‘Abraham’s Boys’ is a sluggish reimagining of horror lore
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Why has the film industry been so eager to besmirch the memory of Abraham Van Helsing? Created by “Dracula” author Bram Stoker in his 1897 literary masterpiece “Dracula,” a still-expanding, horror literature “big bang,” Van Helsing is a physician, scientist, folklorist, vampire hunter and a devout philosopher-warrior in the struggle between good and evil. Arguably, thanks to the great English actor Peter Cushing, Van Helsing is as important and charismatic a figure as Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the Hammer Studios “Dracula” remake, “Horror of Dracula” (1957). Lee and Cushing appeared together as Dracula and Van Helsing three times. Cushing played Van Helsing five times, including in the marvelously Gothic-Freudian 1960 Terence Fisher outing “The Brides of Dracula” (1960).
Based on a 2005 short story by Joe Hill, “Abraham’s Boys” takes liberties with Hill’s setting and cast of characters and tells the story of Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, “Bosch”) and his family. In this version of the story adapted by director Natasha Kermani (“V/H/S/85”), the setting is changed from the East Coast of the U.S., where Van Helsing emigrates with his two sons Max (Brady Hepner, “The Black Phone”) and Rudy (Judah Mackey, “The Morning Show”), to the rural Central Valley of California, where in opening scenes we hear a lone female utter an anachronistic vulgar expression before getting attacked by a tall, black-cloaked figure. Hmm. Kermani also adds a new character, Van Helsing’s wife Mina (Jocelin Donahue, “The House of the Devil”), yes, that Mina from “Dracula.“ In a somewhat tiresome performance, Donahue’s Mina, a one-dimensional Gothic femme fatale, is beset by visions and spells. She has a conversation with no one we can see and tells her sons that she “always wanted a daughter.” Van Helsing reminds us that he moved the family from “filthy, stinking” London and Amsterdam to California. Sporting a mahogany-colored tan, several extra pounds and a Dutch accent, Welliver huffs and puffs. Van Helsing saves the life of a young rail worker with a punctured lung. Kermani has trouble introducing characters and depicting action. Max chops wood. It is his métier and his emotional state. Rudy whines mostly. No one rides the sole horse.
The conflict between wood-chopping teen idol Max and his abusive, bullying father suggests some underlying (although not too deeply) issues in the Hill-Stephen King father-son relationship. Van Helsing, a hero to readers, turns out to be a malevolent lunatic who berates Max about his deficiency in algebra and later forces Max to drive a stake into the heart of a woman chained in the basement and then casually instructs little Rudy to cut the woman’s head off. In another unintentionally laughable scene, “homemaker” Mina makes “the blood pudding of her homeland” (uh, yuck). She is interrupted and terrified in the process by the tiniest bat in horror film history. Van Helsing fears that “creatures” are closing in on the family like “rats on a merchant vessel.” Paging the Demeter.
“There are hungry things in the night,” someone says apropos of little. It’s not quite, “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make.” But there you are.
Shot in a vintage-looking, squarish aspect ratio by Julia Swain (“The Wrath of Becky”), the film succeeds in making the Van Helsing home resemble an oversized, elevated,Gothic version of the Little House on the Prairie. Get ready for the ending you saw coming from the start. All foreboding and wood-chopping, “Abraham’s Boys” is anemic for reasons that have nothing to do with vampires.
‘Abraham’s Boys’
Rating: R for bloody violence and grisly images.
Cast: Titus Welliver, Brady Hepner, Judah McKay, Jocelin Donahue
Director: Natasha Kermani
Writers: Kermani and Joe Hill
Running time: 89 minutes
Where to Watch: in theaters
Grade: C
Boston Movie News 