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With: Titus Welliver, Jocelin Donahue, Brady Hepner, Judah Mackey, Aurora Perrineau, Corteon Moore, Fayna Sanchez, Jonathan Howard
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Written by: Natasha Kermani, based on a story by Joe Hill
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Directed by: Natasha Kermani
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MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence and grisly images
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Running Time: 89
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Date: 07/11/2025
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Slack Drac
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
A stiff, awkward "further adventures" story of the Van Helsing character from Bram Stoker's Dracula, Natasha Kermani's sort-of horror movie Abraham's Boys is, given the talent involved, surprisingly lifeless and anticlimactic.
It's 18 years after the death of Count Dracula, and Abraham Van Helsing (Titus Welliver) is now living in California with his wife Mina (Jocelin Donahue) — formerly Mina Harker — and sons Max (Brady Hepner) and Rudy (Judah Mackey). Mina is sickly, and her health is a concern to all.
At the same time, the boys live in fear of their strict father, but the bolder younger brother Rudy, musters the courage to break into Abraham's secret office. There they find a terrifying creature, imprisoned. When their father discovers their crime, he tells them of his secret calling: hunting vampires. He tries to teach them how to hammer a stake and cut off a head, but it's at that moment that Max makes a horrifying realization.
Adapted from a 2004 short story by Stephen King's Joe Hill (from the same collection as The Black Phone), Abraham's Boys doesn't do much to flesh out its source material; it seems to stretch it instead, filling it with empty spaces. It really has only one idea, and, like the story, it's hard to keep that under wraps long enough to create a truly shocking reveal. It just slides downhill into a rather pointless finale.
For most of its 89 minutes, characters interact in artificial ways, blocks of dialogue tumbling out, each thing said unrelated to the previous thing said. The movie invents some new characters, including Black siblings Elise (Aurora Perrineau) and Eddie (Corteon Moore), but they don't help things very much.
It's barely even a horror story, with only a few jump-scares and generic nightmare sequences that try to tingle the spine. (The tacked-on subtitle, A Dracula Story, is misleading at best.) The entertaining The Last Voyage of the Demeter showed how a successful story could be spun off from Stoker's original tale, but Abraham's Boys isn't on that level. It's mostly toothless.
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