Exuberantly moronic and awful

Rating: 1/10 (16 November 2004)

Leave it to Stephen Sommers do outdo himself in the schlocky film-making department (see my MUMMY II review). I've never seen a movie exuberantly & giddy in its awfulness. This film is so moronic, on so many levels that it creates an all new style of cinema, a style that will never catch on (hopefully...) if one looks at the disappointing box office. The "filmmaker" doesn't care for anything but big noisy moments where everyone is screaming, or falling off of this wall or that cliff, all done in a extreme schlocky manner, including an orgy of terrible CGI, bad makeup, stupid characters and a plethora of incongruous elements so disparate that the end product looks like it was truly dreamed up by a 5 year old boy suffering from extreme ADD.
Sommers actually tried to make Van Helsing into a medieval James Bond, with the villain, being a campy Dracula (and his three hysterical bimbos) trying to destroy the world with their GREMLIN-like offsprings by having them energized by the "lifeforce" from Frankenstein's Monster. If that made any sense to you, you need to see a shrink!
The film is filled with soooooooooooooo many mistakes and goofs that it defies total logic, even for a film that belongs in the horror/fantasy genre. If werewolves only change in moonlight, how come Anna's brother was a werewolf during the daytime? Helsing recklessly firing his automatic crossbow in that village, even if there are people all around...I'm surprised no one was accidentally killed. Why did the lightnings strike the centuries-old stone overpass when the goofy Friar tried to cross it? And what happens to Anna at the climax. Moments like these basically show how Sommers was just winging it (and then some...) and had no idea what to do with Universal's classic monsters. The scene when Frankenstein's Monster swings across the overpass, only to crash through a window and tackles the female vampire, accidentally saving Anna, is by far the DUMBEST scene ever conceived in the history of cinema. That scene is filled with so many mistakes (why doesn't Anna just leave the room?) that Ed Wood would have been jealous of Sommers for creating something that actually eclipses everything the legendary bad filmmaker ever tried to make.
VAN HELSING is definitely one of the worst films ever made!