Dylan Dog: Dead Of Night (2011)
a review by Evan Landon
If you are not familiar with the character “Dylan Dog”, do not feel bad; neither did I until this movie came out in 2011. It was right after I fell asleep in the theater to Brandon Routh’s outing in Superman Returns with Kevin Spacey. Fun Fact: his zombified sidekick, Sam Huntington, played Jimmy Olsen in that picture, so someone obviously saw something there that I am just oblivious to.
When this movie came out, I remember seeing commercials for it and not having any clue who the fuck “Dylan Dog” was and how he had multiple stories because of the title. I was intrigued, however, but it was in and out of the theaters so quick that I completely forgot about it until years later when I saw Cemetery Man, which I liked very much. That movie from 1994 definitely captured the overall tongue-in-cheek campiness that you can tell this one was shooting for. Maybe I should do a review on that movie instead... Oh well. Maybe next time.
You see, Francesco Dellamorte and Dylan Dog are essentially the same character written by Italian comic book writer, Tiziano Sclavi, as he wrote Francesco Dellamorte in his 1991 novel Dellamorte Dellamore before he wrote the protagonist of his comic series Dylan Dog as a comic book hero in the 80's. The worldwide popularity of that Italian comic serie gave way to many fighting over the rights to make it into a movie, so much so that a cheaper adaptation of Sclavi's Dellamorte Dellamore was chosen to be made into a film instead. It gets more than a little confusing, but it all comes down to the almighty dollar, at the end of the day.
Dylan Dog, the character, is a paranormal investigator for hire who is the only human mediator between vampires, werewolves, and zombies, who all have a difficult time getting along in the supernatural backdrop of New Orleans. On this specific case, a woman hires him to find out who killed her father (as he now only currently only undertakes normal private investigation cases) only to immediately discover that this was no normal case. After initially turning down the case, he is swayed after his sidekick is killed (ultimately turning him into a zombie via werewolf bite) leading him into a world that he had rejected because of his wife's demise some years earlier. The rest is a series of convoluted contrivances that string together a plot that involves all sides of the paranormal spectrum, or at least the ones based in this story.
I did not think the acting or dialogue could be any worse than the last film I covered, Lockout, but here we are. Peter Stormare was also in that one too, now that I think about it. Damn, that dude gets around. The computer generated effects are hardly scary or believable, which kind of sucks because maybe if it was done with good ole practical effects, this could have been watchable.
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night was released to very little fanfare, as it bombed out of the box office hard, only generating $5.8 million against a $20 million budget. It sucked enough for the Italian fans to clap back with their own version the very next year, that even garnered a sequel the year after that, which was much more authentic to the beloved comic books. Plus, those ones are in Italian too, just like the comic.
Since the character teamed up with Batman in the comics earlier this year and a series has been in the works for a little over a year now, we might be seeing this paranormal peacekeeper pop up in some of our entertainment mediums in the near future. That will be kind of interesting, even though this movie was awful. Just add Batman.
2 out of 5