Self-described “mockbuster” production company The Asylum is unabashed in its shameless, timely rip-offs of popular movies, a catalog that thus far includes titles like Transmorphers, Almighty Thor, and even Titanic II. But whereas most of these are obviously skating the edge between winking, naughty parody and vulgar cash-in, what happens when the movie The Asylum is paying “homage” to seems every bit as ridiculous as its Z-grade imitator (and even more so than Snakes On A Train)? Why, then we would collapse into some sort of satirical black hole, and it would look a lot like Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies, the “mockbuster” version of forthcoming would-be blockbuster Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Moviehole picked up on a casting announcement for the imminent production, which imagines a world where America’s 16th president must himself get involved in the Civil War to battle armies of the Confederate undead, aided by a one-armed Stonewall Jackson and even John Wilkes Booth, who joins the “New Secret Service” presumably because he hates zombies more than black people. Which isn’t all that crazy compared to Vampire Hunter, which finds Lincoln hunting bloodsuckers with William Seward and Edgar Allan Poe. In other words, we’ve reached the point in our genre-mashing and history-revising where our cheap B-movie knockoffs are almost indistinguishable from the movies they’re spoofing. And honestly, no matter how great Timur Bekmambetov’s movie turns out, there’s no way it’s going to be as good as this poster.