What
a fucking turd. Fuck you, Hollywood. How the fuck can you release
something so soulless, witless and pointless? How fucking greedy
do you need to be?
Van Helsing
is as crappy, loud and stupid as the Harelip at the Arvada City
Hall Open House's free hot dog barbecue. It's all disorienting
squealing and howling and shoving hands down uneasy city firefighters'
pants.
Van Helsingis
the kind of movie that people who hate movies make. It's not a
good movie, it's not even a bad one that somebody cares about.
It's just a steaming pile of shit, a mass-marketing stunt dressed
up like entertainment. It'll be a blockbuster, but no for reason
other than sheer force of will and heavy marketing that keeps
telling us it's an event. If this is an event, so is the
time I ate too many sulfites at the Soup Plantation and sat on
the can wringing my bowels like a handtowel.
Fuck, this
is bad. Expensive, noisy and shitty. And you know why? Because
some asshole Writer-Directer Stephen Sommers (last seen making
bad Mummy movies) had hundreds of millions of dollars to
make a monster movie using the Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein
and he was too God damn lazy or unclever to bother doing anything
good. I guarantee that this movie was sold to a studio based on
a concept long before a word of script was written. It's all concept,
no plot and no character development.It's such a willy-nilly steaming
load that there's no reason to watch it from beginning to end.
You could enter halfway through and leave halfway through the
next screening and get just as much out of it.
Really, this
movie isn't a tribute to great monsters of the past, it's a cheap
fucking cashout on people's nostalgia for them. It's a bad, loud,
shitty movie that only tries to be loud. In that is succeeds.
Hugh Jackman
is Van Helsing, a Vatican-sponsored monster hunter. He is sent
to Transylvania to kill Dracula, where he meets up with Kate Beckinsale,
some sort of mealy-mouthed vampire huntress/gypsy who looks more
like a Fredericks of Hollywood reject than anything who could
kill bloodsuckers. Se just looks stupid. They join forces, along
with the requisite nerdy, funny sidekick. Along the way, they
encounter both clues and obstacles that appear to be pulled out
that lazy fuck Somer's asshole. There is no reason to the story's
twists because they are driven by the need to blow shit up at
the expense of character development and plot. Along the way,
there are many feeble attempts at humor that thud like the floor
at a VFW hall on Amputee Dance Night.
Van Helsing
is like riding shotgun with an ADD meth freak who keeps swerving
onto sidestreets because "there's something totally cool I want
to show you in this dumpster," when all you really want to do
is get home. Maybe a couple detours are cool, but when the entire
trip is nothing but aimlessly digging through strangers' trash,
it gets fucking old fast.
Hollywood's
horse shits out plot points like Dracula can only be killed by
werewolves, so luckily Jackman gets bit by one. And only Dracula
has an antidote for werewolvism, so luckily Jackman can kill and
then take the serum that is so readily available. The rules keep
changing, based more on what Sommers wants to blow up next than
by anything resembling common sense. This asshole thinks we're
all so fucking stupid that we just sit there and go "that blowed
up real good!"
The movie
climaxes with Jackman having to kill Dracula and take the antidote
before a clock strikes twelve. The clock takes at least 20 minutes
from the when it strikes for the first time, and then we never
even see it again. What a sloppy, bogus load of fucking donkey
nuts. Van Helsing is so God damn busy wrapping up uninteresting
and absurd subplots that it doesn't even try to follow through.
Hugh Jackman
is almost as good a swashbuckling hero as Richard Chamberlain
in Alan Quartermain. Although, I think Chamberlain was
wittier. Jackman is a stiff, uncharismatic fraud; a very bad Indiana
Jones, totally uninteresting and without a damn thing to do. Kate
Beckinsale is about as likely a vampire huntress as anyone else
from a J. Crew catalog. In other words, bullshit. She looks more
likely to snap in two in a strong wind than to stand up to killers.
And in a movie that's a decathlon of bad acting and worse accents,
she can out pole-vault, run, shotput and triple-jump the very
worst this movie can throw up. She's fucking awful. As is the
rest of the cast. How in the fuck can an entire cast botch a Romanian
accent? This is community theater quality crap.
And the acting,
good God. Every scene feels like the first take. Like someone
said "We'll fix it when we put in the special effects." People
interacting with animated creatures appear completely lost, sometimes
not even looking at the imaginary creature they're supposed to
be sharing screen with. Even the animated creatures look cheap
ass. The werewolves look hokey, the brides of Dracula look lame,
and other monsters just look silly.
This is awful,
the kind of shit we get when an asshole like Sommers tells Hollywood
he can shit gold and they all put their heads under his ass to
see. It's money where brains should go. One Finger for
Van Helsing.
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