Four score and seven years ago — or was it 2012? — two studio pictures, each budgeted around $65 million, portrayed our nation’s 16th president as a larger-than-life, all-American hero. Whereas Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln could boast of taking home two Academy Awards, only Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter portrayed him as an ax-twirling ass-kicker.

Let’s see you do that, Daniel Day-Lewis! If he had, it wouldn’t make the movie any better; sitting through this Lincoln log is like a night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and you’ve got an upper-right box seat. (Too soon?)

By day, a pre-politics Lincoln (Benjamin Walker, Kinsey) works as a shopkeeper, attempting to woo regular customer Mary Todd (Final Destination 3’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead, here looking like a porcelain doll and/or a Campbell’s Soup Kid). And largely by night, he is devoted to killing the monsters who deprived him of a mother since childhood.

Despite the apparent novelty of putting the red stuff in the White House, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter suffers from being just another watered-down vampire movie. Seeing the bloodsuckers fling live horses at those who wish to stake them is new. Then again, so is stopping the movie cold for a rousing speech by abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Jaqueline Fleming, Contraband), as if to lend PC integrity to soulless fantasy. Our leading man is as wooden as the trees Lincoln chops; on the other hand, Winstead acts her heart out, as if no one told her the project was junk.

As with Wanted, Bekmambetov nurtures a directorial flair that is not just style over substance, but style smothering it. Tim Burton producing only encourages the Russian filmmaker’s worst sensibilities, and your reaction to this flick is tied directly to your tolerance for his affinity to take an action move from regular speed to slow motion and then back to regular speed again, all within the same edit. The mashup of horror and history is a joke that should have ended with screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 novel, and that long-in-the-tooth best seller should have been a short story.

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln … —Rod Lott

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Gary Jones’ Mosquito comes from the right place: the heart. With a low budget and a lowbrow idea, it plays like a modern version of Bert I. Gordon’s big buggers of the atomic age, such as Beginning of the End and Earth vs. the Spider. The difference is that in his late ’50s heyday, Gordon never had the opportunity for a shot from the supine POV of a totally nubile, totally nude woman, looking from her ample chest to the creature poised at her feet, but its appendages reaching, er, higher up.

Thanks to a crashed meteor, the infected swamp at a national park causes its mosquito population to mutate to the size of a large dog. Said skeeters chase campers and drain them of blood through one nasty-looking proboscis. Often taking acting cues from cartoons, the terrorized human leads are cardboard and forgettable, save for the novelty of seeing The Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton as a dopey park ranger and Gunnar Hansen, Leatherface of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as a bank robber. Looking like a teddy bear in camo, Hansen is at his most Jerry Garcia-esque here.

Mosquito suffers greatly from second-halfitis. Jones (2000’s Spiders) throws so much at us in the establishing phases that he leaves nowhere else for him to go but back to the well. With each return trip, the pool of ideas is that much more depleted. To the movie’s credit, the in-camera effects of the mosquitos (and their prey) are inspired, no matter their placement across 92 minutes. (The occasional animated sequence, however, deserves a swat.)

Although Jones’ sense of humor remains intact throughout his debut film, Mosquito’s climactic confrontation is creatively bankrupt, what with the survivors boarding themselves inside a small house — and thus inside Night of the Living Dead — and, as an in-joke that’s not as clever as it thinks, Hansen wielding a chain saw as insect repellent of choice. Overall, the buzz is pleasantly mild. —Rod Lott

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Given Area 51’s title and creative pedigree, there’s no question of if aliens will be seen, but how long, and will the wait be merited? The short answer is “no,” which you might have guessed to judge from the film’s six-year sit on the Paramount Pictures shelf. The sci-fi/horror hybrid marks one of the more significant sophomore slumps for a 21st-century director — in this case, Oren Peli, creator of the record-shattering smash Paranormal Activity. Even with audience expectations calibrated to realistic levels, Area 51 emerges as a close encounter of the worst kind.

The movie finds Peli again toiling in found footage (whose second wave he ushered in with his 2007 from-nowhere debut), as an otherwise seemingly intelligent young man named Reid (unknown Reid Warner) ropes in his two best buds to embark on a ridiculous quest to break into Nevada’s titular U.S. Air Force base, long rumored to house proof of extraterrestrial life. Exercising an unhealthy obsession with UFOs and their related government conspiracies, Reid is the kind of anomalistic kid who earns straight As in school, yet treats The X-Files as something of a documentary.

Peli does his follow-up film no favors by telling us right away that Reid has vanished; we guess his fate (correctly, because it’s the most obvious choice) nearly 90 minutes before Area 51 gets around to it — and with some laughably bad CGI effects that ruin any illusion of the subgenre’s authenticity. As in the creditless Paranormal Activity, Peli painstakingly goes for that facade, which is the only legitimate reason we’d willingly watch so much of a movie through the limited, circular frame of night-vision goggles.

The main reason Paranormal clicked, I think, is because Peli really dug into our universal vulnerability while in a state of sleep; even if you found them annoying, Katie and Micah could have been you or I. Area 51 has no such relatability; it clicks only when you turn it off. Its measure as a disappointment cannot be overstated, as the project not at all boldly goes where every alien-conspiracy picture (and TV series) has gone before. —Rod Lott

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Escape 2000 may be the “cooler” title, but Turkey Shoot is the most apt. This Thanksgiving, let’s give thanks this bird exists, no matter the moniker. It is one insane Aussie exploitation export.

In the near future — well, 1982’s idea of such — democracy is, like the careers of this film’s leads, a thing of the past. Any people “The Society” deems as being among “malcontents or deviants” (read: freethinkers) are thrown against their will into a concentration camp for “re-education and behavior modification” tantamount to torture.

One of these tight-ship facilities — Camp 47, to be precise — is where Paul (Steve Railsback, The Stunt Man) and Chris (Olivia Hussey, Stephen King’s It) find themselves dumped so unceremoniously at Turkey Shoot’s start. The place is lorded over by the unsubtly named Thatcher (Michael Craig, Mysterious Island), who relishes the chance to espouse Camp 47’s credo: “Freedom is obedience; obedience is work; work is life.” And life here is short!

Catching me off-guard (no pun intended), the movie undergoes quite a change at its midpoint; not unlike a caterpillar emerging from its butt-spun cocoon as a butterfly, Turkey Shoot becomes a The Most Dangerous Game redo, now with a special blend of Australian seasoning. Paul and Chris are part of a tiny group of campers chosen to take part in a “hunt,” with them being chased by Camp 47 guards and their rich, equally well-armed Society friends. Thatcher gives them a three-hour head start and a promise: Survive until sundown and freedom is theirs.

Then director Brian Trenchard-Smith (Leprechaun 3 and Leprechaun 4: In Space) makes things get weird.

For one thing, the Camp 47 hunters bring in a ringer: a hirsute, wolf-eared circus freak who eats human toes. He/it looks like something mail-ordered direct from The Island of Dr. Moreau. For another thing … hell, with that, who needs additional incentive? Not for nothing did Mark Hartley devote a significant amount of his 2008 Ozploitation documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, to fete Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey; it’s intentionally and outrageously over-the-top in its violence, yet too campy to approach being labeled nihilistic. As one of the snooty hunters quips correctly, “Beats the hell out of network television.” —Rod Lott

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Alien vs. Predator comes off as high art next to the monster mash-up Lake Placid vs. Anaconda, a melding of two franchises I’d bet the average moviegoer doesn’t realize were franchises; with the exception of the 2004 flop Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, all six sequels bypassed theaters. That includes this one, the not-so-fab fifth chapter for each.

Its setup is highly labored, with a scientist delivering much fact-filled exposition in a valiant attempt at justifying the flick’s joint meeting of creature features. But really, all you need to know are these three sentences:
1. There’s a giant crocodile.
2. There’s a giant anaconda.
3. They get loose.

Representing Team Placid is feisty Sheriff Reba (Witchblade’s Yancy Butler, from 2010’s Lake Placid 3 and 2012’s Lake Placid: The Final Chapter, which obviously flat-out lied). To combat the critters run amok here, she joins forces with a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warden (Corin Nemec, Mansquito) and, reluctantly, an opportunistic local guide (Robert Englund, ditching his Freddy Krueger gloves for an eyepatch and peg leg to reprise his Final Chapter role) who knows his way around the woods.

As luck would have it (for any teen boys watching, that is), Delta Phi Beta sorority girls specializing in vocal fry and petty bitchiness are on hand to haze pledges at the beach where the croc and snake lurk. You will root for the species other than human. Mmm-mmm, snacks!

First-time director A.B. Stone (*sniff sniff* — I smell pseudonym) and screenwriter Berkeley Anderson (Robocroc, and I swear that’s real) play the lax proceedings for a big joke, perhaps hoping to latch onto this country’s inexplicable love for all things Sharknado. Like those movies, the gags aren’t funny. The only laughs Lake Placid vs. Anaconda earns are not the ones it intended, as the CGI effects are third-rate on a scale with only two levels. Neither the anaconda nor the Lake Placid crocodile looks any better than what free iPhone apps can create, and your time is better served playing around with those. —Rod Lott

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