Dylan Dog in Dead of Night review

This film is a bit of an oddity and very nearly slipped under my radar until I noticed that the main star was Brandon Routh of Superman Returns fame. Just a couple of points before I start.

1) In my opinion Brandon Routh was the sole redeeming feature of that Superman Returns and since he's been in it I've only ever seen him in Chuck and Scott Pilgrim vs The World and he was excellent in both of them. For some reason I can't help but think of him as a less schlocky version of Bruce Campbell and wish more directors would start utilising him as a comedic actor which he clearly has the talent for.

2) A little history lesson behind the film though since I had to do some research myself. Apparently it's based on a series of surreal Italian comic books but the movie deviates heavily from the source. The wikipedia page sums up the differences so I won't go into them here since they're largely inconsequential for the sake of this reviews.

The film starts out looking like a standard murder mystery albeit with some sort of large hairy creature being the culprit (spoiler - it's a werewolf) and then we get a brief explanation of the setting from the title character. I really dug this intro and it gives the film a vaguely noir tone. The problem is the film fails to stick to this tone or indeed any tone throughout and becomes a confusing mish mash of styles so you can be left confused wondering what sort of balance the director was trying to strike. Overall it comes across as mostly comedy/horror with undertones of action and noir.

The comedy largely comes from the interaction between Dylan and his sidekick Marcus played by Routh's fellow Superman alumni Sam Huntington. While the comedy is fairly predictable and extremely hit and miss the two work well together and really seem to enjoy their roles.
The noir comes from the fairly bog standard story. There's a damsel in distress and through a series of events Dylan is drawn into helping her discover the identity of her fathers killer and eventually track down a stolen object of great power before it can be used for evil.

The action scenes are largely forgettable with the exception of the warehouse scene where Dylan and Marcus battle a horde of cannibal zombies. Yes you read that right but more on that shortly. While the rest just kind of plod along and aren't very well shot or choreographed.

The setting will be familiar to anyone who has watched a supernatural series or film in the last decade. The vampires and werewolfs have an uneasy truce and there is one human (Dylan) who is stuck bang in the middle having been assigned the role of peace keeper between the two.
The take on zombie lore is fairly interesting however and as far as I can recall has never been done before but my memory is fairly bad so no doubt someone knows better. The zombies are completely sentient but can only eat dead or rotten food and anything else they throw back up. As previously mentioned there are cannibal zombies though who have gone insane from hunger and eventually started eating each other.

While you see plenty of vampires, werewolves and zombies in the film there's really only one main character of each. For zombies we have Marcus as mentioned previously and for the vampires we have Taye Diggs as Vargas and the werewolves are headed by Peter Stormare as Gabriel.
Both actors do admirable jobs. Vargas is extremely over confident and cocky that his plan will succeed while Gabriel much like Stormare's character in Prison Break runs his werewolf clan much like a mafia family.

The special effects are passable for the most part apart from the final scene where the boss fight looks like something out of a made for TV movie.

Dead of Night has atrocious ratings on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes neither of which I really think this film deserves. The final scenes are where it really goes downhill and feels a little bit rushed and is obviously meant to lead into a TV series or a series of movies which it probably won't get.
It's definitely not up there with the greats of comedy horror but if you're looking to pass a night and can look past the script which is fairly predictable at times and some comedy which just completely misses the mark then it's a perfectly solid B movie.