terrible

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2004)

This film is really an atrocious piece of soulless commercialistic crap. The title might suggest some kind of gothic or horror flick. Yet It's not horror; it's not comedy... It flops at eliciting any emotional response at all. The concept seems to make yet another low-brow, high- budget, shoot-em-up Hollywood production substituting pyrotechnics for substance. The "hook" is that in place of monosyllabic, muscle-bound vigilantes, it substitutes a menagerie of monster characters including Count Dracula, werewolves, Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein's monster (have I left any out?), and the hero, van Helsing, as an employee of a secret Vatican organization who is regularly sent on missions save the world by hunting down and killing evil-doers. Hmmm... is it just me or does this worldview seem all too frighteningly familiar? Stupid, disappointing, and nauseatingly bad writing and development. I've never actually gone to the trouble of logging on to post a bad review of a movie before: This flick was uniquely inspiring in that regard.
I'd really like to see Hollywood stop shamelessly exploiting and wearing out well-known characters from famous works of the past (as in Van Helsing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Underworld etc.) to make stupid, big budget special-effects crap intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It fail to appeal at all; and it shamelessly uses up the impact of the quality work that made these characters into cultural icons, for no redeeming purpose whatsoever.