Van Helsing Picoreview
May. 10th, 2004 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xthreadPretty. Awful. Really Pretty. Really Awful.
It wanted to work. It wanted to work really badly. After making 'The Mummy' work so nicely, how did they manage to botch this so badly? Although its very pretty. We kept thinking about wanting to show this together with Underworld, because they're both Kate Beckinsale vampire flicks. But we were afraid that the TV would get Van Helsing cooties all over it, and Underworld would feel slighted for being shown on the same screen, so we gave up on that idea.
It wanted to work. It wanted to work really badly. After making 'The Mummy' work so nicely, how did they manage to botch this so badly? Although its very pretty. We kept thinking about wanting to show this together with Underworld, because they're both Kate Beckinsale vampire flicks. But we were afraid that the TV would get Van Helsing cooties all over it, and Underworld would feel slighted for being shown on the same screen, so we gave up on that idea.
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Date: 2004-05-10 09:45 am (UTC)I still think the double feature can work. Underworld would go second and get an ego boost by comparison to Van Helsing. We may be willing to provide our TV -- given that the house is habitable by the time the VH DVD is out, which judging by the review should be before the end of the month ;)
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Date: 2004-05-10 01:27 pm (UTC)Kate Beckinsale is really yummy. I'd happily accept her on toast, but I'd have to fight Nina for the privelege. And the ending was unnecessary from a narrative viewpoint.
Wolverine, I mean Hugh Jackman, was fun, although it really was eerie watching Wolverine wander around in a vampire flick. (By that I do not mean that Jackman can't get ouside of the Wolverine persona, but at various times the writer is clearly writing Wolverine, which is odd).
Faramir reprising the role of Christian Slater in Name of the Rose was also fun to watch, and I expected Frankenstein's Monster to break into 'Puttin' on the Ritz' at any moment, even though he was being chased by Harpies, but all of that was still not enough to save the film. In fact, fundamentally, all of that was the problem - pick a storyline and stick with it. As it was, they tried to jam entirely too much into entirely too little, and ended up with disjointed pastiche that wasn't quite pretty enough or funny enough to overcome being a disjointed pastiche that was very pretty.
Ripping off Alan Moore's Mr Hyde and the Young Frankenstein intro ala Wizard of Oz was really nice. And having Riff-Raff wandering around a Transylvanian village as an undertaker was apropos, but it was still Just Too Much...
Did I mention the flick was a total pastiche that didn't quite work?