Things wrong with Van Helsing
May. 6th, 2004 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiWhere to start?
With the Flying Frankenstein Monster of Coincidence (plus 10)?
Maybe the Evil Oompa Loompas?
How about the Flaming Evil Oompa Loompas?
The plot? Van Helsing, a man with a mysterious past, amnesia, and nightmares, meets Rogue in a bar -- wait.
Van Helsing, a man with a mysterious past, amnesia, and nightmares, kills Mr. Hyde (who looks worse than the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen version of the same character) in France (why France? Because he'd escaped London, of course). He then meets up with his Abbot of Exposition, who explains that their top secret organization found Van Helsing nearly lifeless on the steps of a church, and naturally knew that they could use him to fight evil (I know that's what I think when I find nearly-lifeless folks on my doorstep). The Abbot of Exposition takes Van Helsing down to the Secret Holy Benetton Society Lair, where monks, priests, rabbis, and members of every religion known to mankind work together in perfect harmony developing steampunk gadgets. The Abbot gives Van Helsing his mission: Go to Transylvania, where a mysterious family of do-gooders is down to two members, and they need Van Helsing and a mysterious fragment of a scroll that the family's patriarch gave to the Secret Holy Benetton Society hundred of years ago in order to prevent his family from ever being able to fight Dracula for no good reason we can ever discern. Van Helsing goes to visit the SHBS version of Q, who gives him a gattling crossbow, stakes, crosses, and also mentions that he has a mysterious box that can produce the energy of seven billion or so suns, but he has no idea what good that might do. Yeah. Gee. Really? Can't imagine that'll play a part in the movie. Van Helsing decides that a bookish nebbish of a monk is just the kind of sidekick he needs to bring to a country full of danger, and drags Q along.
We then cut to the final two members (a sister and brother, played by Kate Beckinsale and someone not important since he dies soon) of that family fighting a werewolf using methods perfected by the Keystone Kops. This includes shooting the werewolf with non-silver bullets while the brother is fighting the wolf, using a pulley that gets stuck at inopportune times, standing with one's foot over a pit while a cage is being lifted from said pit, putting a werewolf in a cage with slats big enough for its paws to get through, and all sorts of other fun techniques. After much fun is had by all, the brother heroically shoots the werewolf with the one silver bullet he had, and is pushed over a cliff.
Cut to Van Helsing and his sidekick entering a generic Transylvanian village and being assaulted by many of the villagers, who, like small-minded villagers in horror movies everywhere, don't trust outsiders, especially ruggedly handsome ones who look like Canadian mutants. After exchanging words with a gravedigger, Van Helsing finally gets to meet Beckinsale, and the sexual tension runs high.
Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? Stephen Sommers has directed Famke Janssen and Rachel Weisz, two of the most attractive stars around, and managed to cut out any hint of them being sexy in the slightest. You think he'll do any better with Beckinsale? Not a chance. You could put her in Underworld's leather bodysuit, and Sommers would still make her as sexy as, well, a Flaming Evil Oompah Loompah.
Which brings me to the Flaming Evil Oompa Loompas. Yes, this movie has them. As well as werewolves who only pass on their curse when someone shoots them. Plus an Igor who plays with cattle prods. And female vampires who perform interpretive dance. They all work for Dracula, who, in spite of being played by the normally talented Richard Roxburgh (who was also in LXG, come to think of it), manages to be the least engaging Dracula ever. Seriously. Leslie Neilson would have been better. Really.
Back to the plot, or, as I like to call it, the "plot," vampires attack, Van Helsing fires four million crossbow bolts that somehow don't hit Kate even though his aim sucks and he's aiming at the vampire attacking her. At some point, Kate tells one of the Brides that she's going to stake her, which guarantees that said Bride will live until the final moments, and then get staked by Kate. Just as two of Drac's three brides are about to kill Kate, Van Helsing kills the third, and the other Brides run back to Drac to cry and dance and eventually have sex in a giant ice cube.
I am not making this up.
Kate and Hugh chat a bit and provide us with some pointless exposition, after which he sprays her with concentrated GHB and she wakes up in bed. The presumed off-screen ravishing will make it to the DVD, I'm sure.
After waking up, her brother, now a werewolf, has snuck back into the castle to attack her/warn her as he switches between wolf and human (depending on the moon going behind clouds, even though this is all indoors, and moonbeams never really strike him directly anyway). He gets away, and Van Helsing chases him, killing the gravedigger in the process because someone had to die. Eventually, Hugh and Kate make it to Frankentstein's castle (the Good Doctor's fate is revealed in the prologue; suffice to say that it's just like the James Whale movie, only it sucks ass). Kate and Hugh discover Dracula's secret plan: He's going to have them change the ending of the play and steal Satine for himself. Wait, wrong Roxburgh role. Dracula and his brides have spawned a zillion Baby Vampire Eggs over the years, and they need electricity wired through a werewolf, to get the babys' little vampire baby hearts pumping.
Really. I'm not making this up. Nor am I making up how much the egg chamber scenes are swiped from a James Cameron movie. However, at no point does Kate say, "Get away from her, you bitch!"
Anyway, Drac gets his babies all alive (they explode out of the pods as tiny little bloodsucking monsters with wings, basically an army of thousands of flying embryonic Dick Chaneys). The babies attack the village, where the villagers, like any group of villagers in a country besieged by flying bloodsucking monsters would do, mill about aimlessly outside instead of hiding in reinforced basements. During the hullaballoo, Q rescues a chick, and after all the baby vamps explode because the power channelled through a werewolf wasn't right (Thousands dead due to bad vampire chakra, film at 11), Q gets lucky, because, well, he's only a friar, not a priest.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, Van Helsing fights Drac, who seems to know about Van Helsing's mysterious pastin Project X as a man named Gabriel. Before more can be made of this revelation (Gabriel Knight? Gabriel Byrne?), the werewolf brother gets loose, and Van Helsing and Kate run to the rooftop, where he fires his grappling hook gun across the ravine and into the forest. Which is 2.5 miles away. He grabs Kate and they shoot along the grapple until the werewolf follows, breaking the line. Wolf falls into the water, Hugh and Kate land on their butts, and Dracula shouts, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?" Okay, two out of three.
Soon, for no reason, they stop to drink absinth in some old ruins (hey, why not), and the ruins collapse into the sewers, leading to Our Heroes meeting Frankenstein's Monster, who, after a brief fight, explains that Drac's nefarious plan to send his children into the world (that bunch that exploded was only one egg cycle's worth) will only work if he uses Frank's body. The heroes, Q, and Frank all head to Hungary to take Frankie away to safety. To get there, they use the famous Decoy Staegcoach trick, which involves using two stagecoaches, having Hugh drive the fake one, and the horses jumping a huge gap but just missing by enough to cause the coach part to fall over a ravine, and a Bride to chase after it to grab Frank, but instead find that the coach is filled with a Stake Bomb, which conveniently explodes right then even though Hugh never could have set a timer.
Meanwhile, back at the real coach, our heroes are attacked by the werewolf/brother, leading to battle in which the werewolf is killed, but not before biting Hugh, because that's how it always goes. We also learn that the full moon is in two nights, which is impressive, since we just saw a full moon the night before. Before we can worry about this, the remaining Bride grabs Kate even though it appears to be broad daylight (turns out it was just the floodlights from the film crew) and flies away. The rest of the group meanders over to Budapest, where the female vamp tells them that they can make a Frank/Kate trade at the big masked ball. Hugh shoots Frank with a tranq dart and hides him in a crypt for no good reason, which Igor and the Oompa Loompa
At the ball, hilarity ensues, as Q and Hugh do a Gratuitous Flying Trapeze Act of Doom to grab Kate. Really. Of course, by this point we know that everyone at the ball is a vampire (we know because there are mirrors to show us the lack of reflections), and the clusterfuck that ensues is only cut short when Q realizes that the big ball what creates sunlight might be useful, and kills all the vampires except Drac and the remaining Bride, who are really the only ones we care about.
Before the heroes and Q can rescue Frank, Drac blocks them with a portcullus, which allows him to conveniently taunt them. We then learn that Hugh only has one day to find a cure for his lycanthropy, or it'll become permanent. Fortunately, Budapest to middle Transylvania is a short drive using the Express Horse, and they're there in about ten minutes.
At this point, Q remembers the Mysterious Hidden Animated Painting he found after getting laid, and then tells a long and rambling story, the only useful information within being that Dracula was killed in life by someone known as "The Left Hand of God," which was so obviously Van Helsing that even the gum encrusted to the bottom of my chair got up and walked out in disgust. At some point during his ramblings, he explained that he learned all this from a Mad Magazine fold-in, which explains a lot.
No, I'm not kidding about that last part.
Eventually, they merge that fragment of a scroll (see way above) with a painting to open up a portal to Drac's Icy Castle, which looks just like the castle from Mortal Kombat, only with suckier actors and lamer special effects. Chaos and unintentional hilarity ensue, in enough of a discombobulated mess that summarizing it would be pointless. Suffice to say we see the following:
-The remaining Oompa Loompas all set on fire in random electrical accidents.
-Frankenstein flying through the air to save Kate and Q on separate occasions, both by dumb luck.
-The revelation that Drac has a cure for werewolves, because he knows that a werewolf is the only thing that can kill him (why not stakes, sunlight, or fire? No fucking clue)
-The revelation that Drac keeps his cure for werewolves in a jar filled with acid, which, fortunately, doesn't dissolve the syringe (although it does dissolve metal and flesh).
-The staking of the remaining Bride, by, you guessed it, Kate.
-Kate grabbing an icy, slippery edge with one hand and holding on, in a preview of this summer's Spider-Man 2.
-The Big Battle between Van Helsing and Dracula, which ends with Drac dying and getting his neck sliced open. However, Van Helsing is now a full werewolf, and poor Kate gets slashed up and dies before injecting Hugh with the cure. Alas, their love could never be consummated. But slash writers will undoubtedly have a field day with Q and Van Helsing (and maybe Drac and Frank). And, frankly, most of the slash written will be better than the script, which I can only assume was influenced by Sommers snorting a kilo of cocaine every other day.
The movie ends with Van Helsing and Q burning Kate on a funeral pyre, at which point the ghost of Kate looks down from the heavens and smiles, as do Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Anakin. Frank, meanwhile, slowly rows his boat away, and Alan Silvestri's music plays as we fade away to the closing credits, and Universal's fond hopes for a sequel (they've already got an animated prequel, a PS2 game, and a tv spinoff in the works).
Impressively, this is the worst Dracula movie in recent memory (amazing, given the vast number of Drac flicks). It's also the worst Kate Beckinsale Vampire/Werewolf movie in recent memory. It is, however, just fucking hilarious to MST3K. My recommendation? See it for free, by hook or by crook, and enjoy making fun of the crap that Sommers spews forth. But don't pay one fucking red cent for this garbage.
With the Flying Frankenstein Monster of Coincidence (plus 10)?
Maybe the Evil Oompa Loompas?
How about the Flaming Evil Oompa Loompas?
The plot? Van Helsing, a man with a mysterious past, amnesia, and nightmares, meets Rogue in a bar -- wait.
Van Helsing, a man with a mysterious past, amnesia, and nightmares, kills Mr. Hyde (who looks worse than the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen version of the same character) in France (why France? Because he'd escaped London, of course). He then meets up with his Abbot of Exposition, who explains that their top secret organization found Van Helsing nearly lifeless on the steps of a church, and naturally knew that they could use him to fight evil (I know that's what I think when I find nearly-lifeless folks on my doorstep). The Abbot of Exposition takes Van Helsing down to the Secret Holy Benetton Society Lair, where monks, priests, rabbis, and members of every religion known to mankind work together in perfect harmony developing steampunk gadgets. The Abbot gives Van Helsing his mission: Go to Transylvania, where a mysterious family of do-gooders is down to two members, and they need Van Helsing and a mysterious fragment of a scroll that the family's patriarch gave to the Secret Holy Benetton Society hundred of years ago in order to prevent his family from ever being able to fight Dracula for no good reason we can ever discern. Van Helsing goes to visit the SHBS version of Q, who gives him a gattling crossbow, stakes, crosses, and also mentions that he has a mysterious box that can produce the energy of seven billion or so suns, but he has no idea what good that might do. Yeah. Gee. Really? Can't imagine that'll play a part in the movie. Van Helsing decides that a bookish nebbish of a monk is just the kind of sidekick he needs to bring to a country full of danger, and drags Q along.
We then cut to the final two members (a sister and brother, played by Kate Beckinsale and someone not important since he dies soon) of that family fighting a werewolf using methods perfected by the Keystone Kops. This includes shooting the werewolf with non-silver bullets while the brother is fighting the wolf, using a pulley that gets stuck at inopportune times, standing with one's foot over a pit while a cage is being lifted from said pit, putting a werewolf in a cage with slats big enough for its paws to get through, and all sorts of other fun techniques. After much fun is had by all, the brother heroically shoots the werewolf with the one silver bullet he had, and is pushed over a cliff.
Cut to Van Helsing and his sidekick entering a generic Transylvanian village and being assaulted by many of the villagers, who, like small-minded villagers in horror movies everywhere, don't trust outsiders, especially ruggedly handsome ones who look like Canadian mutants. After exchanging words with a gravedigger, Van Helsing finally gets to meet Beckinsale, and the sexual tension runs high.
Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? Stephen Sommers has directed Famke Janssen and Rachel Weisz, two of the most attractive stars around, and managed to cut out any hint of them being sexy in the slightest. You think he'll do any better with Beckinsale? Not a chance. You could put her in Underworld's leather bodysuit, and Sommers would still make her as sexy as, well, a Flaming Evil Oompah Loompah.
Which brings me to the Flaming Evil Oompa Loompas. Yes, this movie has them. As well as werewolves who only pass on their curse when someone shoots them. Plus an Igor who plays with cattle prods. And female vampires who perform interpretive dance. They all work for Dracula, who, in spite of being played by the normally talented Richard Roxburgh (who was also in LXG, come to think of it), manages to be the least engaging Dracula ever. Seriously. Leslie Neilson would have been better. Really.
Back to the plot, or, as I like to call it, the "plot," vampires attack, Van Helsing fires four million crossbow bolts that somehow don't hit Kate even though his aim sucks and he's aiming at the vampire attacking her. At some point, Kate tells one of the Brides that she's going to stake her, which guarantees that said Bride will live until the final moments, and then get staked by Kate. Just as two of Drac's three brides are about to kill Kate, Van Helsing kills the third, and the other Brides run back to Drac to cry and dance and eventually have sex in a giant ice cube.
I am not making this up.
Kate and Hugh chat a bit and provide us with some pointless exposition, after which he sprays her with concentrated GHB and she wakes up in bed. The presumed off-screen ravishing will make it to the DVD, I'm sure.
After waking up, her brother, now a werewolf, has snuck back into the castle to attack her/warn her as he switches between wolf and human (depending on the moon going behind clouds, even though this is all indoors, and moonbeams never really strike him directly anyway). He gets away, and Van Helsing chases him, killing the gravedigger in the process because someone had to die. Eventually, Hugh and Kate make it to Frankentstein's castle (the Good Doctor's fate is revealed in the prologue; suffice to say that it's just like the James Whale movie, only it sucks ass). Kate and Hugh discover Dracula's secret plan: He's going to have them change the ending of the play and steal Satine for himself. Wait, wrong Roxburgh role. Dracula and his brides have spawned a zillion Baby Vampire Eggs over the years, and they need electricity wired through a werewolf, to get the babys' little vampire baby hearts pumping.
Really. I'm not making this up. Nor am I making up how much the egg chamber scenes are swiped from a James Cameron movie. However, at no point does Kate say, "Get away from her, you bitch!"
Anyway, Drac gets his babies all alive (they explode out of the pods as tiny little bloodsucking monsters with wings, basically an army of thousands of flying embryonic Dick Chaneys). The babies attack the village, where the villagers, like any group of villagers in a country besieged by flying bloodsucking monsters would do, mill about aimlessly outside instead of hiding in reinforced basements. During the hullaballoo, Q rescues a chick, and after all the baby vamps explode because the power channelled through a werewolf wasn't right (Thousands dead due to bad vampire chakra, film at 11), Q gets lucky, because, well, he's only a friar, not a priest.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, Van Helsing fights Drac, who seems to know about Van Helsing's mysterious past
Soon, for no reason, they stop to drink absinth in some old ruins (hey, why not), and the ruins collapse into the sewers, leading to Our Heroes meeting Frankenstein's Monster, who, after a brief fight, explains that Drac's nefarious plan to send his children into the world (that bunch that exploded was only one egg cycle's worth) will only work if he uses Frank's body. The heroes, Q, and Frank all head to Hungary to take Frankie away to safety. To get there, they use the famous Decoy Staegcoach trick, which involves using two stagecoaches, having Hugh drive the fake one, and the horses jumping a huge gap but just missing by enough to cause the coach part to fall over a ravine, and a Bride to chase after it to grab Frank, but instead find that the coach is filled with a Stake Bomb, which conveniently explodes right then even though Hugh never could have set a timer.
Meanwhile, back at the real coach, our heroes are attacked by the werewolf/brother, leading to battle in which the werewolf is killed, but not before biting Hugh, because that's how it always goes. We also learn that the full moon is in two nights, which is impressive, since we just saw a full moon the night before. Before we can worry about this, the remaining Bride grabs Kate even though it appears to be broad daylight (turns out it was just the floodlights from the film crew) and flies away. The rest of the group meanders over to Budapest, where the female vamp tells them that they can make a Frank/Kate trade at the big masked ball. Hugh shoots Frank with a tranq dart and hides him in a crypt for no good reason, which Igor and the Oompa Loompa
At the ball, hilarity ensues, as Q and Hugh do a Gratuitous Flying Trapeze Act of Doom to grab Kate. Really. Of course, by this point we know that everyone at the ball is a vampire (we know because there are mirrors to show us the lack of reflections), and the clusterfuck that ensues is only cut short when Q realizes that the big ball what creates sunlight might be useful, and kills all the vampires except Drac and the remaining Bride, who are really the only ones we care about.
Before the heroes and Q can rescue Frank, Drac blocks them with a portcullus, which allows him to conveniently taunt them. We then learn that Hugh only has one day to find a cure for his lycanthropy, or it'll become permanent. Fortunately, Budapest to middle Transylvania is a short drive using the Express Horse, and they're there in about ten minutes.
At this point, Q remembers the Mysterious Hidden Animated Painting he found after getting laid, and then tells a long and rambling story, the only useful information within being that Dracula was killed in life by someone known as "The Left Hand of God," which was so obviously Van Helsing that even the gum encrusted to the bottom of my chair got up and walked out in disgust. At some point during his ramblings, he explained that he learned all this from a Mad Magazine fold-in, which explains a lot.
No, I'm not kidding about that last part.
Eventually, they merge that fragment of a scroll (see way above) with a painting to open up a portal to Drac's Icy Castle, which looks just like the castle from Mortal Kombat, only with suckier actors and lamer special effects. Chaos and unintentional hilarity ensue, in enough of a discombobulated mess that summarizing it would be pointless. Suffice to say we see the following:
-The remaining Oompa Loompas all set on fire in random electrical accidents.
-Frankenstein flying through the air to save Kate and Q on separate occasions, both by dumb luck.
-The revelation that Drac has a cure for werewolves, because he knows that a werewolf is the only thing that can kill him (why not stakes, sunlight, or fire? No fucking clue)
-The revelation that Drac keeps his cure for werewolves in a jar filled with acid, which, fortunately, doesn't dissolve the syringe (although it does dissolve metal and flesh).
-The staking of the remaining Bride, by, you guessed it, Kate.
-Kate grabbing an icy, slippery edge with one hand and holding on, in a preview of this summer's Spider-Man 2.
-The Big Battle between Van Helsing and Dracula, which ends with Drac dying and getting his neck sliced open. However, Van Helsing is now a full werewolf, and poor Kate gets slashed up and dies before injecting Hugh with the cure. Alas, their love could never be consummated. But slash writers will undoubtedly have a field day with Q and Van Helsing (and maybe Drac and Frank). And, frankly, most of the slash written will be better than the script, which I can only assume was influenced by Sommers snorting a kilo of cocaine every other day.
The movie ends with Van Helsing and Q burning Kate on a funeral pyre, at which point the ghost of Kate looks down from the heavens and smiles, as do Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Anakin. Frank, meanwhile, slowly rows his boat away, and Alan Silvestri's music plays as we fade away to the closing credits, and Universal's fond hopes for a sequel (they've already got an animated prequel, a PS2 game, and a tv spinoff in the works).
Impressively, this is the worst Dracula movie in recent memory (amazing, given the vast number of Drac flicks). It's also the worst Kate Beckinsale Vampire/Werewolf movie in recent memory. It is, however, just fucking hilarious to MST3K. My recommendation? See it for free, by hook or by crook, and enjoy making fun of the crap that Sommers spews forth. But don't pay one fucking red cent for this garbage.
