Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter?  Seriously?

I took my kids to The Avengers a few weeks ago and we were assaulted by a preview for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.  Both kids, almost simultaneously, leaned in to me to ask in incredulous bafflement, “This is a movie?  For realsies?”  (That’s how 14 year-olds talk these days.  For realsies).  Now, just consider how far off the mean you have to have wandered to have the audience for The Avengers think your premise is too preposterous.

Well, the fact is, the definitive Abraham Lincoln action movie already exists—and has done for over 60 years.  If it was a person, it could retire.  Now, this fantastic action thriller may not have Lincoln in very many scenes (one, if you’re counting), but it’s about Lincoln, it’s an action thriller, and it hits it out of the friggin’ park, so…

We’re here to enjoy The Tall Target.  And hoo boy is there a lot to enjoy.

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Quatermass creator and screenwriter Nigel Kneale (1922 – 2006) has his roots in the Isle of Man, a small patch of over 200 square miles in size that is located between Great Britain and Ireland. Megalithic monuments that heralded a new development in human technology began to appear on the Isle of Man during the Neolithic Age. At present, the island is the center for various competing private space travel companies that are vying for a thirty million dollar Google Lunar X Prize, organized by the X Prize Foundation. “X” marks the spot, and in this case it’s where reality and space travel intersect, bringing us back to Nigel Kneale and The Quatermass Xperiment (U.S. title: The Creeping Unknown), which was the first feature film to introduce his beloved alien-battling character of Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group. READ MORE

The late 1970s was a period in film comparable to the present day: Hollywood developed a fixation on geek culture, turning out comic book movies and remakes of older sci-fi productions, while Lucas and Spielberg created new versions of well-worn pulp forms. Part of the leading edge of this trend was Dino DeLaurentiis’ 1976 King Kong.

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In Hollywood during the 1930s, political movies dealt with corruption strictly on a small scale.  Whether it’s the corrupt politicians following the orders of their political bosses in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or a local joe, frustrated and angry with his luckless existence, signing up with a radical hate group in Black Legion,  Hollywood kept the corruption local, so to speak.  In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Senator Paine’s (Claude Rains) corrupt schemes affect the bank accounts of political bosses like Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) but don’t threaten or affect the world economy in any measurable way.  Likewise, in Black Legion,  Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart) joins a hate group whose activities affect the lives of those in a small town, although it’s implied their plans are much larger (here’s the real group the movie group was based on).  When it came to far-reaching conspiracies, it was always some international group, and some other country, doing the dirty work (Foreign Correspondent, for instance).  But then, slowly, the net widened and, seemingly out of nowhere,  in a one/two punch of extraordinary power, director John Frankenheimer blew the whole thing wide open.

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