by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles wanted to watch a movie last night, and I went
looking through our DVD backlog and came up with Van Helsing, a 2004 horror extravaganza from Universal in which
writer-director Stephen Sommers, who had made two commercially successful films
based on the old Universal Mummy
franchise with Brendan Fraser in the David Manners role and someone or
something named Arnold Vosloo in the Boris Karloff role as revivified mummy
Imhotep, The Mummy in 1999 and The
Mummy Returns in 2001. For Van
Helsing Sommers got to rewrite a lot of
classic Universal monster characters, including Count Dracula, Frankenstein and
his monster, and even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (though he doesn’t turn green,
Sommers’ Mr. Hyde is larger than Dr. Jekyll — Robert Louis Stevenson described
him as smaller because he only
contained the evil within Jekyll, not the good — thereby making the Incredible
Hulk’s derivation from Jekyll and Hyde even more obvious than usual), into a
mashup of a story that literally made no sense. The film opens with a prologue
in black-and-white (the modern-day Universal logo starts out in color, then
fades to black-and-white, then catches fire and becomes a villager’s torch) in
which the villagers in Transylvania (the Castle Frankenstein gets relocated
from Mary Shelley’s original Switzerland to Romania) descend on Frankenstein’s
castle just as he’s finally giving life to his creation. The black-and-white
recreation of the original Universal monster classics is actually quite
convincing, and Samuel West’s performance as Victor Frankenstein is good (he
manages to suggest Colin Clive without being an outright “impressionist”
imitator), but there’s something wrong here: the whole pace of the scene is wrong, cut too fast in that damnable
modern-day editing style that decrees that audiences will be bored if you hold
a shot on the screen longer than about three seconds. What’s more, there’s a
subtly risible quality in Sommers’ writing that reminded me of Mel Brooks’ Young
Frankenstein — only Brooks and Gene Wilder
(his writer as well as his star) intended Young Frankenstein to be funny.
It turns out that Victor Frankenstein
is actually broke and he’s dependent on Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh in one
of the worst performances I have
ever seen in a major film — as tacky and stage-bound as much of Bela Lugosi’s
acting in the 1930 Universal Dracula
is, he was capable of far more subtlety than he was usually given credit for
and he totally aces Roxburgh in this role; ironically the only other film I’ve
seen Roxburgh in was another one in which he was channeling a far better
performer in a 1930’s: Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge!, in which he was playing Nicole Kidman’s rich
“keeper,” the equivalent of Henry Daniell’s role in the 1936 Camille) for his seed capital to build the monster. We also
learn that Dracula has been married to three women (they made a brief cameo
appearance in the opening scenes of the 1930 Dracula but then were pretty much forgotten about in the
rest of the film) and he’s been having sex with them for hundreds of years, and
they’ve been giving birth to his kids — only, since both Dracula and his brides
are dead, the kids they bring forth are dead too. They’re hung from the walls
of his castle in giant seed pods that couldn’t help but remind me of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, and he can make them
hatch — whereupon they emerge as gargoyles but don’t survive long because
Dracula can’t figure out the secret of keeping them alive. He’s become
convinced that Frankenstein’s technology can do that, which is why he provided
Frankenstein his venture capital — only he killed Frankenstein almost
immediately but kept the Monster (Schuler Hensley) alive and also hired
Frankenstein’s servant Igor. (There’s a weird thrill when Richard Roxburgh and
Kevin J. O’Connor, who plays Igor, have scenes together, if only because
they’re both playing characters
originated on screen by Bela Lugosi.) So where does Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman)
fit into all this? He’s an emissary of the Pope who, like Dracula, has been
alive for hundreds of years — though somehow his memory of his previous
existence got “wiped” — and he’s out to destroy Dracula and prevent his gargoyle
kids from being loosed on the world en masse.
To do that he seeks out the help of Dracula’s
surviving relatives, particularly Carpathian princess Anna Valerious (Kate
Beckinsale) and her brother Velkan (Will Kemp), who’s become a werewolf, and
after about two hours of great-looking but ill-connected and totally
preposterous action scenes (the film got a PG-13 rating “for nonstop creature
action violence and frightening images, and for sensuality”) that make the film
look like it was based on a “graphic
novel” (i.e., a book-length comic book) even though it wasn’t, Van Helsing gets
bitten by Velkan and is in danger of becoming a werewolf himself unless he gets
the antidote from Dracula in time. Nonetheless, he goes into at least one
werewolf transformation because it’s finally dawned on him and Anna that, since
Dracula is immune to the traditional vampire-killing techniques (they drive a
stake through his heart and he calmly pulls it out again and gives it back to
them), only a werewolf can kill him. Van Helsing duly kills Dracula but in the
process Anna dies too (a disappointment since I was hoping that, as a fantasy
character, she could come back to life and she and Van Helsing could have a
happy ending together) and Frankenstein’s Monster (ya remember Frankenstein’s
Monster?) floats himself out to sea on an
ice floe à la Mary Shelley’s
novel. (Incidentally Bram Stoker gets a closing credit thanking him for
creating some of the characters in the film, but Mary Shelley does not.) Van
Helsing is one of the worst movies I’ve
seen in quite some time, and as it unrolled I couldn’t help but make a lot of Mystery
Science Theatre 3000-type jokes about it —
including one after the scene in which Mariska (Josie Maran), one of Dracula’s
brides, gets killed. “No, she’s not dead,” I said; “she just escaped to America
and is starring on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” I also noticed from imdb.com that Universal
couldn’t leave ill enough alone with this story: there’s another Van Helsing, a TV series from 2016, though in this one the title character is a
woman, Vanessa Helsing (Kelly Overton), who wakes from a decades-long period of
unconsciousness to find that the world has been taken over by vampires. And it
doesn’t help this movie that both
Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale have been in better sci-fi/fantasy series than
this — Jackman as Wolverine in the X-Men movies and Beckinsale as a vampire who hunts down werewolves in the Underworld films!
