Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2011)

First things first: although Dylan Dog: Dead of Night shares a title character with a similarly themed Italian comic book (created by Tiziano Sclavi), the two don’t have much else in common. Instead of being a former Scotland Yard investigator who haunts the foggy streets of London for nightmare creatures, this Dylan Dog is a handsome young guy in New Orleans, played by Brandon Routh. He doesn’t have a sidekick who thinks that he’s Groucho Marx, doesn’t play the clarinet, and doesn’t drink absinthe. If you’re a fan of the comics, you’ve likely read all you need to know and I can already hear the screen door slamming behind you. Everyone else should feel free to read on.

So Dylan lives in New Orleans, which as it turns out is a sort of Mecca for the undead. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies all live and work among us in the city for which nighttime is always the right time. Dylan used to be the impartial human mediator between the various powerful families in the supernatural underworld, keeping them from engaging in all-out war or getting revealed to human “breathers.” That is until his pretty girlfriend is murdered and he goes berserker on a clan of ancient vamps.

While he is trying to live his new life as a run-of-the-mill private dick with a client roster full of cheating spouses, he gets a phone call from a different pretty girl named Elizabeth (Anita Briem). Her father, an importer of antiquities, has had his heart ripped out by a werewolf. When the local police don’t believe her story, a priest gives her Dylan’s old business card that reads: “No pulse. No problem.” At first, Dylan refuses to get involved but then his sidekick Marcus (Sam Huntington, Routh’s Superman Returns co-star) suffers the same gruesome injury. At least for the sidekick—who ends up becoming a zombie—the condition is “manageable.” Supernatural hijinks ensue.

Directed by Kevin Munroe, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is like that hokey supernatural action thriller starring a once A-list celebrity or serious thespian that you stumble upon in your local video store. You end up watching it mostly to satisfy your morbid curiosity but end up realizing that it doesn’t suck as hard as you thought it would. It’s not very good, mind you, but it’s got its charms. Actually, minus the video store, Dylan Dog is exactly that movie.

Or one of those Noah Wyle Librarian movies on TNT.

Among its B-movie charms is Dylan Dog’s film-noir conceit. While the execution isn’t at all successful—Routh’s wooden monotone voiceover narration is no match for Humphrey Bogart’s grizzled nonchalance, Briem’s femme fatale is not nearly as dangerous as say, Lauren Bacall, and Huntington’s jokey sidekick is about twice as labored as anything Mickey Rooney ever did—the film does earn points for effort. It’s a crowded market for monster movies these days but at least this one tries to have a personality all its own.

Unfortunately, that personality isn’t a particularly interesting one. The dialogue, as supplied by scripters Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, is lethally dull. The two try their hands at sardonic, cavalier wit and fail every single time. Meanwhile, Huntington tries extra hard to deliver what are essentially second-grade “knock-knock jokes” with mad-eyed conviction. Bless his little heart.

I also have to wonder how much script-doctoring Dylan Dog underwent at the hands of studio executives in their search of a broad, PG-13 American audience. This low-budget flick (if you don’t believe me, check out the terrible CG demon in the third act) hints in so many ways of being a labor of love. How else would you explain the inclusion of film and stage veteran Taye Diggs as a drug-peddling power-hungry vampire and character-actor Peter Stormare (he also played Lucifer in Constantine) as a werewolf mob boss? Even its source material—an obscure by American standards, 30-year-old, Euro-set comic book—suggests that Munroe and company had loftier goals than they ended up delivering in this trifle of a movie.

Still, with Routh’s matinee-idol good looks anchoring Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, it’s not the hardest thing in the world to watch. This movie is escapist entertainment of the rainy, Saturday-night-at-home variety.