Its not a vampire its a turkey

Rating: 3/10 (8 May 2004)

This movie is painful to watch. Why didn't some one stop director Stephen Sommers and his directorial excess is beyond me. I like The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, I even like Deep Rising, which this resembles in its desire to top itself at every turn.
Van Helsing, a thousands year old man who works with the Vatican is sent off to fight Dracula, his brides, werewolves and the Frankenstein monster. Its everything to excess as the filmmakers rub your nose in everything that they've stolen by referring to every damned film they've ever seen.

Its awful.
The opening sequence in black and white is meant to be a throw back to the Universal horror films of the 1930's and 40's, it comes off as if a bad jokey TV commercial. The next sequence of Van Helsing in Paris with Mr Hyde is clever and works, except that its a rip off of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the design of Hyde. At this point, with Van Helsing returning to the Vatican the film falls into an abyss of rip off mania, the worst being the Q like monk. You know Q from James Bond?
From here its off to Dracula and its over blown over done sequence after sequence as more and more and more crap is thrown into the mix.
Sommers has said that this is a film that he would have made when he was nine. Well did he have to regress himself and allow that nine year old to actually do so? Then again I can't see any nine year old actually liking this...
Don't get me wrong, except for Igor's make up (which would have been bad twenty years ago) the effects and the technical film making and some of the script (not all) are okay, granted the effects can shift from good to laughable but mostly they are okay. The problem is that the film doesn't have any sense holding it together. There is no sense of anything other than more is less.
More is less is also true of the acting. With the sole exception of Hugh Jackman everyone over plays it.
I spent most of this movie physically pained, batter by the over done nature of it and the fact that all I could help but think was "this should have been better" over and over again.
You don't need to give your money to the producers on this one. Only doing so will think we want a sequel and that would be a very bad thing. Stay home and begin a stamp collection, its a much more rewarding way to spend two hours.