Force Fed Films: Van Helsing (2004)

Today I was given Van Helsing to watch starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale. I remember passing this one up simply because it looked really bad in the trailers. The CG monsters they showed in the trailers just didn't look good. In fact I don't think any one I know saw it in the theaters. I'll admit though, on paper it does sound good. The world's greatest monster killer, Van Helsing, hunting down Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein's monster all at once along with a collection of other creatures of the night. But does it stand up in practice? Perhaps with sufficiently lowered expectations it'll be alright. One can only hope. Hit the jump to see what I unearthed on these undead!


At first the story seems like it will just be about Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) tromping off into the forest and fighting monsters, but there actually is a thread of a story here. The Valerious family has been fighting Dracula, his vampires, and werewolves in the forests and mountains of Transylvania for hundreds of years. Long ago, the head of their family swore that none of his family, including any and all generations to come will enter Heaven until Dracula has been slain. The last member of the family left is Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) and Van Helsing has been sent to help her finally kill Dracula before he can kill her, forever condemning her and all her ancestors to purgatory.

Van Helsing arrives in Transylvania to protect Anna

First of all, I want to say that this wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. There were some fun action sequences, and some some cool looking things, like Van Helsing's weapons, and the design of the Wolfman was pretty good too. Hugh Jackman was his usual cool self, throwing everything he had into the role. Kate Beckinsale was very attractive, as expected, but she had this very annoying fake Transylvanian accent the whole time. Even so, she was actually pretty cool too, but I was always just reminded of how much cooler and better she was in Underworld.

Unfortunately, that's where the good qualities stop. Pretty much every thing and every one else were bad. Most of the effects were just terrible, save for a few of the CG werewolves, but even they weren't great looking all the time. All the vampires (there are a lot), imp things, and even Frankenstein's monster just looked bad.

This might be one of the better looking werewolves ever. Sad that it's in this movie.

The side characters were also quite bad. I really really didn't like Richard Roxburgh as Dracula. He's possibly the worst rendition of Dracula I've EVER seen in my life. Also, David Wenham plays Van Helsing's sidekick, a member of the church to help him do research. While David wasn't bad at acting, his character was still terrible nevertheless. He was always being stuck with these terribly bad jokes (and not so bad their funny, just bad) that were just always out of place. I would have rather he wasn't in the movie at all. 

Everything was far too over designed, like the people behind this movie had seen The Matrix one too many times. Everything just seemed to be trying too hard to be "cool." There was a lot of unusually placed steampunk stuff going on, and for some reason Dracula had a ton of little henchmen in black leather suits with gas masks. I don't even know what those were. Also, why was nearly 3/4 of the movie spent fighting Dracula's brides? They're around from the very beginning to the very end, and annoying and ugly the entire time.

Terrible effects and creature designs make for one ugly ass movie

There were at least a few small callbacks, if you knew enough to catch them, to the original movies a lot of these monsters came from. We see Frankenstein's Monster carry the doctor up to the windmill which the angry mob sets on fire. We hear Kate Benkinsale's character Anna mention that Transylvanian horses are the fastest in the world, which reminded me of the goofy scene in Nosferatu which shows Dracula's horse drawn carriage move at breakneck speeds, but that was in part due to the footage being played at double, perhaps even triple speed. But then at least I wasn't surprised when it looked like the footage of these horses was also goofily sped up as well.

On paper this movie probably looked like it could do no wrong. Hugh Jackman fighting all the classic movie monsters at once, with all their stories re-imagined to intertwine together. It should have been a no-brainer. Unfortunately everything seems to have been over thought, over designed, and probably overlooked by the studio. Although, seeing that the director/writer was also the creative mind behind The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, I'm somehow not surprised that this ended up the way it did. Honestly though, I think if the CG was just a little better, that would have helped a long way to making this movie bearable. As it is though, this is a movie you should probably avoid like the plague. Yes, I said it was better than I thought it would be, but instead of being excruciatingly horrendous, it was just really terrible.