Undead on arrival

Rating: 5/10 (6 May 2004)

*Contains Spoilers*
Steven Sommers is dangerous. You may not have been conscious of it until now but the man has abilities that would make many of his more fantastical characters seem redundant. Like a photochemical blue ring octopus, Sommers can paralyze the human body in less than two hours, causing higher brain functions to shut down completely. Gradually secondary functions, such as motor control, breathing and the ability to sit up straight encroach on impossible. Before long you're looking down the business end of misanthropic meltdown, a few frames away from becoming undead yourself. Will Hugh Jackman show up to put you out of your misery? Will he f***.
You've seen Van Helsing before. I know you don't think so at the moment but cast your mind back to Sommer's last reworking of classic, better made horror fare, The Mummy and you've got the tone, characters and production methodology reproduced with a painful attention to detail. Evidently people attending the former sent all responsible the wrong message, namely that what the public wanted was more of the same, so you see you've only got yourselves to blame. I'll certainly be punishing myself this evening.

VH was supposed to be Sommer's slightly darker take on Universal's classic monster flicks but Sommers is no James Whale, though based on the evidence presented here he deserves to sample Whale's favourite pastime soon, preferably at the hand(s) of the seven footer playing Frankenstein's monster. Said creature isn't a bad metaphor for this flick, stitched together as it is from Whale's movies and Sommer's previous efforts. A copy of a copy then and with all the generational loss that implies, it's a depressing indictment of the directors big dumb fun' approach but it's too dumb to be any real fun and big in this case simply means the great man's trademark noise, wall to wall (sometimes surprisingly shoddy) computer generated effects and so close to one dimensional they can taste it, characters who constantly talk exposition rather than say anything, `We've got to get this to Van Helsing', `She's DEAD', `we've got 48 hours to save you/the world/our dignity' etc
The characters and plot, and I use the term lightly, replicate the Mummy perfectly. Jackman stands in for Fraser, the guy you've never heard of is John Hannah providing the not in any way comic relief and Weisz is brought back from the cine-dead as Beckensale, impersonating her kick ass heroine Schick with care but being careful to have a east European accent so that the Mummy's leading lady can't show up at Universal and claim her pay packet. She even dies for God's sake.
It's a poorly cut up corpse, messy in the mid-section with a blaring, ear bleeding soundtrack designed to stun the audience so that they won't notice the plot holes. It starts promisingly enough with a black and white prologue that recalls the original Frankenstein but after that this one heads for the grave with Jackman's Indiana Van Helsing, more a monster killing James Bond than anything conceived of by Bram Stoker, getting his orders from the Vatican(!), stocking up on weapons and sodding off to Transylvania to kill some really very good looking women and saving the world. That's it and you should know that by going to see this movie you're only encouraging Sommer's to make more so don't do it. He can be stopped but only if we all pull together. It's demographically target overproduced bilge from the vat marked franchise' but who are these people exactly? You, me? The teenaged gang sitting behind me in the cinema loved it, laughing in all the right places and evidently lapping up every minute. That they looked like habitual drug users was a matter of some concern. At $135M wouldn't it have been cheaper just to give these kids smack? I lost two hours of my life today and although I'd only penciled in some light cooking and a screening of Gag Factor'(the biopic of comedian Tommy Cooper), I can't help but feel a little bitter. Cooper's gagging was impressive to say the least, incidentally.
Complete cock.