Let's Keep Things In Perspective...

Rating: 7/10 (9 May 2004)

First off, let me say that I am a HUGE fan of the early Universal horror movies. These movies created the genre. My understanding was that Van Helsing was a modern, CGI-heavy homage to those early movies. The movie even begins where the Son Of Frankenstein left off. Except for the stellar perfomance of Karloff in The Mummy and the first 2 Frankenstein movies, almost all of the rest of the early Universal Dracula/Frankenstein/Wolfman movies were fun (and sometimes silly) popcorn movies. True, there was not a lot of room in this movie for deep acting and the story might even be considered campy, but that's ok. It was a fun addition to the Universal horror tradition. I liked Jackman's Van Helsing character and David Wenham was great. There were a few questionable bits of dialog, a bad accent here and there, some borderline CG, etc, etc...but I enjoyed the movie a great deal.