Saw it last night. Pretty damn good. The story is a little goofy and the effects make things a little cartoonish at times, but overall it was a fun, interesting, visually impressive movie. Certainly a popcorn muncher. The presence of 3 major classic movie monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman) made me a little apprehensive because I didn't think they could successfully cram all 3 into one movie without it feeling forced and lame, but in the end all went nicely.

Comments, kvetches and compliments here.

The film is a total cheese fest. Let me go down my checklist:
Lame plot - check
Bad dialogue - check
Absurd stunts - check
Silly looking make-up/creature effects - check (although the final werewolf did look surprisingly good).

Naturally, being the lover of B movies that I am, I rather enjoyed it. :D

If you actually try to think about the plot, it makes no sense, and it does deviate a *little* from the original stories. I liked it though. Visually impressive, and some nice action.

Slight spoiler - Did they mention how Van Helsing left the castle at the end though? I thought it was impossible to leave the castle, due to those cliffs, and that door being only one-way.

@ JSBB

You forgot:

Ridiculously HOT ass-kicking women: CHECK!

You forgot:

Ridiculously HOT ass-kicking women: CHECK! Quite true! :)

Wow...you guys are the first people I've heard from who actually liked it.

And I can't understand how :p ...it was SOOOO bad.

The only decent thing about that movie was Kate Beckinsale :love: ...and that was a *very* decent thing indeed :D .

it was SOOOO bad Yes, it was, and that is why I liked it. :p

There are two types of really bad films - those that painfuly bad and those that are amusingly bad and in my mind Van Helsing falls into the second category.

If you look at horrible movies, probably the worst and at the same time one of the funniest films that I have ever seen has to be Godzilla v.s. the Smog Monster. It is so bad that you will probably bust a gut if you actually watch the entire thing. Every time you figure that they have reached the bottom of the barrel they reach out and sink to an all new low. Mighty Peking Man ranks pretty high on that same scale.

Van Helsing does not come near this level of amusing ineptitude but I found there to be quite a lot worthy of snickering and amused eye rolling.

This movie was a total cheesefest!! The plot was terrible, and can best be described as "All over the place!" Van Helsing was basically a 19th century version of Wolverine with a crossbow that would rival most machine guns of today.

I liked Frankenstein's Monster and wanted to see more of him. Faramir had some funny lines and should a little range in comic relief. Kate Beckinsale is the only good thing going on in this movie!!! She may just be the reigning B-movie vixen!!!

The special effects are pretty aesome, but it just proves the all too common Hollywood phrase: Great Special Effects can't compensate for a poor script.

LXG meets Underworld with Wolverine as the main star. Most of everything about this movie is absurd, crap, fake, wierd, incoherent. But for some unexplainable reason... I enjoyed it. :D

I went to see Van Helsing last night, and I really had high expectations of it. But a movie with three of the greatest horror icons in it seemed doomed to fail, and it did. It certainly failed my expectations, but even though, I wouldn’t call this a bad movie.

Stephen Sommers’ last major movie, The Mummy, was fast. They just turned it up a notch and made Van Helsing go at light speed. Both movies revived an old horror classic, and made it into a modern day movie, but The Mummy (a great movie in my opinion) had something Van Helsing lacked. The Mummy was an action movie, with moments in it that you get pushed back into your seat, and your heartbeat jumps up for a few seconds. Besides that, it also had a kind of humor to it, which I really enjoyed. Van Helsing had those things, but less. Perhaps it was just too fast to have good jokes and too predictable to have those exiting moments.

People say that Sommers took three great stories and warped them into something which has nothing to do with the original movies, but I wonder, do people even care nowadays? I’m not a fan of classical horror pictures, and the only Dracula I have ever seen is Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992, but because everybody talks about the similarities between Van Helsing and X-Men, I’ll just give my opinion about that. When I first saw the X-Men movie, I thought it was a decent movie, but it wasn’t X-Men. What once was a great story was ruined by some writers, who didn’t want to make an X-Men movie, but just a movie that resembled the X-Men a bit, with more or less the same characters, and which makes a lot of money. The original story from the comics was abandoned, but the majority of people didn’t seem to mind that much. Not long ago, a new comic was published called Ultimate X-Men. What they did was just rewrite the story again, just like they did with the movies, to appeal to a bigger audience. The new comic runs next to the original comic, and I’ve never read it, and I never will. This comic made me realise; do people care about the classics? I know it is just a story, but you just don’t mess with some stories, and I can imagine some people felt the same when they saw Van Helsing.

The characters of Van Helsing were impressive in my opinion. Van Helsing did seem like a Wolverine Lite, without the claws, regeneration or the sarcastic comments, but the memory loss, and the long life were in there. However, I think the only reason why you made that connection between Van Helsing and Wolverine was due to the fact that Hugh Jackman plays both roles. If they had put someone else in the role of Van Helsing, the thought probably never occured to you that this character was a bit like Wolverine. In the end, Hugh Jackman put down a pretty cool and fresh Van Helsing. But then again, that “Hello Gabriel” was a somewhat of a disappointment. Whatever happened to Abraham Van Helsing? Also, the fact that they didn’t mention Van Helsing came from Holland was a big disappointing ;)

*If you haven’t seen the movie, skip this paragraph.* Of the monsters, I really liked Frankenstein’s Monster. He was put down very convincing, and I just felt a bit sad for the tall guy. The Wolfman idea was just bit too far fetched. Somebody was a werewolf, then ‘the brother’ became a werewolf to add some drama, and in the end Van Helsing became the werewolf, just in time to stop Dracula in his evil plans. And what a coincidence, Dracula can only be stopped by a werewolf, and the hero gets bitten. Not only that, but the hero is the only wolf who can break free from Dracula’s spell and save the day. A cunning Van Helsing who uses no special power to drive a stake through Dracula’s heart would have given more satisfaction, but would of course be less sensational than a fight between two giant-sized monters. The fact that Van Helsing (as the werewolf) kills Anna, adds to the whole ‘Van Helsing is a murderer’ idea, but seemed like a desperate attempt to add more drama to the film.

The clumsy sidekick had his funny moments, and David Wenham put him down pretty convincingly. Last but not least, Kate Beckinsale of course; she was just gorgeous. The fact that she kicks ass on screen, in a very tight outfit, would have been enough reason to see this movie.

Like said in the posts above, the plot was a bit weak, but all in all a pretty entertaining movie, but certainly not a master piece. The action in it was nice, and they did some good work with the special effects. What was supposed to be my short opinion about this movie became a pretty long rant, so I’ll just leave it at this.