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Wow, what a godawful mess this movie is. I was going to write a clever intro paragraph, but then decided it wasn’t much worth the effort. I’ll admit I was a little biased going in to the film: I hate Brandon Routh. I’ve never met him, and I am sure he is a sweet guy who always remembers his mom on her birthday, but his smell a fart acting didn’t fly (ha ha) in Superman Returns, and it doesn’t fly here.
Also, the poster for the film is less than awesome. But still, Dylan Dog is a pretty well revered graphic novel, and it did inspire Michele Soavi to make Dellamorte, Dellamore, so I tried to get over my Routhaphobia and enjoy the film.
Not so much.
| The gist of the film is that Dylan is a private investigator with a paranormal past. When Marcus, his Shia LeBouef-esque sidekick, urges him to take scraggly-blonde Elizabeth’s dad-dead-by-a-monster case, Dylan must go all Constantine and break out his bag of magical tricks. Soon he’s comparing werewolf hair all CSI-like. Thus he is thrust back into the world of Truebloods (vampires, duh) and werewolves, a world where he was an impartial human third-party go-between, until some bad shit went down and he had to take a powder. |
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The basic plot device of the film is something called the Heart of Belial, a cross containing blood that belongs to the werewolves, but the vampires want it, but Elizabeth’s father smuggled into the country, that can apparently transformed a flesh vessel into Belial, whoever that is. I don’t know. The whole thing was confusing. It is never quite clear who killed whom, and who wants the Heart, and what they exactly want it for. The whole movie was confused.
Then comes the big twist at the end, which is no twist, really. Sure, it was unforeseen, but that’s because there was no lead up to it, and it makes no sense. You don’t have an oh, shit! moment. You have a what is this shit? moment. The point was supposed to be, who is the real monster: the undead, or a human who wants to kill a bunch of undead who aren’t really bothering anyone? I know that was the point, because they told me. Several times. Like if they said it enough I’d care, or think it was a rational point of you.
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Because the main gripe I have with Dylan Dog, above and beyond anything else, was it’s piss-take on the monsters. The vampires look and act a lot like the vamps on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which worked in a show about California teens but not so much in a film about the dark underbelly of New Orleans monster society. The werewolves “learned to control their change,” and when Kurt Angle (yes, that Kurt Angle) does change, his costume looks like it was bought in the clearance section of a Spirit Halloween store. |
Belial and the Tattooed Zombie, both played by Bobby Steele, are pretty menacing, but both have an uncomfortable air of familiarity. Belial is straight out of Species, and TZ is clearly an extra effect that was lying around the shop that did the Nemesis for RE: Apocalypse.
Oh, and the regular zombies. Deep sigh. They’re the hapless, cowardly humor scapegoat of the film. It was more than a little offensive to my horror sensibilities. They’re a joke. It was literally painful for me to watch. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I’m just going to get pissed off again.
I have never read the comic, and I don’t know if the monsters were supposed to be stupid and not scary, Dylan a mono-emotioned Himbo, and the plot a Hydra-headed mess of dead-end plot points, but that’s what the movie is. In a word: it sucks.
| The director’s only other feature credit is the recent TMNT, so that goes some way towards explaining things. But possibly in his defense, the film does have a certain Frankenstein’s Monster vibe, in that some scenes are grainier than others, and some have a weird watermark hanging out in the upper right-hand corner of the screen - if you watch this film, you’ll have all the time in the world to notice these things. Trust me. These hints signal to me a film that was pieced together in the editing room in a frustrated attempt to salvage fucking something worthwhile out of the footage. |
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It failed.
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