Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2000 Patrick Lussier film Dracula 2000. Today, he looks at the 2004 Stephen Sommers film, Van Helsing. This article will contain spoilers.
So this is what passes for a “cult classic” from our dreary lost decade, the aughts.
A larger complaint about the context this movie existed in before we get to the subject at hand: What a terrible time it was for Western action films. People complain about the “shaky-cam” style that the Bourne franchise popularized, but that was the beginning of an actual trend in these big mainstream films towards intricate fight choreography in the martial arts film style that looked either “real” or, beginning with the John Wick revolution, “hyper-real” — clearly a set of highly-coordinated dance moves, but done at an extremely high performer level in a way that was meant to be captured by cameras and accentuated by editing instead of hidden.
In the aughts, almost all we got was this action-comedy shit shot through with the first bad grasping attempts at invasive CGI. There were good (or at least enjoyable) examples of this — the Sam Raimi Spider-man movies are from this decade; the fun Pirates of the Caribbean movie; Crank sort of counts for this — and there were exceptions to using the action-comedy formula at all, like Shooter and Casino Royale. But we also got a whole lot of stuff like Rush Hour, Shanghai Knights, Smokin’ Aces, Shoot ‘Em Up, Charlie’s Angels, and the original run of Fast & Furious films. It was also the decade where big print media IP emerged as the primary drivers in big-budget filmmaking. The 2000s were the domain of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and in the back half, the superhero ascension.
This is how you end up with a Van Helsing movie that could have been a beautiful-looking, fun action-adventure romp, but wants to be a franchise-launching James Bond vs. Universal Movie Monsters tentpole with multiple sequel threads. Instead of being either, it ends up saddled with too much world-building, a never-ending first act with way too much grab-ass and screwing around in its action scenes, and a finale that just didn’t have the technology available to pull off what it wanted to do in the year 2004.
The good first: The sets and costumes in this movie are magnificent and would help set what pulp retro-modern-whateverpunk fantasy looked like for at least the rest of the decade. Kate Beckinsale’s entire deal in this film created the raven-haired corset fantasy action babe template that would soon appear in video game character creators everywhere; the female Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and Katarina from the third Dungeon Siege outright steal this look. Jackman’s Van Helsing is equally inspirational; he’s not the first witch hunter to wear a black pilgrim hat to work, but he might be the most visible one. Both Dracula and Frankenstein’s castles are portraits of dire fantastic industry whose look and vibes were templated for similar mad science so many times over the next 20 years that people no longer remember their proximate origin in this blend of Saruman’s breeding pits from Lord of the Rings, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and the underworks of Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back. The movie spends like eight total minutes in Budapest and the monster’s ball in Dracula’s summer court is still the most visually striking scene in the whole affair. Even the windmill Frankenstein’s Monster ends up buried beneath has a skeleton of big chunky gears under its thin lumber skin.
The best sets in the film — the castles, the masquerade party, the workshop pits — get the film’s best actor to work on them. Richard Roxburgh’s Dracula is the only part of Van Helsing that endures past the film’s credits; Beckinsale and Jackman sleepwalk through most of the film, marking time until they can return to the Underworld and X-Men franchises respectively, but Roxburgh really goes for it. His Dracula is not especially Romanian, despite the actor’s comments about the idea of a mythic Romani king inspiring his costuming and makeup; he comes off more like an Australian trying to play a Spaniard. But there’s a driving, undeniable energy to his performance; he is easily the most alive and vital character on the screen across the film’s ponderous 2 hour, 11 minute run time. Part of this is that so much of his Dracula performance is kinetic: He’s always moving places, walking up walls, standing on columns sideways, jumping, looming behind people, sweeping his arms around, ballroom dancing — the man is never standing still. Most of the words coming out of his mouth are stupid, but Roxburgh figures out how to deliver even the worst clunkers by ratcheting up his mysterious smugness. It makes you wish you could have seen what he’d have done with a script with more intelligent motivations for his character than “Dracula wants to unleash a bunch of CGI vampire imps on Romania, for mostly unexamined reasons.”
That is basically the plot of the film, and is only one of the many reasons why we’re done talking about the good parts of Van Helsing. If you haven’t seen the movie in twenty years you might be forgiven for not even remembering that was the big plan; there’s so much other stuff going on! And so very little of it is interesting! There’s the completely inessential character introduction for Van Helsing that features him killing an extremely 2004 CGI Mr. Hyde on the flagstones outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which as far as I can tell is only the setting for this fight so they can briefly trick you into thinking Van Helsing is hunting said institution’s famed Hunchback instead. There’s an entire Q Department gadget scene ripped straight from a Bond film with the friar Carl, who follows Van Helsing around as a comedy relief plot-advancing sidekick. There’s the half-hour the film then spends in the village at the foot of Castle Frankenstein, perhaps the only uninteresting set the movie has, anchored by a fight against the brides of Dracula that goes over ten minutes long, feels like twice that, and only has the decency to remove one of the three from the film. There’s the brides themselves, whose actresses are game but who are given less than nothing to work with, spending much of their time both in and out of their CGI ping pong ball suits making CGI faces.
There’s Frankenstein’s Monster, who feels like he should either be given way more or way less to do in this script, and instead ends up as a macguffin prone to giving irritating lectures. There’s all the maximalist lore and plot nonsense you’ll grow to detest in these franchise-launching films over the next twenty years, where Van Helsing is actually 400 years old but lost his memory and is the guy who originally killed Dracula and also is a werewolf because there’s a war between vampires and werewolves (very brazen of you, Stephen Sommers, with Kate Beckinsale standing right there), and the church has been manipulating him until now because– Enough! Too much! Cut thirty minutes out of this film and then we can start to talk about it being “so bad it’s fun!”
The final fight is an extremely-maligned extended confrontation between Van Helsing’s CGI wolf ogre form and Dracula’s CGI vampire ogre form, which is what the entire film has been building too both in its plot and with its effects use. The CGI in this movie is, for its time, actually very good. When Sommers uses it responsibly and with the right guard-rails — heavy complementary practical effects and the proper camerawork to hide or switch out models as needed to protect the computer effects — it shows the promise of the technique and why studios fell in love with it. The initial werewolf transformations are extremely creepy; the vampire face distortion when their fangs come out is the right level of pulpy grotesque and stupid. But you can’t just show both guys in their CGI ogre forms duking it out like one of those graphics card box covers from back in the day. The technology wasn’t there for it yet, and wouldn’t get even close to being there for another ten years; maybe closer to fifteen. The Steppenwolf in Zack Snyder’s own cut of Justice League, that guy is a CGI ogre that mostly works (and there’s still a lot of lighting tricks there, because almost Snyder never uses natural light). That guy is the true inheritor to “looks like he should be on a graphics card box”-style character design. These first-generation successors to the troll from Fellowship of the Ring, not so much. There are some really painful held shots in Van Helsing’s final fight, especially of the werewolf, because of all the things the tech isn’t there for yet in 2004, it’s really not there for CGI fur or hair.
This was the first film to fail to launch a Universal Monsters shared universe franchise; it would not be the last. We’ll eventually cover the most recent of those to date, Dracula Untold (2014), which at least in my memory is a much more enjoyable fun bad film than this one. Still! While it’s hard to mourn that we didn’t get two or three juiceless sequels out of the Van Helsing franchise-that-wasn’t (though apparently not impossible; an AI slop trailer for “Van Helsing 2 (2026)” is kicking around YouTube with millions of views), it’s not a complete waste of time. Google around for all of Roxburgh’s Dracula sequels, at least. And if you truly want more Van Helsing content that keeps to the spirit of the original, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a Diablo-like ARPG that carries this film’s standard with both hands. It took me until literally writing this article to realize that your Van Helsing’s ghost companion in that game is their take on the Kate Beckinsale character from this movie.
I have off next week! Not from my editorial work for the site, but from writing this column; instead, senior Meatwatch and Gundam correspondent and site administrator Greg will be taking over to talk about 2006’s Ultraviolet. I’ll be back the following week with BloodRayne, as I try to put off Queen of the Damned as long as possible.
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