an Helsing review and discussion.

The following is spoiler-free, or at least gives away nothing more, and considerably less, than the trailers do. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed the movie, even though it's not really any good. More details below, of course, after my quick categorized rating:

Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 9
Replayability: 4
Overall: 6

Malaya and I caught VH Friday evening, though it was a near thing. After the avalanche of bad buzz and negative reviews, we nearly skipped VH entirely, before deciding that we had to at least give it a shot for matinee prices. After all, as we've learned from numerous past action films, the enjoyment you get out of them is largely based on getting your expectations properly set.  We knew that VH was a cheesy monster movie. Not even a horror movie, not once it was watered down to PG-13, but a creature feature. In the old days it would have featured several men in bad monster suits, with flippers and scales, or a cape and fangs, or a fur suit and a wolf mask. Women would have run from them, a hero would have pursed them, and in the end all would have ended happily. Nowadays the monsters are as likely to be the heroes as the humans are, but the essence of the genre remains the same.

Ironically, neither Malaya or I are monster movie fans. We like action movies, and horror movies, and there are often monsters in both of those genres, but would we go see a movie that appeared to suck, just because there was a dude in a monkey suit? Of course not. However, when there are at least three main monsters, as in Van Helsing, we appeared to be unable to resist.

As for the movie, I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it. It was about as good as the recent Dawn of the Dead, and far better than crappy films like Underworld, Freddy vs. Jason, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and others in the same genre that we've seen in recent months. Malaya liked it as well, and while I can't recommend it for people who don't like dumb action movies with lots of special effects, it wasn't at all bad. I'm confused by all of the bad reviews it's getting, when I've seen so many other recent movies that were definitely worse.

Van Helsing is currently sitting at 23% positive on RT, with just 30 out of 128 reviews positive.  I'm not sure why so many critics are bashing it; I mean what did they expect? It's not a masterpiece, but it's entertaining, it's got a plot, the CGI is generally pretty good, etc. If you go in expecting something as smart and vivid as Kill Bill 2 you're going to be disappointed, but Van Helsing is a big dumb monster movie by the guy who did The Mummy and The Mummy 2. Two films that starred Brendan Fraser. Need I say more?

Van Helsing does not star Mr. Encino Man himself, but it does feature Richard Roxburgh, who I had no familiarity with, but who was allegedly legendarily-unwatchable in last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  I've never seen it, so I can't comment. He played someone named "M" in that film, and he plays Dracula in Van Helsing. He wasn't horrible, but he certainly didn't do anything to rise above the B-movie level of the script. He did contribute heartily to the least watchable scenes in the film, which occurred just about every time he opened his mouth and it wasn't filled with CGI fangs, and the long speech in which he bemoaned his (literal) lack of a heart and dead emotions almost made me laugh out loud twice. If you can listen to Richard Roxburgh's Dracula gasp out, "I feel nothing! I'm hollow!" without snickering and flashing back to Teen Vader's legendary, "I don't like sand. It's hard. Not like you, you're soft." howler from Episode II, you're a better man than I.

The key to enjoying Van Helsing, as with most mediocre movies, is to go in with appropriate expectations. If you expect something great, you'll be unhappy. If you go in expecting silly fun, you just might get it. I had very low expectations, almost to the point of dreading it. I expected super cheesy acting, bad CGI, a ridiculous, virtually plotless story, and more.

I got some cheesy acting but mostly competent fare, far better CGI than the trailers had led me to expect, and a ridiculous plot with an absurd ending. The plot was ridiculous, but at least it had a plot. You knew what the good guys were trying to do, you knew what the bad guys were trying to do, and it proceeded relatively logically.

So no, it's not a good movie, and I don't feel any desire to ever see it again or own it on DVD, but I'm not unhappy that I went and saw it. It could have been much, much better, but I didn't feel like it was 100 minutes of missed opportunities, as I did after Underworld.  For a movie that had to shoehorn in so many vast sets, monsters, and so much action, it does a remarkable job of remaining coherent.  I'm usually pretty picky about movies that are just nonstop flash with no substance, and I don't like the hyperactive, hyperstylized aspect of your typical Bruckheimer film. The Rock, for instance, where every shot simply has to feature a weird camera angle, oddly-filtered lighting, rat-a-tat-tat military music, or all of the above, and most of the action is basically incomprehensible due to being blender edited together from about 4 different camera angles. I didn't get that feeling in Van Helsing though. There were downtimes between action sequences, the action mostly existed to drive the plot, and while a lot of the sequences were relatively ludicrous, they were at least edited together well enough that you could follow what was happening.

There were cool small things too. Dracula's Jawa-like helpers, Frankenstein's awesome castle design, the weapons and tools, the Vatican James Bond-like workshop (Which is cute in the trailers, but was more clever than expected in the movie since it was filled with workers of every creed and ethnicity; Arabs, Jews, Indians, etc, all toiling away on odd weapons and mechanical inventions. In the Vatican.), Van Helsing's surprisingly-non loathsome Monk sidekick, Van Helsing's mysterious, immortal background, and more.

On the downside, I think they missed a lot of opportunities; mostly by having the monsters move impossibly fast 98% of the time, and slower than molasses the 2% of the time that they had to be slow in order to let the main characters survive yet another battle they should have died in. There's a big werewolf vs. vampire fight scene at one point, and it was so much less interesting than it could have been. The vampires had shown an ability to vanish and reappear behind people all movie, while the werewolves could move incredibly fast and hit incredibly hard. Yet when the time came for the big battle, the vampire never vanished once, continually stopped to talk when it could have flown away and escaped, and made almost no effort to hurt the werewolf at all. Meanwhile, the werewolf was slower than every other werewolf in the movie, and seemed much more interested in leaping and tackling the vampire, rather than trying to bite it or claw it or anything productive like that.

Basically, what could have been an epic, awesome battle, if properly directed and choreographed, was just a bunch of leaping and talking and crashing. To make a comparison, in Freddy vs. Jason they eventually had the big battle the viewer demanded, and when it came time, they fought like hell. No one stopped to taunt or dick around, no one punched when they could slice, and no one hit a weak blow when they could have gone for the kill. The big showdown in that movie wasn't amazingly great or anything, but at least you didn't sit through it wondering why Jason wasn't using his machete, or groan out loud every time Freddy could have stabbed Jason, but stopped to talk instead.

Dracula's three vampire brides were pretty weak as well.. In their human form they were okay, though a lot less beautiful than I would have expected. They looked like cute college girls in harem outfits, rather than undead mistresses of the dark. Then needed to be more exotic and more sensuous by far. In their bat forms they were silly though. You see a number of shots like that in the trailer, and I'm not sure what the idea was with their look. They go from fully-dressed to completely naked in a very quick morph, but once they're naked and winged, it's weird. It's definitely not sexy; they're too bat-like and oddly quadrupedal, with hind legs that they cock forwards and try to grasp with like a second set of arms. Plus they're like bat Barbies, inflicted with breasts that look like the small hard chest lumps on a mannequin; nipple-less and asexual. As artificial as Marilyn Manson in his alien Omega look. They're Barbies all over too, with smooth, orifice-less groins as well.

I'm not sure how I would have improved them, other than by at least giving them nipples. The problem there is that they're either obviously in costumes, like the nipples and six packs Batman gets from his foam rubber gear, or else they're naked, in which case the movie gets an "R" rating and makes about 50% less money. Not all movies are so burdened, but when we walked into Van Helsing, just before the trailers began, my first thought and comment to Malaya was, "I can see why they made this one PG-13." At least one third of the audience was made up of young boys, 10-14 y/o range, and while some of them were there with parents and might have come to a more adult, R-rated Van Helsing, I'd imagine quite a few of them wouldn't. Or would have at least had to buy tickets to New York Minute before sneaking into Van Helsing.

But as for Dracula's Brides, they were a neutral, or even a negative, when they could have, in theory, been awesome. Clothes on them when they flew? Maybe, but what sort of clothing? Their flowing harem outfits would have been impractical in flight, and looked silly. Something form-fitting? Maybe, but how different would that have been from the Barbie bodies they had anyway? Make them topless but with panties, or tight pants? That would be silly, and as it was, it sort of made sense that they could go from fully dressed to naked bats back to human and fully dressed. It was like they changed entirely, and their clothing magically changed along with them. But if they changed from one form with clothing to another form with different clothing? I dunno; sounds pretty absurd. What is this, Diablo II with the weapon switch hotkey?

The other odd thing about the brides was that they were never given a single sexy thing to do. Perhaps the 12y/o boys thought they were hot, but as an adult who has seen a real live girl naked on one or two occasions, they did nothing for me. Not hot/exotic enough in human form, and not in any way sexy once they were naked and flying around. They didn't become all that monstrous either, not the way Dracula did; and anyway, they could have been hot in spite of their monstrous faces. Instead they weren't scary monsters or hot chicks. Some of that was due to the photography; they never tried to act seductive or erotic towards anyone, which surprised me. I figured there would have to be at least one "try to seduce Van Helsing" scene; every female vampire movie has that.

The US movie rating board is notorious for freaking out over any sort of nudity (symptomatic of America on a whole, as the ridiculous Janet Jackson Superbowl breast incident demonstrated) or sensuality, and a movie can get an R rating for the tiniest bit of sex, and the commercial suicide of an Adult rating for anything even approaching softcore sex. Yet unbelievable amounts of violence can be shown and still get a movie a PG or PG-13 rating. It's just got to be mostly bloodless violence, and consequence-less violence.  I.E. you can show a bomb going off and killing an entire city, but you can't show a single child crying in pain with blood streaming from a cut. Or you can show any sort of multiple-fatality fight scene, so long as the people get hit and fall down, rather than screaming in agony or thrashing around, or bleeding profusely as they do in real life.

So the Van Helsing makers wanted to do the Brides naked and sexy, but realized that if they were really naked, or even appeared mostly human and partially naked, it would get them an R rating, which I'm sure was verbotten, given the film's budget and target audience. So they made them naked, but asexual as a compromise. It worked, at least in terms of preserving the precious PG-13 rating, but it made for some pretty boring female vampires. Dracula went into his full body bat form several times, and I remember his face being pretty demonic, but I don't remember much about the rest of him. Was he naked and sexless as well?  Or did he do the werewolf thing with ripped pants? I can't really remember.

Anyway, I've gone far off of my "was the movie any good" review portion, as usual, and I've intentionally not talked about all of the plot illogic things, since they're spoilery. I liked the film, since even though it was far less than it could have been, it was more than I expected it to be. It's not great, it's not even very good, but it's a fun show and not nearly the non-stop roller coaster boredom that some of the critics are saying. It's certainly not a movie that I would have made, it's got zero dialogue that you'll ever consider quoting, other than to ridicule it, and there's not one memorable character-driven moment in the film. But it's usually pretty to look at, there are a lot of nice small details, the sets are awesome, the CGI is pretty good, and it's popcorn-y, mindless summer movie fun.

Originally posted in the blog on May 9, 2004.

May 15, 2004

Caaroid mailed another time about movies, this time to compare/contrast Underworld with Van Helsing, the day after I wrote my mildly-positive Van Helsing review.

Underworld vs. Van Helsing

I have an advantage over you, since I got to see the two of them within a week apart. It was pretty surprising to me to hear that you preferred VH, since I felt it was a worse movie. Then again...

Underworld pros:

story is better: It is always arguable, but in case of VH there is no bloody surprise in the whole movie. You can always either predict what's going to happen, or it is just irrelevant. The Romeo and Juliet style thingy in Underworld was cheesy, but the "good turns out to be evil" thing was pretty clever (for a silly goth action movie), and nothing like that happened in VH. And yes, there are a lot of inconsistencies in both stories, but I think Van Helsing fares worse in that regard. The only good part is that the girl dies in the end, but that alone is hardly enough to compensate for the boredom.

fight coreography is better: again, an arguable thing, and I am known to make mistakes in this regard since once I considered Nightcrawler's entry in X2 awesome; now having seen it three times I just go OUCH every time he waves his hand and people fall over a foot away. Anyway, in VH all the fight sceenes were repetitive, whereas in Underworld you always got new type of action.
weapons are better: come on, a bloody gas-powered xbow, WITH a bow part? That alone made me go ouch (I actually waited for him to use the bloody bow for something, like shooting exploding crap with it or something, but no). And then I did not even touch the revolving knives thingy... Ok, Underworld did not have so many weapons in it, but they were all more believable

Kate Beckinsale's hair: she's cuter in Underworld :)

Setting: Underworld is shot in Budapest, capital of Hungary, and it's pretty cool to see the buildings you walk around being populated by vampires and werevolves. Ok, it's only a pro for me, big meeh to you.

Van Helsing pros:

CGI: frankly, Underworld has the WORST cgi I have seen in the past bloody 5 years. It is so hideous that at times one has to go OUCH, you would not take something that horrible from a video game, let alone a movie. This, and this alone makes the two movies en par to each other.

Ok, overall I think contain the same amount of fun factor. I did not mind seeing either, and truth to be told, Underworld made me go mygodthisisicrap twice, while VH only once, although the 2 underworld ones were from CGI, while the VH one was from the "I have no heart" speech.

Hardly a topic worth going into this lenght. "Kate's hair is better short" would've sufficed.

So ultimately, the deciding difference for Caaroid is... Kate had cuter hair and outfits in Underworld. I wouldn't argue with that, since I thought she was yummy in that movie and pretty much irrelevant in Van Helsing.

I hardly remember Underworld at this point, despite the fact that I blogged about it at ridiculous length the day after I saw it.  My main recollection was of the one dreadful actor who played the male romantic lead, and that the story was a long series of missed opportunities. Underworld could have been a great movie, but it fell short in so many ways: acting, direction, story, costumes, etc. Van Helsing wasn't any good, but it made the most of its opportunities, limited by the PG-13 rating as it was.

About Underworld I said:

I'd give it like a C-, which is below a recommend from me, and that's almost entirely since there was some interesting action and nice visuals and nice set design. How to define the mediocrity of Underworld?

• It wasn't a bad movie that was indifferent and sloppy.
• It wasn't a terrible movie that was the best it could be.
• It was a potentially very good movie that didn't come anywhere near living up to it's potential.

In comparison, Van Helsing gets a B-, since it's a mediocre movie that did about the best it could. I would have subtracted four or five swinging on wires/leaping over bottomless pit scenes, and put in some better hand to hand combat, but that wouldn't have gotten the score higher than a B anyway.

Both movies could have been much better, but Underworld could have been almost infinitely better, and I couldn't grade it without thinking how much better it would have been with just a few script revisions.

Another random point about Van Helsing, that I meant to mention in my review last Friday. I thought the werewolves looked like crap in the trailer. Too hairy, too growl-y, to man-like. More like were-gorillas, facially. Plus they were obviously CG. I don't know if the movie had better graphics after more time was spent polishing them, or the shots just looked better in giant size on a movie screen, but the werewolves were pretty damn cool in the film. Super fast, super vicious, and while they were clearly animals, they hadn't lost all of their human intelligence. There were also several different werewolves in the film, and I thought they'd made an effort to make the wolf forms look something like their human forms, facially. Which was a nice touch.

It's not like you could have recognized the actors from their werewolf avatars, or vice versa, but at least the werewolves looked different from each other. Different pelt colors, but also facially; some were more muscular, had thicker brows, etc.

Pre Movie Discussion

April 28, 2004

Van Helsing Film Clips: Nine new one minute clips from various spots throughout the movie.  Malaya was jonesing for this one months ago, when I was pretty indifferent. It looked too cheesy and stuffed full of monsters and villains, sort of reminiscent of the last couple of disastrous Batman movies when there were like 5 bad guys each and it just crowded the movies to death.  I began to feel more interest as I read more previews and learned to tune out the cheesy aspects of the teaser and first trailer, but I was still in the "It might be watchable if..." mode.

Then the early sneak reviews started coming in, and they were almost unanimously negative.

This is just an awful, awful movie. At the beginning I had hope, it seemed like other than the vampires it might be an entertaining movie. A little over the top but potentially fun. That hope died quickly.... 75% of this movie is computer generated and it gets boring fast. CGI characters fighting and swing on cables repeatedly is just tedious. The big final fight is a repeat of everything you've already seen just with a different background. The dialogue is mostly just laughable and when added to dreadful Romanian accents its even worse. The plot is so silly and stupid that its not even worth going into.

There are a dozen more like that over on AICN, if you care to follow the links. At this point, even Malaya is having doubts, and she's been hot to see Van Helsing ever since she first heard about it last year. I wish I could say that the movie clips on Yahoo turned my doubts around, but unfortunately they did not. They're a very mixed bag, but they all make Van Helsing look like an expensive B-movie. When the monsters and other special effects look obviously-fake on the thumbnail sized browser screen, it's a bad sign, since any imperfections will be greatly amplified on the big screen. The Dracula guy is featured in two or three of the clips, and he's not laugh out loud awful, but none of them inspire much confidence that he's not as cheesy as the sneak reviews say he is. I can envision wincing every time he starts to talk after an hour of screen time. I was wincing from 30 seconds of Kate Beckinsale's attempted Transylvanian accent, though I have to applaud their use of an entirely gratuitous butt shot of her, for no other reason that that she'd got a hella tight ass. As last year's Underworld trailer spent about five seconds establishing beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Also, that Santa's sleigh broken bridge horse/wagon leap doesn't look any less fake when you see the minute of movie that builds up to it.

At this point, I think Malaya and I are waiting to hear what some real critics think of the movie, and if they're as negative about it as they were about oh... The Punisher, we'll probably save our $8 for something later this summer with less publicity, but more quality. And the Punisher film clips were good, damnit!

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