Since starting “Film Forensics”, I have occasionally been tempted to rent a film purely for the purpose of dissecting it, knowing full well that I am about to see not just a mediocre film (the meat and potatoes of Film Forensics), but a genuinely awful one. I had been repeatedly warned off Van Helsing, but it is so strongly linked to several of the other films I have been reviewing, particularly LXG (Richard Roxborough as villain, presence of Mr Hyde) and Underworld (vampires and werewolves and Kate Beckinsale), I couldn’t resist.

And yeah, it was bad. Roxborough is really quite awful, Beckinsale barely registers, Hugh Jackman showed not a single spark of his Wolverine in the X-Men films, and David Wenham is farcical (and gives a surprisingly similar performance to his drug-addict mulleted loser from “Going Square”). The performances of Dracula’s brides are almost too difficult to describe, but somewhat resemble Kate Bush from her “Babushka” video clip. The special effects are amazingly silly and the stunts are so outrageous they lose suspension of disbelief within seconds. And the plot…

Well, the plot could have been interesting. It’s obvious the writer/director had ideas, or at least, a lot of affection for the old monster movies and an urge to try and fit them all into one film. The Wolf Man, Frankenstein (and his monster, of course), and Dracula are drawn in and he tries hard to make them all vital to the story. At some point he appears to have despaired of getting it all working, and started piling action scenes on top of each other in order to hide the flaws. As has been pointed out in reviews, Van Helsing gets bitten on a full moon, and only has three days until he turns into a werewolf on the next full moon. Which is, you might think, a little odd.

It begins promisingly enough, with a black and white recreation of the villagers-with-torches scene from Frankenstein, which mostly serves to remind us that the seventy-year-old film really did have some effective and atmospheric shots. It would have been nice if they had stayed with this style: it’s obvious they could recreate it well enough. They couldn’t have stayed with black and white, but the dramatic angles of the framing, the slow, sinister camera movements, the gothic noir style of lighting would have complemented the script a great deal more than the frenetic style they settled on. In a monster movie, even an action one, the atmosphere should be one of delicious, creeping dread. As such, the early scenes with Dracula and Dr Frankenstein almost work. The old trick of having Dracula teleporting around the room off-camera was done well, and, of course, mostly abandoned for the concluding fight between him and Wolfey Van Helsing. It’s probably an obvious character note to say that Dracula should have been underplayed. A dignified, restrained performance (and subtler “vamping out” appearance) would have nicely offset the histrionics of his brides, and a pained grimace from him as they overact around him would nicely motivate his predation on Beckinsale’s character, and set up a cooler-than-thou challenge for Van Helsing to meet.

There are so many poor choices in the script that it’s a little difficult to know where to start. There are some obvious changes to be made. Van Helsing’s memory loss subplot never really clicks, and merely serves to remind us of the superior treatment of the same themes in the X-Men films. It can be excised without difficulty. Van Helsing already undergoes a journey in the film, from human to werewolf and back.

Dracula’s babies never rise above the risible: vampires already have perfectly acceptable means of siring progeny, and the story really doesn’t need him to be trying to take over the world in order to raise the – ahem – stakes. He’s Dracula. The only reason for the baby subplot is to involve Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.

We can do this instead by reversing the situation. Someone wants to take over the world, inevitably, in this kind of film, so it might as well be Dr. Frankenstein, who has gone truly loopy and power-mad since the villagers went after him with pitchforks and torches (and why not: it is every movie scientist’s prerogative to get big hair and go mad.) He wishes to discover Dracula’s and the wolf-man’s secrets, by dissecting them in the name of science, and applying such knowledge to his – yawn – super-soldiers.

This, of course, is almost as bad as the existing plot (and echoes the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen even more strongly) so let’s try for something a little more quixotic: he wishes to give everyone in the entire world the immortality and indestructibility of these monsters, putting an end to death and suffering. He is, in his own mad way, still trying to help, and can’t understand why Van Helsing might want to stop him. We can put a bit of philosophical meat on the bones of the plot then (which really doesn’t do any harm – look at what Solipsism 101 did for The Matrix), and imagine what the world might be like if nobody died – perhaps Dr. Frankenstein has already been experimenting on the villagers, including Kate’s character, without their knowledge, and they have already lived unusually long lives, at the expense of a certain vagueness about their pasts (their memories still decay). So we can see what it is like in a microcosm, and Dr. Frankenstein will already have answers for the other obvious questions – overcrowding is solved by the reduced fertility rates encoded in the “long-life” virus, the problems of boredom are answered by more genetic tinkering, and the inevitable slowing of progress that would result from generations of older, conservative people not dying is, perhaps, seen as a good thing.

If we keep the idea that Van Helsing turns into a werewolf, then perhaps he is the wolf-man that Dr. Frankenstein is experimenting upon, captured shortly after being bitten. Van Helsing may even become momentarily convinced by Dr. Frankenstein’s viewpoint, during his one month captivity (the period, of course, between his being bitten on the first full moon, and his full conversion on the second), until he finds out the real agendas behind the “long-life” virus – that, contrary to appearances, Dracula is not safely sedated and secured, and he has been secretly meddling with the virus to ensure this new age of immortals is also one of bovine stupidity and complacence. Dr. Frankenstein will not be convinced of this, and is intent on doing destructive tests of the werewolf powers, hurting (more and more violently as they approach the full moon) Van Helsing in various ways to see how he heals, of course with the end-point of actually trying to kill him.

Kate’s “last of the line” subplot should obviously be dispensed with. It’s fine to kill her off: in movie logic, the fact that she has been one of Dr. Frankenstein’s immortal test subjects means she has already lived a full life and really just wants to die anyway ‘cause that’s what happens to immortals – although it might be slightly less awe-inspiringly awful if they avoided putting her beaming face on peach-coloured sunset clouds after she dies. If they can’t avoid doing that, perhaps she should be allowed to live. We can rewrite her history so she is trying to kill all werewolves, after her brother had been turned into one (unknown to her, due to Dr. Frankenstein’s machinations). She has hunted around the world, and is beginning to suspect that it isn’t just a werewolf’s bite that causes the disease, but hasn’t connected it with her mentor, Dr. Frankenstein, yet. So we’ve got the whole back and forth tug of loyalties when Van Helsing enters the scene and is trying to stop Dr. Frankenstein’s good work, but he’s so manly and brave, but he’s turning into a werewolf! But he’s Hugh Jackman, sigh.

OK, these are fairly radical changes – the most I’ve suggested for a Film Forensics so far – but I think the film needs them. We can actually transplant some of the existing visuals and sections of the existing plot onto this new version. There is still the showdown between Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein. The much-abused and experimented-upon Frankenstein’s monster, now with both vampiric and werewolf characteristics, escapes and has a spectacularly bad time trying to work out his place in the world, until he decides to destroy everything – and in this, has an ally in the still-secured Van Helsing. Dracula can still have his hideaway behind the ice/mirror (the one cool effect/idea in the whole movie) into which he goes when Dr. Frankenstein isn’t looking.

Even so, it does feel rather like I’ve cheated. I wrote a drastic redo of “Underworld”, retaining only the “Vampires vs. Werewolves in modern day” elements of that, and completely redid the review in favour of something that more directly used the plot, characters, and situations of the original. My attempts to stick close to the original Van Helsing, however, were ineffective. Underworld was a far better film than Van Helsing, and could survive relatively minor changes. In the real world, most of the changes I sugest would have to be implemented very early on. There are still many improvements that could be done at later stages of the film-making, that would improve the film. Almost any version of the film would be better without the vampire babies – say, for example, that Dracula had developed a magic elixir that combines the secrets of vampirism, werewolfs, and Dr. Frankenstein’s science. This elixir brings life to anything it touches – including the gargoyle army that Dracula has had carved (using slave villagers and stonemasons, presumably). We can then play some nice tricks with life/death, killing people off and having them brought back by the elixir, bringing life to the castle itself, and so on… and there we go again. I’m afraid, with Van Helsing, that there is a huge temptation to depart a very significant distance from the original. The problem is simply that the material in and nearby the film has been strip mined to a wasteland. There’s a long walk to anything interesting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2004 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Action, Fantasy, V, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.