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Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter | 2012 | R | - 5.8.5

Based on the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith: Young Abe Lincoln witnesses a fatal attack on his mother (Robin McLeavy) by a vampire (Marton Csokas) and as he grows into adulthood he vows to kill all vampires. With the help of one renegade vampire (Dominic Cooper), now President Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) frees the United States from the undead. Also with Anthony Mackie, Jimmi Simpson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Erin Wasson and Rufus Sewell. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. [1:45]

SEX/NUDITY 5 - A bare-chested man hears screaming in a downstairs room, he enters the room and finds a woman bouncing on top of a man in a metal bathtub full of suds as they have sex (we see her bare back and buttocks and the man's bare shoulders and arms); the first man exits and the woman exits soon after (we see her bare shoulders and arms and the rest of her body is covered with a large towel). For a few seconds we see a dead woman on the floor with her breast exposed.
 In a plantation ballroom, vampires bite their dance partners in the neck instead of kissing them. A man and a woman kiss briefly a few times.
 One man says to another man in a bar, "Anyone that drunk wants to kiss a girl or kill a man. Which is it?"

VIOLENCE/GORE 8 - A man kills vampires by slicing off their heads, cutting open their chests, or shooting them with silver bullets from a rifle built into his axe; each death is marked by fountain-like spurts of blood, bloody mouths and fangs, decapitations and one burning with a blacksmith's bellows on fire followed by screams (we don't see the burned vampire). A man with an axe slays two and three vampires at a time in several scenes, with blood arching across the screen and showering down his own back and splattering on his face.
 In several scenes, male vampires bite human throats in close-up and we see bite marks, flowing blood, and slimy fangs with mouths gaping open wider than is possible in humans; a woman slumps to the ground dead after being bitten, a man that is bitten falls to the ground either dead or unconscious, and one scene shows a vampire that kisses a little boy's wrist on screen and when we see the boy dying later he has bite marks on the wrist.
 A boy watches as a red-eyed vampire bites his mother on the wrist off screen and we see the vampire's huge red eyes and the boy's horrified face; the woman is shown shaking and becoming pale as the boy lies beside her, she dies silently with an open-eyed stare and we see the boy and his father at a graveyard looking at the woman's headstone.
 Slaves on a plantation at night hide in their cabins, holding rifles while other slaves are dressed up in fine clothing and dance with their vampire slave-owners, and we see many slaves being bitten in the throat by vampires with large, slimy fangs and blood spraying everywhere until a man carrying a large axe confronts the vampires; vampires with gaping bloody mouths and huge fangs jump from a balcony to attack the man in sets of 2 and 4, the man slashes 16 of them to death (through the chest, through the throat or in the head and blood splatters across the room several times), fistfights and kicking occur, the man and the vampires choke one another, a vampire slams a chair onto the man's arms while he lies face up on the floor, and the trapped man sees a vampire threaten to slice the throat of another man, but another man drives a carriage into the room and takes the two men away, demolishing walls with a lot of dust and smoke.
 An extended scene on a train features an attack of a dozen vampires on the US President and members of his contingent: We see a number of fistfights with kicking and choking, gunfire and knife attacks, a human is bitten by a vampire, several vampires are killed with an axe, silver bullets, or silver knives and blood shoots across the screen several times, one vampire is decapitated, while another dead vampire is shoved out of a boxcar door and into a ravine off-screen; a vampire lights a rail trestle on fire while humans and vampires fight on the train roof and the train couplings begin to come apart causing vampires to fall into a ravine, a human falls off the side of a boxcar and is caught and pulled back up on the roof, a vampire is fatally punched in the abdomen with a silver rosary wrapped around a man's hand (causing a lot of blood to spill) and three humans jump onto the trestle as the entire train falls into the ravine with an explosion, large flames, smoke and dust clouds.
 Battle scenes at Fort Sumter and Gettysburg show hundreds of soldiers charging with rifles and bayonets, with hand-to-hand combat blood flies and spatters, and lines of cannons discharge loudly and there are explosions of cannon balls in fields; one man is stabbed through the top of the skull in close-up (blood spurting high into the air), Confederate forces are shown to be vampires that have gaping mouths and slimy huge fangs that disappear and reappear at will, they leave Union soldiers dead and bleeding and several fields are full of bodies, bleeding or dead, and with legs or arms cut off.
 A man confronts a vampire, and he falls through a trap door where he hangs head-down in a basement full of naked, bloody men's bodies hanging over basins (we see bare chests, backs, and arms); the vampire prepares to cut the man's throat with a straight razor, the man has a knife and an axe that he uses to cut the vampire, they fight and the vampire is slashed to pieces with fountains of blood spraying and splattering and is then buried in a coffin beside a tree in the woods.
 A man confronts a vampire with a glazed-over eye from a previous wound, he chases the vampire over the backs of horses as the animals stampede, and the man and the vampire fistfight, kick, and slash each other with knives; the vampire grabs the leg of one running horse and hurls the animal at the man, but misses, the man shoots the vampire in the good eye, the vampire falls on his back and the man swings an axe into the vampire off-screen (the screen goes black before we can hear the strike).
 A man with a pistol hunts a vampire, misses several shots, and is beaten up by the vampire and thrown on the roof of a warehouse and falls back down; the man shoots out the vampire's eye leaving a bloody socket, the vampire attacks the man with his gaping mouth and slimy fangs, but misses the bite and after a struggle, the screen darkens and the camera cuts to the man in bed, bare-chested, with bandages around both elbows and forearms as well as a bruised and cut nose, one eye swollen shut and his ribs bruised.
 In a flashback, several vampires approach a husband and his wife on the road in a carriage, bite the man to change him into a vampire and suck the blood completely from the wife to kill her. A man accosts a woman in a dark alley and a vampire jumps forward and bites the man in the throat, killing him.
 A vampire charges toward a woman as the woman loads her rifle with a silver toy sword and shoots it into the forehead of the vampire, who flips 360 degrees and dies on the ground with the small sword hanging from the wound and black blood flowing.
 A boy runs up to a slave driver whipping an African-American boy and his mother, leaving large red cuts on the boy's face; the first boy carries a hatchet and shouts, he is knocked down by the slave driver, and another man confronts the boy's father and threatens him with a pistol and after a brief argument, the father and the boy leave.
 A former slave is kidnapped by two vampires and taken to a plantation, but he escapes. A man stops a gunfight between two arguing men by stepping between them and the scene ends. We see a man thrown out of a store and into the street, but he is unharmed.
 We see a dead boy dressed in a funeral suit in bed with his father praying beside him when a vampire enters the room, kneels on the other side of the bed and begs the father to let him bring the boy back to life by making him a vampire; the mother begs for him to allow it and when the father refuses, the woman cries and hits her husband hysterically in the chest and arm and leaves the room.
 A man buries several vampires in the earth beside a tree at night. We see a swarm of many bats fly off into the woods. A man becomes angry while chopping a tree, shouting about not being able to protect his family and the tree is suddenly sliced through and falls. A man yells at a vampire for pretending to be human in their friendship and after a brief argument, the human walks away.
 We see old photographs of sites strewn with dead soldiers. We see photographs of women lying dead on the floors of their homes and hear that vampires killed them (we see no wounds). Blood runs across a large sheet of white paper to outline the Lower 48 United States of America.
 An experienced vampire hunter trains a younger man in hunting techniques: his house is filled with pistols, rifles, knives, bayonets, axes and a blunderbuss hung on walls, the vampire hunter locks the second man into a dark warehouse and we hear shouts, groans and punches and when the lights come up we see the younger man's face covered in blood and cuts, and his right eye swollen; the younger man receives a silver-headed axe from the vampire hunter and learns to twirl it in dozens of scenes and to use it to cut trees in one stroke and to hunt and kill vampires.
 We hear that vampires killed Native Americans and white settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. One man says, "My mother was murdered," another man replies, "If I teach you to murder her murderer, what honor does it do her?" One man says to another man in a bar, "Anyone that drunk wants to kiss a girl or kill a man. Which is it?" A woman says, "A war's coming. All colors of blood will be spilled."

LANGUAGE 5 - At least 1 F-word, 1 anatomical term, 4 mild obscenities, name-calling (selfish, idiot, blood-sucking demons, madman), stereotypical references to war, politicians, plantation owners, vampires, racism, slaves, the Underground Railroad, secret lives, 3 religious profanities, 5 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - Several bar scenes feature men drinking whiskey, a wedding reception shows people drinking champagne, a man drinks wine first thing in the morning, and a man takes a mouthful of wine at his plantation and spits it onto a map of Gettysburg. A man sucks on the pipe of a hookah (it is empty), a woman sucks on the long stem of a pipe (we see no smoke), and a man puts a pipe stem into his mouth (he does not smoke).

DISCUSSION TOPICS - American Civil War, legends, vampires, slavery, evil, freedom, family, responsibility, truth.

MESSAGE - Real power is not in revenge, but in truth.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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