a review of 范海辛

2025 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 43: VAMPIRE WEEK Rented this one on Netflix way back in the pre-streaming days and ended up turning it off about an hour in, because it was just way too cacophonously dumb and overloaded with early CGI-era nonsense for me at the time. 20ish years later and having now seen a LOT more of the classic Universal monster canon, I was kind of pleasantly surprised to realize that Stephen Sommer's VAN HELSING was really no more stupid or random than a lot of the later-period "monster rally" pictures with Dracula, Frankenstein, and Wolf Man all meeting up in the precursor to the superhero cinematic universes we know (and still mostly love, with some critical grumbling) today. As a creatively underwhelming failed franchise-starter, it's less aesthetically offensive than a lot of Warner/DC's Snyder-era output, as well as Sony's "SPIDER-MAN minus SPIDER-MAN" extended universe pictures. At this point, Jackman still hadn't quite reached his next gear in playing a stoic-but-sympathetic man of action (and honestly wouldn't really find it until LOGAN a dozen years later), and as a character Van Helsing feels under-conceptualized, like they were waiting for a sequel to add some interesting wrinkles or backstory beyond the perfunctory connection between hero and villain. Richard Roxburgh isn't as terrible as I remembered as the Eurotrash fuckboy Dracula seen here, but he also mostly spends the movie shouting exposition at his vampiric brides and/or Kevin J. O'Connor's Igor while unconvincingly walking up walls . Speaking of O'Connor, he along David Wenham and Shuler Hensley feel like they're the only ones really having good time here, with Kate Beckinsale not doing a whole lot to differentiate her character here from her role in the UNDERWORLD franchise. Beyond all that, VAN HELSING qualifies as perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the Castlevania games, in the same way that GALAXY QUEST counts as a Star Trek movie. The setpieces are built less on the tradition of 20th century action/adventure cinema and more on the crazoid logic and loose physics of '90s platform/shooter video games, to the point that Konami could have easily made a 16-bit version of this movie for the Super NES that would have told the story more or less equally well.