do not waste your time or money

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2004)

Please heed this advice: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SEE VAN HELSING. Not as a matinee, not as a rental and not for free. I know what you are thinking, it's what I thought, how bad ultimately can it be? REALLY REALLY AWFUL THAT'S HOW BAD IT CAN BE! And, for those of you who are now saying to yourselves, if it's that bad it might be fun to watch you are wrong. This isn't like Ross Hunter's musical remake of Lost Horizon which was fascinating in it's badness, it's just stupid. It's not even worth watching for the action or the effects, they suck too. Why is it so bad? Hmmh. There is no plot, no dramatic arc, no interesting characters, no interesting character interaction, no redeeming good performance by one solitary actor and shot after shot after shot was cribbed from other films including Alien 3, Alien, Terminator, The Killer, etc etc etc. It is not even an homage to the old Universal films. It's obvious that the "writer/director" (I use those words because technically that was what Stephen Sommers was hired to do) had nothing but contempt for those films, and a complete misunderstanding of what makes those films work, or he couldn't have possibly made this film based on them. He gave Frankenstein's creation the power of speech to make him a whining self martyring pain in the ass. Vampires can walk around in the day time. A werewolf would turn back into a human if there is passing cloud cover over the moon, no really cloud cover, a Vampire hunter who can shoot hundreds of arrows and not hit a moving target in the heart, another vampire hunter who never carries stakes or any weapon that can destroy a vampire and cannot fend off a vampire by herself, and a village full of people living under the constant threat of being a vampire's next meal, who when they hear the sound of hundreds of beating wings at night, go outside en masse to see what's there!