Hugh Jackman’s rumored $200 million monster bash flick is terrible in almost every sense of the word. But at the same time, I found myself being unashamedly, ok, maybe I am ashamed, but I loved it. This is a film where not only do you have to check your brain at the door, but you have to lock it away in a strong box and throw away the key.
Van Helsing has issues right from the beginning. The film opens with this great old time monster movie look. The opening sequence finds us deep in Frankenstein’s Castle as he’s about to give birth to his creation. While an angry mob is outside trying to force their way into the castle, this sequence is shot with love and reverence to the original source material. It’s a moment that we’ve seen or read a thousand times before. At this moment in the film it is hard to tell exactly what type of film Van Helsing is striving to be. In the first few minutes with the grainy black and white cinematography, the apparent “”shot for shot”” remake you get the feeling that this is going to be a serious, reverent look and homage to old time horror flicks. Complete with scares, thrills, and spills. But then Dracula shows up and the ridiculousness starts immediately.Everything involving Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) was just silly and over the top bad. It was hard, ok impossible to take him seriously. Yes he was invincible, but this Dracula wasn’t the “”sexy beast”” he’s supposed to be – he looked goofy. Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Dracula was more menacing than this one. This Dracula managed to be whiney, arrogant (and wasn’t nearly as arrogant or confidant as Dracula is supposed to be) and hysterically funny at the same time. Not the mark of a great villain. And when I say hysterically funny, I’m not entirely sure if he was supposed to be funny as in “”dead pan”” humor or if the dialog was just so atrocious and poorly delivered that it came across to me as being funny. The film has a truly original and silly way of dispatching him at the end.His back story is confusing and never really fleshed out, and there’s a strange twist involving Van Helsing (more on this later) that when the big reveal comes, I was scratching my head. It makes a strange kind of sense, but the set up and lead up to it was so botched that I just didn’t care, and frankly I was warn out by the time the end came. This is where I mention that the movie is almost 2 1/2 hours, with non-stop, wall to wall action. So you really don’t feel the time that is assuming that you managed to shut your mind off – like I did. I will admit that eventually half way through the experience I started to feel numb to the sheer repetitiveness and stupidity of the entire endeavor.I can tell you Dracula’s brides where meant to be seriously evil, but came across as laughably bad. Their dialogue was hideously delivered and the CGI effects were terrible. And here’s where the film really falls down, for a 200 million dollar “”tentpole”” film, the CGI effects had a strange amateurish look and feel to them.When we first meet our hero Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) he is confronting Hyde, a CGI version of the famous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde monster. While the monster had a strange kind of personality, it was impossible to be scared by him. He looked and acted almost exactly like the Hyde monster from last year’s LXG flick. Only this time he was supposed to be big, bad, mean, and a vicious killer, yet there’s a shot of him pulling up his pants to cover up his ass cheeks, while he’s in the middle of battle. Nothing says evil like a big hairy ass.Curiously enough this is one of the only sequences in the entire film where you get the sense that Hugh Jackman is really the bad ass monster slayer that he’s supposed to be. He takes on Hyde without any fear, with ingenious weapons, and shows no mercy. When he’s done with this mission, he returns to the Vatican to meet with this secret society of monks, whose job is to save the world from things that go bump in the night. They send Van Helsing to Transylvania to help Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) kill Dracula. It seems her family is cursed to spend their after life in purgatory until they do the dirty dead. Why this particular family is faced with this obligation is explained in the film, but the explanation is confusing at best. When Van Helsing gets to Dracland, he turns from smart bad ass – who doesn’t remember his past, with cool weapons to ignorant I have no clue what I’m doing bad ass with weapons that don’t work. Well they work they just don’t have much effect on the monsters – at least until the end of the film where he finally figures out how to kill Vampires and Werewolves. You would think the group that he works for would have given him some pointers before sending him on his way, but nope. It was “”take these weapons, we don’t know how to use them or what they are for, but they should work.””To further the film’s schizophrenic nature, at times the movie looked like it was filmed in color, but they decided after the fact that some scenes should be black and white – with some minamilistic color so they applied a filter to give achieve that look. Instead of a crisp clean look, the blacks, blues, and greys ended up looking washed out. At other times the cinematography is gorgeous. Now I’m not going into the fact that the Vampires had no logic, or that it seemed like there was always a cloud handy so that the Vampires can apparently be outside in the day, and that there seemed to be very little difference between night and day anyway. I won’t even get into the fact that the werewolves would transform when they see the full moon, but change back to human when a cloud covers it, yet they can remain werewolves indoors. What I will mention is the hysterical scene where the towns people seeing a swarm of vamp children coming from a mile away, instead of going inside and locking all the doors, like any sane person would do, they just stand outside for a good 5 minutes and stare at the oncoming swarm. At the end of the day, this movie wasn’t about story, cinematography, or acting. What it was about was getting your favorite movie monsters into a situation where they can do battle. You want to see, Dracula Vs Wolfman? You got it. You want Frankenstein’s Monster fight a Werewolf? You got it! You want to see Frank vs. Dracbabes? You got that too. This being the start of the summer film season, you can’t really judge certain films based on things like artistic merit, at the end of the day I have to ask myself did I enjoy myself at Van Helsing? And the answer to the question is a resounding yes, it’s good, or in this case, “”bad”” campy fun. Final Grade B-EM Review byMichelle AlexandriaOriginally Posted 5/7/04