Not to spoil the end of my review or anything, but I have been having very bad luck with my movies lately. …Oh who am I kidding? I pick these movies! Today it was Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, starring Brandon Routh, Sam Huntington, and Taye Diggs.
Coming forth from the bowels of the idea that every comic book needs to be made into a movie, someone decided they needed to buy up the rights to an Italian comic book, throw in Superman, and make that a movie. And it claims to be based on one of the world’s most popular comic books. Yeah? Well I’m a nerd and I hadn’t heard of it before this movie. So suck it! Let’s see what I can make out of the plot here … Okay, so Dylan is a private investigator of some sort with Sam Huntington as a partner. He gets called in to investigate the death of some old guy by his hot ass granddaughter, turns out it’s paranormal in nature and Dylan used to be some kind of paranormal cop that kept werewolves, vampires, and zombies in line, but Dylan don’t do that no more! Then his partner gets killed and he changes his mind. First he’s all Team Edward, taking the side of the vamps and accusing the werewolves because he found one of their hairs. Then he finds the dead werewolf and he’s like “Howl that, this must’ve been the vamps!” and he switches to Team Jacob (and who wouldn’t, look at those abs!) Then he realizes that it was actually a giant zombie vampire or some junk and he realizes his partner has turned into a zombie. But he’ll manage with it and still hangs out for the rest of the movie, trying to come to grips with his zombiness. Turns out the vampires are looking for this cross called the Heart of Belial or something to make a vampire that will help them take over the world. Then add some unsurprising twists and end the movie.
The story here? Eh, not real good. Dylan ends up going back and forth between Team Edward and Team Jacob and Team … Romero? … and it ends up being a kind of confusing mess of a story. In the end it turns out (SPOILER) that the girl he crushes on is a monster hunter who, for some reason, wants to make that Belial thing. I think it was to kill all the monsters, but then who would kill the super powerful vampire? She doesn’t think that far ahead, I guess. (END SPOILER) The minor part of the story is actually what interested me more, and that was Huntington’s problems dealing with turning into a zombie. He couldn’t stomach normal food but, apparently in THIS movie’s idea of a zombie, needed to eat maggots and worms, which he refuses to do for most of the movie. In this movie, zombies eat bugs to contain their hunger for human flesh, which I’ve never seen in a zombie movie before, and I’ve seen a LOT of zombie movies. Ones most of you haven’t even heard of!
As for the acting: mostly not bad, actually. Routh is pretty good as the wisecracking Dylan, Huntington plays his character like a slightly more annoying version of Shia LeBoeuf in Constantine, and Taye Diggs does pretty good. The romantic lead was underwhelming though. And Peter Stormare (whose name you may not recognize, but Google it, you know him) way over does it as the lead werewolf, but that’s kinda Stormare’s thing. A really bad decision they made, that other movies have made as well, is in casting a former WWE-now-TNA wrestler named Kurt Angle, who really should not act, as with the greater majority of wrestlers. I, thus far, can only support The Rock, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and John Cena. IN THEORY! They’ve done their share of shit too.
And the makeup/prosthetic work in this movie is abysmal! They’re roughly on par with the TV show Buffy, which I mean as no insult to the TV show. Buffy did what it could with a TV budget; this movie has no excuse. The giant vampire zombie guy looks like Baraka from Mortal Kombat, and Belial at the end looks like a black Tim Curry from the Legend who either put on some weight or just has child-bearing hips I hadn’t noticed before.
Overall, I can’t say that I agree with Rotten Tomatoes 6% on this, but it’s not much better than that. I give it “I wouldn’t bother” out of 28.
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