Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (Rated PG-13) One Star05-11-11-movie.jpg

If Dylan Dog (107 min-utes) had been a SyFy origi-nal, maybe we could cut it some slack for being such an awful, awful movie. However this piece of celluloid gar-bage simply has no reason to exist. It is not resurrecting much-beloved pop stars and having them fight each other/get dismembered and eaten by Dinocroc, it is not funding awesomely complex shows like Battlestar Galactica, it is not even employing quality CGI animation companies.

The movie is based on a popular Italian graphic novel written by the same dude that did Cemetery Man (Aside: In that film Rupert Everett is wearing the Dylan Dog uniform since Cemetery Man is the alter ego of Dylan Dog). Knowing the pedigree of the movie, at first glance I had fairly high expectations. Then Natasa began listing all the reasons why the movie would suck, and she pointed out that Brandon Routh was a truly terrible casting choice. And really, Brandon Routh, Natasa had a point. You pretty much suck hard core. You made it utterly pointless for me to even try watching Smallville, your middle name is Smirking Moron, your delivery is wooden and your hair looks like its covered in oil even when it is not.

She then pointed out that it was a cheap compromise to change the sidekick character from a Groucho Marx look-alike (yes, we all agree that foreign comics are weird) into a postmodern zombie. I came to my own conclusions regarding the clumsily obvious attempt to cash in on the success of Trueblood by calling all the vampires truebloods, the offensiveness of changing the setting from London to New Orleans, and the stupidity of having the tagline read “No Pulse? No problem?,” when your lead character doesn’t deal exclusively with the undead. You know what movie that makes? It’s the little things. And cashing in on the Twilight werewolf connection completely invalidates your tagline.

Too bad for the movie that neither the plot nor the dialogue makes up for any of these problems. It is hard to remember what happened at the beginning. Even though I saw this less than 24 hours ago, my mind is blanking in self-defense. I think the movie starts with a murder. Some blond chick (Anita Briem) chosen more for cuteness than her ability to act is dancing around and then dis-covers the body. Scene change. Dylan Dog (Brandon “Smirking Moron” Routh) is awoken by someone’s husband…he is a private investigator specializing in divorce cases, or at least he is now. Apparently there is an entire movie’s worth of backstory that the screenwriters have seen fit to fill us in via flashback since they were too freaking lazy to put together a decent origin story movie. He plays verbal footsy with his guest, which is supposed to serve as a character establish-ing guns-don’t-scare-you-once-you-you-have-lived-a-tragic-backstory scene but instead mostly serves to remind me why Routh should never be allowed to have speaking roles, and is then off to meet with a potential client.

He arrives at cute blonde’s murder house with his sidekick (Sam Huntington) and then gets very upset when she explains she wants to hire him for his supernatural detecting, which he retired from. And we will need to listen to about 50 different characters talk about how they thought he was retired, and then hear him explain that he is retired, except for this one case, and then replay other, better, movies in our heads because those scenes are both painful and endless. Taye Diggs is here doing penance for the short-lived Daybreak, and the bloated remains of Peter Stormare also wander on and off the set.

Overall, don’t bother. This is worse than a Marti Noxon scripted season seven episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The beginning is tedious and the ending fails to resolve anything. My eyes rolled so often during the course of this movie I actually gave myself eyestrain. It’s not funny, it’s not quirky, it’s not scary, it’s not interesting, and there are massive plot holes re-sulting from flat-out lazy writing.

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