I tried to watch it.  I can’t believe I tried to watch it.

Van Helsing is a post-modern prequel to Van WIlder, with Hugh Jackman as Van, Kate Beckinsale in the Tara Reid role, Dracula as the angry Dean/Van’s overbearing father, and the weird monk guy as Kumar.  This was on TNT the other night and I figured, why not, it can’t be that bad, right?  I came into it when Van was fighting Mr. Hyde, throwing the poor bipolar CGI’d doctor to his death off the roof of what I assume is the University building he worked at.

From there, Van goes to confess his sin (the Bible forbids murdering poorly conceived CGI characters), and we find out that he actually works for some kind of multicultural task force whose purpose is wiping out evil in the world.  This group calls themselves The Order and they are apparently operating in a basement somewhere in St. Paul’s Cathedral, without anyone knowing anything about it.  Really?  They should have gone the distance in this scene and had some Hassidic Jews working with a Voodoo Priestess to come up with some kind of weapon to fight the Loch Ness Monster while a joint Hindu-Muslim Project Group poured over an upcoming presentation on advancements in Mummy Fighting Technology.  Anyway, Father Soandso pairs Van up with the Catholic Church’s answer to Q and sends him off to Transylvania on some convulted mission to either kill Count Dracula and/or save the only surviving members of the family cursed to defend the world from… I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.  He has to save Kate Beckinsale.  The best part of this is that they explain it to him with some kind of ancient filmstrip projected onto the wall, and no one bats an eye.  That was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, until I saw the rest of Van Helsing.

And so Van and his amazing hair travel to far off Transylvania, and after a quick scene where Beckinsale (reprising her role as the wharwilf/vampire huntress in Pearl Harbor), loses her brother, the other all-important heir to stop Dracula or some such nonsense, via the second major fall of the movie.  So Van is batting .000 before he’s ever gotten to the damned city.  When he does finally grace the hamlet of Transylvania with his presence (and that hair… Oh, that hair), we find out that people apparently become extremely passive aggressive whenever he arrives their town.  Maybe it’s because they know his arrival means they’ve been cast in a stupid movie.  There’s a brief confrontation between Van and Kate (who looks like she came straight from the Circe du Soleil of RenFests in what is supposed to be a town full of poor, terrified people in medieval Europe). No sooner than Van arrives in T-City than do Dracula’s special ladies descend on the city.  And so begins the major theme of this movie:  the force of gravity.  We saw it earlier when Mr. Hyde fell to his death, and again when the worwalf brother fell into this river.  This scene hammers home the fact that the directors love seeing people fall/get thrown around and that Van Helsing is an enormous tool.  Dracula’s girls beat the shit out of everyone, and really for an OG monster killer, Van is a huge pansy.  They corner Becks, but only retreat because Van scores a lucky shot and kills one of them and they go retreat and hide.  Becks gets super pissed at Van for saving her and the burb because, she says, that’s the first vampire in century to be killed and that they only hunted the denizens of Transylvania to get what food they needed to survive.

I’ve seen some stupid shit in my day, but really?  Did her and her dead brother run on a platform of "We’ll beg the vampires to only kill a couple of you a month"?  Does Dracula dump a lot of money into Transylvania’s public school system?  Does his castle double as their public library?  Is he planning on modernizing their infrastructure?  Come on.

Becks’ brother comes back as an almost-completely-transformed wherewalf and she gets all emotional and there’s some shit about how he knows Dracula’s secrets (the answers to the upcoming chem final that Van needs to pass to graduate?!) and the story soon shifts away from the city to … Castle Frankenstein.  Dracula, played here by Ben Stiller doing his best Clint Eastwood impression, is assisted by a bunch of Jawas and a deformed guy who I assume is supposed to be Igor.  Van and Becks infiltrate the Castle for some reason, only to find themselves in a room full of glowing green pods suspended from the ceiling.  Oh no!  Did the Bodysnatchers invade and replace in the greater MetroTransylvania area with aliens?!  No, it’s only … Dracula’s babies.  The Jawas electrofy Becks’ wohrwalf brother and unleash a couple thousand hungry newborns, who, under the guidance of their two remaining harpy gypsy stereotype mothers, go to Transylvania to see what’s open.  Somewhere in there someone mentions that this isn’t the first time that Dracula has unleashed a horde of demon babies on the city to eat everyone, which again makes me wonder why the people in this city ever listened to the Beckinsales and their "They’re only kill one or two of you every month" program. 

In the process of this wild feeding frenzy, Van confronts Dracula and there’s some kind of allusion about how they’re supposed to know each other, you see, because apparently Van is immortal or something like that, but the babies all explode into a bunch of ickysticky and Q hooks up with some wench and Van and Becks, taking the long way back to Transylvania, stop to do it and fall into a pit (George Senior had it dug out a few days earlier), and find themselves in Frankenstein Rock.  Van talks about the 9 foot tall, 450 pound monster who lives there, but he’s really just a sensitive soul, who, coincidentally, is the Fifth Element.  He eloquently begs for Van and Becks to kill him on the spot, because apparently Dracula needs him to complete his Vampire Baby Machine, and I have to say I thought his argument was pretty convincing.

At this point, I turned it off, because I honestly couldn’t handle it anymore.  I assumed that Van outwits Dracula, graduates, and hooks up with Tara Reid at the end.  Instead, if you can trust Brick, he turns into a warwulf, Kate Beckinsale dies via falling, and I assume Dracula’s babies go onto lead fulfilling lives and Frankenstein and Igor reunite on Dr. Phil years later.  I don’t know.  This is a horribly stupid movie, full of everything wrong with major Hollywood(tm) films – the CGI was horrible, the parts were clearly cast based on name value instead of talent, and I think it took less than an hour to write the script.  Rocky was written in a weekend; this is no Rocky.  I hate this movie.  I think I hate myself a little more for watching it.

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