One of my most anticipated movies of the summer turned out to be a bit of a let down, but at the same time I think I was one of the few people who still enjoyed Van Helsing. The dialogue in the movie is terrible, there’s just no getting around that. The visual effects were also hit and miss. Some of them were amazing, and some looked just awful.
The strength of the movie lies in the action. Some critics (probably rightfully so) complained that there was too much action… that the movie was just one long Van Helsing vs. Some Monster fight from beginning to end with a few breaks for bad plot twists. This is true, but I actually thinks this a strength for a movie that really has nothing else going for it. Since I didn’t care about the characters, and the story was weak, and the dialogue was awful, and the visual effects were hit and miss… then the only thing I had left was the action sequences… and to be honest I thought they were pretty good. So if you just turn your brain off (something I don’t normally like to do when watching a flick) and just take the movie as a cheesy summer actions flick with some cool monsters… then you just might end up enjoying watching it while still thinking it’s a bad movie. I did. Heck, I even watched it twice!
As far as the special features on the DVD goes, this was also a let down. The commentary was boring… the “bloopers” were just a rapid succession of slight mistakes on set without any commentary. There’s a feature called “Dracula’s Castle” that just lets you highlight a couple of areas and then hear a 20 second voice over of Dracula talking about doing something mean and nasty. Dumb. Also, a feature called “You are in the Movie!” sounded good, but all it turned out to be was looking at a scene in the movie being shot from a different camera that was set up behind the main camera or under a table or something like that. BORING! The last feature was something called “The Legend of Van Helsing” which didn’t even work for me.
So, the movie itself can be fun to watch as long as you have little to no expectations, and the DVD itself was a real let down. The only real redeeming thing about it was a far too short segment on the visual effects of the film. Overall, I give the Van Helsing DVD a 5 out of 10, but only because I really liked seeing the Wolfman fighting Dracula. I’m such a 13 year old.
