Apparently, the Italian comic Dylan Dog and the movie Dylan Dog: Dead of Night are very different creations, to the point where fans of the comics condemn the movie adaptation wholesale. Having never read the comic (because of equal parts difficulty to get and not speaking enough Italian to actually understand it), I went into this film more or less blind. I mean, I knew it had vague connections/similarities to Dellamore Dellamorte, but little more than that. So when I say that it was an enjoyable enough film, I am talking from the point of view of never having read a single issue of the comic.
So, Dylan Dog is a private investigator in New Orleans who spends most of his time investigating cheating spouses and insurance fraud. He once specialised in paranormal investigations, but "retired" from that job after his fiancee was killed and he went on something of a vampire killing spree which left most of the supernatural community unwilling to trust him. He gets dragged back into the supernatural side of things, however, when a woman contacts him to investigate her father's murder and his partner is then killed and ressurected as a zombie (a revenant if you want to be pedantic). And that's your plot, more or less. Dylan has to chase vampires (who own a nightclub), werewolves (who own a meat packing plant) and zombies (who don't own anything but eat anyone who steps on their territory) to find the mystical MacGuffin of the movie and stop it from being used. At the same time his newly-undead partner (who looks vaguely like Shia LaBeouf but with none of the teeth-grinding annoyance) has to come to grips with being a zombie, never being able to eat anything but worms and hot dogs and the fact that he can replace his body parts if they get damanged at a "body shop".
You might have guessed that Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is something of a horror-comedy, and you'd be right. The movie does have its tongue wedged firmly in its cheek for most of its running time, and so if you're looking for something that's all horror, all the time then you'll probably be disappointed. There's actually very little blood and gore in the whole movie, aside from a few bodies with holes in their torsos, some severed zombie limbs and some lightly sunlight-cooked vampires. The scenes where Marcus the new zombie is presented with meals of worms and maggots to eat are also unpleasant, especially if those things make your skin crawl. But overall the movie is more comedy than horror, and other than the zombies we don't even see too much of the vampires and werewolves doing what's supposed to come naturally to them. To keep up with current pop culture trends, the vampires are even referred to as "truebloods", which is amusing the first time but starts to grate a little by the end.
Brandon Routh makes a better paranormal PI than he does the last Son of Krypton, it seems, and Taye Diggs is very good as the vampire club owner. Special mention has to be made of the werewolf Wolfgang (yes, really), who was played by none other than former Olympian and current pro-wrestler Kurt Angle. Now we love Kurt Angle in this house, but unfortunately when he's not playing an exaggerated version of himself in a wrestling ring his acting tends to leave something to be desired. Still, he was playing a werewolf, so it wasn't really too much of a stretch that he would be chewing on the scenery a little.
In conclusion, I should probably learn to read Italian. But until then it certainly wasn't the worst film I've ever seen. It was enjoyable enough for what it was, maybe even more so if you go in blind like me.
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