No bark, no bite

Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

DIRECTOR: Kevin Munroe

CAST: Brandon Routh, Sam Huntington, Anita Briem

Rating: **

A private investigator as a "monster hunter" is a sly allusion to the seediness lying at the heart of that profession. Its hero Dylan Dog, as envisaged by the writer of the Italian comic series on which this movie is based, was also a horror story protagonist given to concerns about society's ills and anti-bourgeois rhetoric.

Transported to New Orleans from London, Dylan sheds all that "baggage" to be yet another flashy Hollywood gun-slinging, lip-curling, hip-swinging bad-guy buster to whom saving the world is as simple as dusting his old briefcase.

That briefcase is his signature style as is the ramshackle car he drives. However, Dylan as played by Routh (whose career graph has swung from playing Superman in Superman Returns to a bit role in Kambhakht Ishq) has nothing old-worldly about him. He is as suave as Hollywood super men go, not letting anything from vampires and zombies to werewolves and monsters crumple his favourite red shirt.

The story is about a trinket with powers that has gone missing, which has set this entire spectrum of the "undead" abuzz and astir. Living otherwise in perfect camouflage among the "true bloods" or the "breathers" — meaning you and me — they are now baying for blood. When the murders come to Dylan's doorstep — his assistant Marcus (Huntington) is killed, only to wake up screaming in the morgue, as a zombie — Dylan emerges from "retirement" to get involved.

Along for the ride, despite the horrors and the apparent danger, is Elizabeth (Briem), whose father has also been killed. As Dylan "investigates" everywhere from a butcher shop to a "body shop" where zombies buy parts that they have lost, Elizabeth comes along almost as equally unfazed.

... contd.

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