Even a man who is pure in heart, and has a huge budget can put you to sleep when the boardroom is full and the box office blooms.

Rating: 5/10 (10 May 2004)

Even a man who is pure in heart, and has a huge budget can put you to sleep when the boardroom is full and the box office blooms.
Van Helsing has everything; classic monsters, huge budget, good casting, built in multiple audiences, great story and script.
Wait a minute, did I say great story and script? I meant to say that it looked like somebody blocked the computer generated action sequences from the up coming `King Kong verses the Pirates of the Caribbean', and Van Helsing stole them, inserting various and sundry soft core monsters where there should be buccaneers and a big ape.
By and large this movie was just stupid. It wasn't very funny where it tried to be, it's continuity was terrible and if you love classic monsters you'll despise this. No longer are vampires part of God's great vengeance, it's all a personal feud between Romanian inbreds. Victor Frankenstein is no longer obsessed with the very nature of life, he's laboring to create a power up for the vampire boss, who has a Bond worthy plot to fill the world with demonic telletubbies, part green gummi bear, part Alien egg sack.
You'll also learn that you can run from Budapest to Transylvania and just barely be out of breath, which is good to know if a flavorless well groomed vampire is about to use an automaton as some sort of cable box to correctly charge his spawn.
I actually fell asleep for a couple of minutes.
If I was 14 and had never seen anything else in the way of horror or action movies, maybe it could get a pass, as it is I give it a 5/10, and that's with a bonus for a great angry mob.