Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Here we have young Abe Lincoln (Benjamin Walker getting his young Liam Neeson on) doing all those things we know Abraham Lincoln did—like studying to be a lawyer and meeting Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and growing a beard and freeing the slaves—but taking time outs in between to kill him some vampires. Seems that the South back then wasn’t actually being run by racist peckerwoods, but by a cabal of vampires using those quislings to keep itself tippling in the blood of the slave class. The flick is goofy, but it plays the goofy straight, and as students of comedy know, that’s the best way to play the goofy. It’s called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, so it either sounds stupid as hell or like it might be a total blast. If it sounds stupid as hell to you, then it’s probably not your bag of coffin nails. And if it seems like a blast, then your only hesitancy might be that it won’t live up to the delirious promise of its comic-book title. Of course it doesn’t completely live up. How could it? But it mostly does. Cinemark 14. Rated R.