Put a stake in this movie, PLEASE!

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2004)

Quite possibly the worst movie I've seen. Ever. Worse than LEAGUE OF EX GENTLEMEN, a movie that also really ticked me off. I went in hoping it would be fun, and be an homage, in a way, to the Universal films of the past. But no. VAN HELSING is a bloated, wasteful, soulless,bone-headed and arrogant mess - a perfect metaphor for everything that is wrong with the film industry, and, dare I say it? with our country today. Instead of loving and honoring its source material, this movie is disdainful of it, and uses lame, over the top,in-joke references from Aliens, Terminator, Rocky Horror, Star Wars, and yes, XMen to try to elicit humor. It is a noisy, shrieking, clanging, exploding CGI mess of a movie. God forbid there be any characters with any depth, or a plot that doesn't telegraph every cliche that it is about to commit, or that any iconic logic regarding Vampires, Werewolves or Frankenstein monsters be maintained. And it perpetrates perhaps the greatest sin of all - an annoying and completely uncompelling Dracula. And don't even get me started on the ending. OMG. The ending. People in the preview audience were HOWLING with laughter, it was so unutterably bogus. I am playing Hammer's HORROR OF DRACULA right now in an attempt to clear the miasmic haze of stupidity that VAN HELSING left in my brain.
Peter Cushing, Chris Lee and Terence Fisher, we need you now, more than ever!