After his work on The Mummy Sommers has taken his CGI to extreme; there
appears to be not one scene which doesn't have some in it. This is definitely
a CGI vehicle with a none too complex plot - good guy takes on bad guy, wins -
but it's driven along at a frantic pace with a thundering soundtrack.
The excesses of the film are astounding, where else could anyone put
Terminator, Frankenstein ( and Monster ) alongside with Dracula and Wolfman ?
And then throw in a Hulk-like Mr Hyde ( né Dr Jeckyll ) who
thinks he's Quasimodo for good measure.
It's almost impossible to describe the film, there are just so many pieces to
the puzzle it's confounding. It looks like a jumble of scenes from every other
film you've ever seen, sliced up, twisted, and edited in a montage of homage.
Unbelievably, it works.
It's ridiculous and stupid. The humour is so blatant that it's consequently
poor.
David Wenham as the Friar was Van Helsing's comedy sidekick and didn't seem to
have a line which wasn't some joke. And all through it Hugh Jackman keeps as
straight faced as any Witchfinder General could. The acting is stunted. The
script is weak. The narrative unfulfilling. On those measures, there's no
other verdict than ; it's a pile of c--p.
But there's something to the film, something deeply familiar that makes it
captivating. It was a parody of so many films in so many ways. It carries
memories of Star Wars, with Wenham as a replicant C3PO, through to the
Ewoks at Castle Dracula, or maybe they were Munchkins ? The newborn Vampires
were the new age flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz or perhaps the swarm
from Pitch Black. The female Vanmpires; Harpies from Jason and the
Argonauts. It was X-Men, it was Blade, it was
undeniably 007; perhaps the film's most obvious, but best, parody scene.
It borrowed from Lord of the Rings, from the Lord of Darkness in
Time Bandits and from John Carpenter's Vampires. Some of the
high-wire acts brought back memories of Monsters Inc.
The opening scenes, an astounding tribute to James Whale's Frankenstein,
were fantastic, and every horror film ever made was in some way reflected in
Van Helsing. It was Rocky Horror and Young Frankenstein, and
especially so in the casting of Kevin J O'Connor as Igor, the best played
character by far.
I can't recall which film the horse and carriage chase comes from, the
bridge jump, nor the 'exploding bomb', for we're getting pretty generic by way
of re-used plot, but it'll come to me, probably in a thundering roller-coaster
nightmare-come-dream which is what Van Helsing is.
That the plot was contrived would be an understatement, and the plot holes
were cavernous. If Dracula had been banished away, then how did Igor and
the Vampirettes get from his world to this ? And how many years does it take
to stare at a wall poster and not realise the missing word is "Door" ?
Dracula's castle was a topological conundrum that not even Escher or Klein
could have figured out; leave the top of tower one, swing down two hundred feet,
go another two hundred feet, and crash through a window of tower two at the
level you started at. Discuss.
Einstein would have struggled to rewrite his theorem of time and space
relativity had it not been for the near infinite period of time between the
first strike of a midnight clock and the last. The expansion of time may
perhaps have been an entropy from the fact that this part of the world has
two full moons which occur no less than 48 hours apart.
A historian of Transylvanian folklore would have been struggling with an
encyclopaedic index to try and work out how it was that Dracula came to be immune
to a stake through the heart, unaffected by the Cross and Holy Water, and we
presume now eats Garlic by the clove, and can only be killed by a Werewolf.
Thank goodness for undiscovered, century old, hidden levers and mysteriously
animating paintings, or we'd never have worked out how Van the Man was going
to slay the invincible foe.
And since when has the Vatican had an open-door policy for Bhudists ?
It appears that the script writers took an idea from Memento, knew where
they were going, and wrote the script backwards. The sequencing tied together,
but for no real rhyme nor reason. Just why was Frankenstein and his creation
needed, brilliant though Shuler Hensley was as the monster ?
It's so easy to pull the film apart scene by scene, as we unthread it,
that it is hard to believe that it could run through the projector in a
forward direction without coming off the rails.
It does however survive the journey, and those who were paying closer attention
will have spotted the higher plot relating to the relationship between Dracula
and Van Helsing. Those who survived and enjoyed the ride will undoubtedly be
waiting for the sequel. Others I suspect will be left sitting in the
auditorium believing they've suffered brain damage.
