Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Bless their hearts, Universal Studios is convinced that somehow their stable of classic monsters (which include: Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster [suck it, pedants], the Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.) is their ticket to universe-conquering, four-quadrant filling, box office domination. If they could only figure out the super-secret sauce that has allowed franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the Fast & Furious Family to succeed so wildly, they’d give themselves essentially a license to print money.
Alas, it never quite works out.
Most recently, Universal put a lot of money and time and money and energy and even more money into the so-called “Dark Universe”, which would have united all their classic creatures (including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde as an analog for Nick Fury for…reasons) in a shared cinematic universe. The franchise was meant to be kicked off with a blockbuster update of the blockbuster update of The Mummy, this time starring Tom Cruise. The Mummy sank like a stone and took the rest of the Dark Universe with it (a shame, as casting Johnny Depp in a movie where you never have to see his face was about the best use of Depp we could imagine [besides just firing him into the sun]), leaving Universal to try and come up with some other approach.
And this isn’t the first time that Universal dumped a ton of money and time and money and energy and yes wow so much freaking money into an attempt to turn their monsters into blockbuster superstars. Back in 2004, the studio was riding high off the one-two punch of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, rollicking action/adventure/horror films that turned a venerable, dusty Boris Karloff-fronted chiller into an Indiana Jones inspired mega-hit. Who better to revitalize the entire library of classic creatures than the man behind these unexpected smash hits? And so it was that in 2004, writer/director Stephen Sommers utilized freshly-minted movie stars Hugh X-Men Jackman and Kate Underworld Beckinsale, a bottomless budget, and the most cutting edge special effects that a post-Lord of the Rings world had to offer, and brought into this world…Van Helsing.
It…didn’t go great.
Van Helsing made money, sure, but it not as much as Universal wanted/needed in order to feel a proper return on their investment. The planned world-conquering multimedia franchise was quickly aborted, especially after audiences and critics reacted about as warmly to the film as Transylvanian villagers do to twitchy scientists with a hankering for graverobbing. Today, Van Helsing exists in the dustbin of failed franchises, alongside the likes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Lone Ranger.
But maybe we all misjudged Van Helsing back in the day? There are still those with warm feelings towards the film, and for many it was this movie, not the classics, that introduced them to the iconography of the Universal monsters.
So adjust your comically large hats and sharpen your stakes, because Two Cents is giving Van Helsing another day in the sun. — Brendan
Next Week’s Pick
Spike Lee’s incendiary race satire BlacKkKlansman lands in theaters next week, and by all appearances it looks amazing. Like Chi-raq, BlacKkKlansman is co-written by filmmaker Kevin Willmott, who directed several socially-minded independent films before combining forces with Lee to command a bigger stage. His 2013 comedy Destination: Planet Negro, a low-budget send-up of both classic science fiction and modern social issues, follows the exploits of black scientists in 1939 who decide to escape the racism of Jim Crow USA by colonizing another planet — but like Charlton Heston, their ship gets flung into the future instead, giving them the opportunity to see how America has changed in 75 years — and how it hasn’t. — Austin
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Van Helsing is, conceptually speaking, an odd film. Stephen Sommers clearly has great affection for the classic Universal Monsters, and yet had no interest in making a horror film. Even the protagonist, the titular Van Helsing, isn’t THAT Van Helsing. But it’s kind of a critical cop out to leave things at “it’s not the movie I want it to be.” So let’s take it on its own terms as an action-adventure movie.
Here’s what works: The cast is fine. Hugh Jackman is an entertaining enough lead, although the “mysterious” nature of his character’s past means he doesn’t have much to work with for most of the film. Kevin J. O’Connor is far better than his makeup/costuming as Igor, and David Wenham’s Carl is basically a steampunk version of 007’s “Q.” But the real standout is Richard Roxburgh, who clearly understood the camp potential of the film and went all-out in his performance as Dracula. If everything in the film was as dialed to 11 as Roxburgh, I think I would enjoy it more. But with some cast members embracing the campiness of it and the rest playing things more or less straight the result is a wildly inconsistent tone from scene to scene.
The CGI is really, really, REALLY bad — even for 2004. The action sequences come in two varieties: cartoonish video game cut scenes and (less common) very stagey, not particularly well-shot practical sequences. The score is relentless, and certainly not one of Alan Silvestri’s best. But ultimately the problem is how just unexciting it is. The plot is very draggy — in part because of how far out of its way the film goes to shoehorn in most (but not all) of the Universal monsters. It isn’t thrilling enough to work as action, and it certainly isn’t scary enough to be horror. Again, there is a certain goofy, campy quality at times, but as relaunch (or even homage) of the Universal Monsters Van Helsing just doesn’t work. I’d rather watch The Monster Squad, The Wolfman (2010), or even The Mummy (2017) any day. (@T_Lawson)
Adrianna Gober:
In the court of critical opinion, there’s a litany of charges to be brought against Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing: jaw-droppingly awful CGI, thinly written characters, a baffling over-reliance on exposition, to name just a few. And yet…
As it turns out, when a studio pours millions into reimagining the Dracula/Van Helsing rivalry as a high-concept, gothic Western with a heaping helping of camp, the result is something akin to the Universal Monsters equivalent of Showgirls. And I kind of love it?
I’m only being half serious, but think about it: the sad specter of a failed vision looming large, the extravagant sets and outlandish excess of it all, actors inexplicably shouting mind-numbing dialogue at each other for the duration — — it’s all there. To top it off is Richard Roxburgh’s hedonist Dracula: strutting around with his hoop earrings and Eurosleaze haircut, all confrontational sensuality and exaggerated gestures, he secures his place as the Cristal Connors of Transylvania, and I’m all about it.
By the time credits start rolling on Van Helsing, most people will be reaching for their holy water, but for pure, low-brow, camp spectacle, it gives me plenty to sink my teeth into. (@EADxBB)
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
Some movies are bad because they were a terrible idea from the start, others because no one involved could be bothered to give a damn, and some just had ambitions that greatly exceeded the filmmaker’s grasp.
Then there are movies where the female lead is killed by being tackled onto a chaise lounge.
…Yeah, Van Helsing is something else.
Look, I’m going to go to bat for this movie. Not because it’s *good* (it is…very not), but because you can feel the love and excitement for the material and the full-speed ahead commitment to the bit. Lavish production design, a thumper of a score from Alan Silvestri, and the most iconic monsters in cinema history. Universal thought they had a franchise goldmine, so they let Stephen Sommers do basically whatever he wanted. And he then proceeded to make nearly every possible wrong decision you possibly could on a film like this — but even in the face of the litany of things this film fumbles, I realized a key piece on this revisit:
This is what happens when someone makes Big Trouble in Little China while thinking Jack Burton is actually The Hero.
Van Helsing is *super* bad at his job, and the film seems ludicrously unaware of this fact, insisting within every frame to paint Jackman’s monster hunter as Iconic Movie Badass without him ever actually earning it. He dispatches his first foe by accident, uses roughly 1000 crossbow bolts to kill a single vampire (only managing that much thanks to holy water), can’t shoot a werewolf without getting bitten, fails repeatedly to protect friends and allies, and once he gets superpowers, he accidentally kills his love interest.
(ONCE AGAIN — BY TACKLING HER ONTO A COUCH. WHAT THE FURRY HELL.)
Van Helsing falls very short indeed of being a great monster movie, but — in its current state — it could have at least been a charmingly clever goof, if only the movie (not the characters) had been in on the joke. As it is, it’s a charmingly earnest complete mess. (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
I’m on vacation, but I decided to join in anyway… so I hooked up my Roku to the TV into the downstairs TV at the beach house and pulled up Netflix. Then, I saw Hugh Jackman’s hat and started to reconsider.
My wife walked in and I said, “I think we’re gonna watch Van Helsing.” She then proceeded to sing the hilarious song about Van Helsing that Jason Segel sings in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. We then put on Event Horizon instead.
Thus, I didn’t watch it this week and my only memory of it is from when it first hit my local Blockbuster years back. I remember enjoying it then, but I’m kinda happy I didn’t watch it again now… (@thepaintedman)
“Fuck no am I watching that shite again”.
End.
Van Helsing will always hold a place in my heart for one reason: When it was coming out, and Universal somehow thought this ugly little mutant was going to be their ticket to Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter-style money, they went ALL-OUT to hype up their back-catalog of monster movies. It was due to this promotional campaign that I learned about and saw many of the classic Universal monster movies, including Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf-Man, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, movies that I love and revere to this day. So thank you for that, Van Helsing. But you’re still shit.
Inoffensive shit, just so we’re clear. And honestly I tend to go easy on Stephen Sommers’ particular brand of offensively expensive idiocy because he seems to be coming from a place of sincere love and affection for these characters/properties, and because, while Van Helsing is dumb (and it is so very, very dumb) it’s dumb in the manner of an energetic, sweet-hearted kid. Van Helsing is an overlong, dim-witted disaster, but compared to the sneering condescension and hateful attitudes that propagate the overlong, dim-witted disasters propagated by the likes of Michael Bay and the sub-Michael Bays of the world, Van Helsing’s manic drive to entertain you comes off almost as charming.
Almost, because, as I have said, this is a very bad movie. The special effects looked awful back in 2004 and they were dated within a day of the movie being released. Even that might have been forgivable were it not for Sommers’ heinous visual sense, which crowds every frame to the point of unintelligibility and crams so much random crap onto each monster that they are either indecipherable (Frankenstein’s monster) or just ugly to look at (the various werewolves, Igor).
I don’t like Van Helsing, but I also can’t hate it. It’s trying so hard to be your favorite movie, and it throws so much stuff at you in an attempt to make you like it, that I can’t help but be endeared to it, at least somewhat. Hopefully, somewhere down the line Universal will figure out the correct way to use their magnificent legacy of monsters, and Van Helsing can be looked back on fondly as a goofy little footnote. But until then…well…I don’t know, the Dracula-gargoyle is sorta neat, I guess. (@theTrueBrendanF)
I watched this when it first hit DVD and vaguely recall loving Kate Beckinsale and hating everything else. But I couldn’t recall any specifics about why Van Helsing didn’t connect with me, aside from the bad CG.
It’s corny to be sure, but the same could be said of Sommers’ The Mummy and its sequel, which I enjoy unreservedly. Here he arguably repeats the same formula of high-camp adventure with splashes of old fashioned monster horror, but it all lands with a dull thud.
Right from the start, things start off badly with an awful sequence involving the literary Mr. Hyde. It’s goofy-looking, nonsensical, and strangely mean-spirited — all of which are demonstrated when Van Helsing lops off Hyde’s enormous cartoon arm with his glaive, and it falls bloodlessly to the ground and shrivels back into the (also bloodless) appendage of Dr. Jekyll.
Richard Roxburgh is bonkers as Dracula both in his look and performance, which kind of hurts to say because I really like Richard Roxburgh. His presence as the villain exemplifies the movie’s biggest problem, which is that it’s all so outrageously silly. In theory this concept is a promising one (even if the Dracula fan in me bristles at the misappropriation of Van Helsing).
Jackman and Beckinsale do an admirable job of trying to make this all work, but it’s a mess. It’s harmless and fun enough that I don’t have any reason to outright dislike it, but it’s undeniably bad. (@VforVashaw)
Next week’s pick: