Awful

Rating: 1/10 (22 October 2005)

This was so bad, I had to walk out on this film 15 minutes into it. Absolutely appalling. I loved the old 1930's/40's horror flicks but this is just not them. If you watched Van Helsing and The Mummy back to back you'll see how unsuccessful Van Helsing was at re-capturing that familiar sense of engagement we had with the old classics. For those people saying "Oh, it's just a bit of fun, camp fun", I do not think that was Sommers intention and if it was fair play to him. But I will argue that those classics were not just 'camp', they were a lot more textful than that. They had weird, eccentric characters in them but the films were crafted to have your sub-consciousness take the story seriously, that's what made them great. You know what to expect from them, watching them is the closet feeling to that one you get when you sit round a camp fire out in the dark with friends and freak each other out with little spooky tales. Van Helsing fails at this. I am a fan of CGI, but only if it looks real. The CGI in this made me cringe, its part of the reason I walked out the cinema. CGI can look incredibly good, or it can look incredibly bad in movies. You look at the CGI in Van Helsing and cannot help but be disengaged with the film and think, that's not a vampire, its a silly looking computer animation. And there was lots of it too, even in just 15 minutes. This wasn't fun, it was poor. Whenever puppets, costumes or make-up was used in the old horror films, obviously it looks silly but it can be real enough to accept it as being real, for the sake of enjoying the film. As much as I tried, this did not and would happen in Van Helsing with the CGI monsters. I find with most CGI characters in films they just don't have the correct body movement physics or facial expressions to justify themselves as believable characters, its a very serious issue that is overlooked. For me, the CGI in Lord of the Rings was superb, I didn't feel myself being disgusted with it such as in Van Helsing or in the Starwars prequels. Please, save your money and do not buy or rent Van Helsing its just a poor movie which fails as a tribute to the old classics.