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Posted a few days ago on Facebook about seeing the Asylum's Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies, and how, for a direct-to-video quickie made to cash in on the theatrical release of Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, it was actually pretty good. I've mulled it over for a bit, and find I want to write it up in more detail. Note that there are some spoilers.
First off -- this *is* a low-budget quickie. They managed to make a not-bad-looking production by a lot of location-shooting at historic sites, but the zombie hordes in untucked shirts and trousers (men) and untucked shirts and ankle-length but obviously modern skirts (women) break the spell.
Except for Mary Todd Lincoln (Debra Crittenden), the only female characters are a couple of plucky prostitutes, one of whom (Baby Norman) is Lincoln's lost love, fallen on hard times. She's played as a true 19th-century heroine forced into a lousy life by society's prejudices, and she gets a slightly more believable costume than her daughter, who wears what looks like a repurposed modern prom dress/bridesmaid's gown, but lots of bigger-budget movies have costume designers (or more likely producers) who insist prostitutes be exempt from the fashion rules of their own era, in order to put them in something modern audiences will perceive as sexy, so I can't really hold that against this film.
ALvsZ works as well as it does because, while the script does contain a tiny bit of humour*, it never makes fun of the central premise, which is that a terrible plague will spread and wipe out all North America if a handful of Unionists and Confederates can't put aside their differences and nip it in the bud. Some of the cast are more talented than others, but all of them are on board with playing it seriously, and fortunately Bill Oberst Jr. (Lincoln) is very talented. His Lincoln is strictly according to the iconography, but he's heroic and sympathetic; as far as Oberst is concerned, this might as well be a mainstream historical drama about the U.S. president coping with a crisis situation while struggling with his personal feelings. Even when he and Mr. Brown (Jason Hughley), a freed slave and one of his Secret Service, zipline away from an exploding fortress.
The other pillar of the movie is Jason Vail as Booth (yep, he shows up too), because zombie movies need at least one human villain -- you can fear shambling mindless corpses that want to rend your flesh and turn you into one of them, but you can't really get mad at them, because they're automatons. Booth is a preening villain, a secret agent fueled by fanaticism but constrained by his own ego + his acting background: he can't resist dropping hints as to his real identity, and at one point he sneaks up on Lincoln at prayer and refrains from shooting him basically because he's played in Hamlet. He survives the zombie crisis only because history says he didn't die at that time, and because the movie needs him for its tragic but satisfying final twist.
*This is the kind of story where half the supporting characters are Someone Famous In Disguise/Before They Were Famous
First off -- this *is* a low-budget quickie. They managed to make a not-bad-looking production by a lot of location-shooting at historic sites, but the zombie hordes in untucked shirts and trousers (men) and untucked shirts and ankle-length but obviously modern skirts (women) break the spell.
Except for Mary Todd Lincoln (Debra Crittenden), the only female characters are a couple of plucky prostitutes, one of whom (Baby Norman) is Lincoln's lost love, fallen on hard times. She's played as a true 19th-century heroine forced into a lousy life by society's prejudices, and she gets a slightly more believable costume than her daughter, who wears what looks like a repurposed modern prom dress/bridesmaid's gown, but lots of bigger-budget movies have costume designers (or more likely producers) who insist prostitutes be exempt from the fashion rules of their own era, in order to put them in something modern audiences will perceive as sexy, so I can't really hold that against this film.
ALvsZ works as well as it does because, while the script does contain a tiny bit of humour*, it never makes fun of the central premise, which is that a terrible plague will spread and wipe out all North America if a handful of Unionists and Confederates can't put aside their differences and nip it in the bud. Some of the cast are more talented than others, but all of them are on board with playing it seriously, and fortunately Bill Oberst Jr. (Lincoln) is very talented. His Lincoln is strictly according to the iconography, but he's heroic and sympathetic; as far as Oberst is concerned, this might as well be a mainstream historical drama about the U.S. president coping with a crisis situation while struggling with his personal feelings. Even when he and Mr. Brown (Jason Hughley), a freed slave and one of his Secret Service, zipline away from an exploding fortress.
The other pillar of the movie is Jason Vail as Booth (yep, he shows up too), because zombie movies need at least one human villain -- you can fear shambling mindless corpses that want to rend your flesh and turn you into one of them, but you can't really get mad at them, because they're automatons. Booth is a preening villain, a secret agent fueled by fanaticism but constrained by his own ego + his acting background: he can't resist dropping hints as to his real identity, and at one point he sneaks up on Lincoln at prayer and refrains from shooting him basically because he's played in Hamlet. He survives the zombie crisis only because history says he didn't die at that time, and because the movie needs him for its tragic but satisfying final twist.
*This is the kind of story where half the supporting characters are Someone Famous In Disguise/Before They Were Famous
