'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' Review - A Bloody Fun Revisionist Take on American History

"History prefers legends to men. It prefers nobility to brutality, soaring speeches to wild deeds. History remembers the battle, but forgets the blood. However history remembers me before I was a President, it shall only remember a fraction of the truth..." So begins the opening monologue of director Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of the Seth Grahame-Smith's novel 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter'. The film follows the secret history of Abraham Lincoln, America's sixteenth president, whose life has been haunted by the undead. As a fan of the book, I couldn't wait to see the movie, but I was cautious going in to believe it could meet my expectations. But thankfully, director Bekmambetov, stars Benjamin Walker, Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, producer Tim Burton, and author Grahame-Smith have made a thrilling, fun, and stylish movie that really fires on all cylinders and never really disappoints.

'Dark Shadows' Review - A Misguided Fan Tribute That Doesn't Quite Know What It Wants to Be

I've always been a fan of 'Dark Shadows', ever since I was young and sci-fi channel would air reruns of the cult soap opera from the 1970s. It was something I really looked forward to watching whenever it was on, and while cheesy now, it still had great storytelling and fantastic characters, especially in the late Johnathon Frid's Barnabus Collins, who would go on to become what the show was best known for. There have been two tries at bringing back the franchise since it went off the air, neither of which gained any traction. One of them, the series from the nineties even featured a young Joseph Gordon Levitt as the young David Collins. But some things are just better left alone, and sadly, the same can be said about this newest try at recreating the cult favorite. This time, we have Tim Burton at the helm, with a script written by Seth Grahame-Smith, and starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, and Jackie Earl Haley. The formula sounds like it should be a real winner, but needless to say, the film feels more like a mediocre fan film with a big budget than the great adaptation that it could have been.