Directed by: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh
Oh hey, cool! They were one of my favorite bands when I was growing up, this is gonna be– wait… Van HELSING, not Van Halen, huh? Dammit. That movie sucked.
Hugh Jackman is Van Helsing, a monster hunter who’s lived for hundreds of years and who has to go defeat Dracula and his harpie and wolfman minions, all with the help of a comic relief friar and Kate Beckinsale, who plays the exact same character in every single movie she’s in.
Yeah, this is a bad movie. I mean, I get the concept behind it, which is a sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen idea (which came out the year before, coincidentally), except with classic Universal movie monsters instead of literary monsters, but all they use are Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the wolfman, and at the beginning is Mr. Hyde, which isn’t even one of those guys. What, you couldn’t fit a mummy or gillman in there anywhere? It just seems kinda half-assed to me.
And the half-assed concept of the film is the strongest part. The effects are retarded, the story makes no sense, the characters are flat and boring, and the acting is fucking atrocious. Richard Roxburgh, the guy who played Dracula, is just amazingly bad. Every single time he speaks, I winced. As amazing as this is, I think he may be the worst Dracula I’ve ever seen, and I saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Guest, where Dracula was a huge fat guy who barely moved or did anything but snarl with cheap plastic fangs.
Films in Boxes 
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