Could be, but it isn't...

Rating: 3/10 (14 May 2004)

SPOILERS..I watched this movie expecting to see something like Mummy or, at least, like The Mummy Returns. I was not expecting too much. Having thrown in one movie Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman means that it can't be a serious horror movie. Or can it be?? Perhaps in this question Mr Sommers gave the answer "yes" or, even worse, "maybe". And what's the result?? In one word CATASTROPHE!!! SPOILERS: We have Van Helsing. "Gabriel" Van Helsing.The "left hand of God"!!!Does this ring a bell??It does for me.You want help?? Well, obviously somebody thought it would be clever and deep and intriguing to create a connection between the monster hunter and an Archangel!!Yes, AN ARCHANGEL!!And the excuse is that Mr Sommers did not like the name "Abraham"!Pretty convincing, right?? We leave that aside and we move on:We have Dracula.And the brides. And they want to have kids (about a million of them!!) and thus destroy the world. And, in order to bring their - obviously dead, since their parents are dead - kids to life, they need Frankenstein's monster.And this monster is hiding in the basement.And it definitely likes Jonh's "Apocalypse" as well, since it screams in an advanced shakespearean way "As I walk in the valley of the shadow and death...".And we have the good girl's brother who becomes a wolfman and wants to kill the girl.And, of course, we have the beautiful heroine and the sexy hero...And, naturally, when we have all these together, we can have anything but a serious movie.But some people did not seem to realize that. So, we have a script suitable for a good parody, a nice comic relief guy(Wenham) and an excellent portrait of a self-sarcastic Dracula by -clever- Roxburgh. The rest of the cast/crew/film, though, seems to fail to understand how and what. So, they act seriously while dealing with extremely hilarious facts and situations and they end up looking stupid and ridiculous. Obviously Mr Sommers spent large amounts of money on visual fx and other technical things.Perhaps he should spend a little more time in guiding his cast, leading them through the same way into a "pure-blood" movie. A movie that knows what it is and does not hover between the super-light and the super-grand.3/10 for decent performances.