There are exciting moments - especially a carriage chase while Van Helsing and Anna are attempting to transport Frankenstein's sweet-natured monster back to Rome for his safety. Her family has been challenging the count for four centuries and her brother has become a werewolf. In addition to being a pale version of Polanski's role in The Fearless Vampire Killers, this chap is also a version of 'Q' from the Bond movies and he equips Van Helsing with a variety of state-of-the-art and stake-of-the-heart gear from his laboratory, including a semi-automatic crossbow.įrom then on special effects take over as Van Helsing is joined in his fight against Dracula and his flying harpies by the aristocratic Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale). The movie begins to get a little shaky, however, when a pawkily humorous young monk is assigned to accompany Van Helsing on a vital vampire-destroying mission to Transylvania. This man is not quite Bram Stoker's middle-aged professor from Amsterdam whose notepaper is headed 'Abraham Van Helsing, MD, DPh, DLitt, etc, etc.' He's Gabriel Van Helsing, a strapping young man dressed like Indiana Jones, who works for a secret Catholic organisation that conducts an eternal war from its HQ in the Vatican cellars against Satan in all his earthly forms.Īll this is rather good. In a nice touch, Hyde smashes through the cathedral's rose window.
Against a cityscape dominated by a half-built Eiffel Tower, the vampire-slayer and scourge of evil Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is battling on the top of Notre Dame with Dr Jekyll in his Hyde mode. The film then moves on a year to Paris in 1887. The difference, however, is that here Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) has taken over Frankenstein's castle and seeks the power to create life for his own ends. He's marching with a mob in a black-and-white recreation of the final sequence of Frankenstein where the overreaching scientist is about to die and his creature will be buried beneath a windmill. The movie begins excitingly and affectionately by turning the spinning globe of Universal's logo into a blazing torch brandished by an angry peasant. But it was Universal that created the moulds, the templates, the archetypes and it is to these that Stephen Sommers has returned, first with The Mummy and The Mummy Returns a couple of years back, and now with Van Helsing he brings together Frankenstein, his Monster, Dracula and the Wolf Man.
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In the 1940s RKO challenged Universal's supremacy with Val Lewton's series of subtle low-budget films of the supernatural, and in the 1950s Britain's Hammer Films became the semi-official home of horror for a decade or more. To this pantheon of Gothic anti-heroes the studio added the Mummy and the Wolf Man. Universal's big thing was horror and in 1931 Bela Lugosi gave iconic form to Bram Stoker's Transylvanian count in Tod Browning's Dracula and Boris Karloff did the same for Mary Shelley's monster in James Whale's Frankenstein. Warner Brothers specialised in crime and social-conscience pictures. MGM, for instance, became famous for musical and polished society dramas. W ith the coming of sound each of the major Hollywood studios sought to corner certain kinds of entertainment.
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