuts out a lot of the family turmoil associated with Abe’s life and starts us off with Abe’s family all dead. This is one way the movie and book differ. Another way is that in the book there isn’t one villain and the movie does have one vampire. In the book vampires, the majority that is, are the villains. There are a few that want to stay hidden and they are the vamps that help Abe. In the movie we only meet Henry the main vamp that wants to help Abe and we don’t really hear about the others he works with. We get more training for Abe with Henry then we did in the book. But Henry’s change is different, which kind of sucked. In the book his change was more heart wrenching, and “older” and what I mean by that is that in the book he was changed after landing in the new world, and in the movie it seemed to happen when the new world was thriving. So not only do we lose Abe’s history but we lose Henry’s.
In the movie we start when Abe is an adult and starting his live away from his father, we don’t meet Edgar Allen Poe as we do in the book, which is a complete bummer for me since he is one of my favorite authors. Another change is the first time Abe hunts a vampire and meets Henry. In the book Abe goes after a vamp whose stealing children from their beds in the movie he does after the vamp that killed his mother. While that does happen in the book it’s after he’s hunted and prepared for a strong vampire. The movie did follow this first hunt close to the book but as I said it’s not exact. This is just one of the many differences between the book and movie.
The one thing both Flyboy and I wish they wouldn’t have changed is the end when they are in the twentieth century and Abe and Henry are standing at the Lincoln Memorial talking about that they’ve seen and done. We don’t get that in the movie, we see Henry walking to someone in a bar, the same way he had talked to Abe centuries before.
If I hadn’t listened to the book, and if I could separate book and movie, I’d say this was a good movie. It’s exactly what one would except from a movie called Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. Even with the changes I’m glad I saw the movie, I don’t think it was a waste. The only thing I wish we could have changed would be that we saw an earlier show and that I wouldn’t have been so tried after surgery. But with the craziness of our life we had to see it two days after surgery and at ten o’clock on a Friday night.
