Van Helsing

What a fucking turd. Fuck you, Hollywood. How the fuck can you release something so soulless, witless and pointless? How fucking greedy do you need to be?

Van Helsing is as crappy, loud and stupid as the Harelip at the Arvada City Hall Open House's free hot dog barbecue. It's all disorienting squealing and howling and shoving hands down uneasy city firefighters' pants.

Van Helsingis the kind of movie that people who hate movies make. It's not a good movie, it's not even a bad one that somebody cares about. It's just a steaming pile of shit, a mass-marketing stunt dressed up like entertainment. It'll be a blockbuster, but no for reason other than sheer force of will and heavy marketing that keeps telling us it's an event. If this is an event, so is the time I ate too many sulfites at the Soup Plantation and sat on the can wringing my bowels like a handtowel.

Fuck, this is bad. Expensive, noisy and shitty. And you know why? Because some asshole Writer-Directer Stephen Sommers (last seen making bad Mummy movies) had hundreds of millions of dollars to make a monster movie using the Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein and he was too God damn lazy or unclever to bother doing anything good. I guarantee that this movie was sold to a studio based on a concept long before a word of script was written. It's all concept, no plot and no character development.It's such a willy-nilly steaming load that there's no reason to watch it from beginning to end. You could enter halfway through and leave halfway through the next screening and get just as much out of it.

Really, this movie isn't a tribute to great monsters of the past, it's a cheap fucking cashout on people's nostalgia for them. It's a bad, loud, shitty movie that only tries to be loud. In that is succeeds.

Hugh Jackman is Van Helsing, a Vatican-sponsored monster hunter. He is sent to Transylvania to kill Dracula, where he meets up with Kate Beckinsale, some sort of mealy-mouthed vampire huntress/gypsy who looks more like a Fredericks of Hollywood reject than anything who could kill bloodsuckers. Se just looks stupid. They join forces, along with the requisite nerdy, funny sidekick. Along the way, they encounter both clues and obstacles that appear to be pulled out that lazy fuck Somer's asshole. There is no reason to the story's twists because they are driven by the need to blow shit up at the expense of character development and plot. Along the way, there are many feeble attempts at humor that thud like the floor at a VFW hall on Amputee Dance Night.

Van Helsing is like riding shotgun with an ADD meth freak who keeps swerving onto sidestreets because "there's something totally cool I want to show you in this dumpster," when all you really want to do is get home. Maybe a couple detours are cool, but when the entire trip is nothing but aimlessly digging through strangers' trash, it gets fucking old fast.

Hollywood's horse shits out plot points like Dracula can only be killed by werewolves, so luckily Jackman gets bit by one. And only Dracula has an antidote for werewolvism, so luckily Jackman can kill and then take the serum that is so readily available. The rules keep changing, based more on what Sommers wants to blow up next than by anything resembling common sense. This asshole thinks we're all so fucking stupid that we just sit there and go "that blowed up real good!"

The movie climaxes with Jackman having to kill Dracula and take the antidote before a clock strikes twelve. The clock takes at least 20 minutes from the when it strikes for the first time, and then we never even see it again. What a sloppy, bogus load of fucking donkey nuts. Van Helsing is so God damn busy wrapping up uninteresting and absurd subplots that it doesn't even try to follow through.

Hugh Jackman is almost as good a swashbuckling hero as Richard Chamberlain in Alan Quartermain. Although, I think Chamberlain was wittier. Jackman is a stiff, uncharismatic fraud; a very bad Indiana Jones, totally uninteresting and without a damn thing to do. Kate Beckinsale is about as likely a vampire huntress as anyone else from a J. Crew catalog. In other words, bullshit. She looks more likely to snap in two in a strong wind than to stand up to killers. And in a movie that's a decathlon of bad acting and worse accents, she can out pole-vault, run, shotput and triple-jump the very worst this movie can throw up. She's fucking awful. As is the rest of the cast. How in the fuck can an entire cast botch a Romanian accent? This is community theater quality crap.

And the acting, good God. Every scene feels like the first take. Like someone said "We'll fix it when we put in the special effects." People interacting with animated creatures appear completely lost, sometimes not even looking at the imaginary creature they're supposed to be sharing screen with. Even the animated creatures look cheap ass. The werewolves look hokey, the brides of Dracula look lame, and other monsters just look silly.

This is awful, the kind of shit we get when an asshole like Sommers tells Hollywood he can shit gold and they all put their heads under his ass to see. It's money where brains should go. One Finger forVan Helsing.