Fridae

There’s a rule of thumb that you can never get a decent film adaptation out of a classic novel. You’re more likely to get a great film adaptation out of something pulpy or second-rate. But when it comes to adapting classic pulp fiction, anything goes.

Tiziano Sclavi’s Dylan Dog series of graphic novels are written in the grand Italian tradition of subverting American genres. Just as his predecessors remade cowboy movies into spaghetti westerns, Sclavi’s literary achievement is in twisting the supernatural sleuth genre as typified by John Constantine: Hellblazer into a darker, more inventive and bizarre creation known as Dylan Dog.

So imagine the promise that a film adaptation of Dylan Dog would hold. And just how wrong (or very appropriately right) it gets when you realise that Dylan Dog: Dead of Night might be deliberately filmed as a poor man’s Constantine (yes, that one with Keanu Reeves). In other words, there’s a detective (the eponymous character) who keeps the peace between the various supernatural races, a supernatural universe (vampires, werewolves, and zombies) run like mafia clans, and a murder mystery that threatens to unleash a supernatural civil war.

It is very difficult to ignore the film’s cookie cutter plot and characters, low budget prosthetics, make-up and special effects - which will understandably enrage fans of the far superior graphic novels. That being said, the best part of this film is where it recreates the very bloody (and low budget) Dario Argento giallo aesthetic. Combined with its quirky depiction of post-Katrina New Orleans and lingering shots of the buff under-acting Brandon Routh, Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is a passable B-movie with a quirky visual sense.