Van Helsing: Does it Hold Up?

So here we go, another trip down memory lane, but this time with a movie I actually got to see in theaters.  “Van Helsing” was a 2004 joint effort from Universal Studios and Stephen Sommers to breathe life into the classic Universal monsters while also capitalizing on the buzz generated by “The Mummy” and Hugh Jackman’s rising fame thanks to his work as Wolverine in the “X-Men” film franchise.

Sommers was the guy behind the first reboot of “The Mummy” back in 1999 and by golly it shows because his fingerprints are all over this flick.  Van Helsing came out with the intention of creating an action filled rollercoaster ride featuring our favorite film monsters including Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and having them fight “not Wolverine”.  To expound on that last part, Jackman leads this cast as Gabriel Van Helsing, an amnesiac immortal who fights monsters in the hopes that the clandestine organization he’s associated himself with can help get his memories back, which is totally not a riff on Wolverine, an amnesiac immortal who fights evil mutants in the hopes that the clandestine organization he’s associated himself with can help get his memories back.  See, they are completely different.  One has anger issues and claws and the other doesn’t have claws.

The film opens with a black and white re-imagining of one of the more famous classic monster movies, Frankenstein, complete with “Its ALIVE!!!” line only to have it bleed into color and show that Dracula has been secretly funding Dr. Frankenstein’s work for the purpose of creating “the monster”.  Things go off the rails shortly after that and the monster is presumed dead.

We then meet our titular hero with Van Helsing tracking Mr. Hyde through Paris because apparently he’s also Jack the Ripper, I think.  They never make that clear.  Hyde is brought to “life” as a completely CGI character and…we’ll get back to this.

So our love interest in the film is Anna played by Kate Beckensale with a Transylvanian accent so thick and so bad that it just distracts you from what her dialog actually is.  Anna is trying to fend off her village from regular attacks from “The Brides”, Dracula’s three consorts who morph from dangerously attractive women to pasty winged demons.  

Van Helsing shows up and lends a hand, sent there by the “The Church” with his Caddy, Friar Carl…who is by far the most effective character in the whole movie, to put a stop to Dracula’s shenanigans.  Van Helsing wastes one of the brides, Marishka, saving Anna.  Anna, as it turns out, is the last of a bloodline and must kill Dracula so their ancestors can enter Heaven.  Don’t look at me, I didn’t write this.

He saves Anna and because she’s bound and determine to get herself killed before act three he knocks her out.  When she comes to she encounters her brother Velkan, who she thought was killed in an attempt to trap and kill the Wolfman.  Velkan tries warning her about Dracula’s plan but guess what, he’s the new Wolfman and the minute he sees the full moon he transforms and tries to kill her.

Van Helsing and Anna track the Wolfman back to Frankenstein’s Castle where they discover that Dracula is trying to bring to life an army of vampire gremlins by using Velkan as a battery.  It doesn’t work and the little monsters that started to come to life end up dying, much to the dismay of Dracula and his brides.  Van Helsing and Anna are chased by the Wolfman and escape to the remains of an old windmill.  There they meet Frankenstein’s monster but because he’s not “evil” Van Helsing can’t kill him and so decides to help him.  This is all witnessed by the Wolfman who reports his info back to Dracula.  As it turns out, Franky was the battery Drac has been looking for.

Carl, back at Anna’s pad, discovers a painting that comes to life, depicting a werewolf and a vampire battling. 

Still the most effective character.

The group travels by carriage to Budapest, luring the remaining brides into a trap and killing Verona. The Wolfman ambushes the real carriage and bites Van Helsing before being killed. Anna is captured and held as a bargaining chip in exchange for Frankenstein's monster. They hide him in a crypt, but he is taken by the count's undead underlings while Van Helsing and Carl rescue Anna. Returning to the Valerious' castle, Carl discovers an inscription and creates a doorway to the castle. After failing to free Frankenstein's monster from his imprisonment, he lets them know of a cure to lycanthropy that Dracula possesses. Carl determines that the bite of the Wolf Man is the only way to kill Dracula. He and Anna take Igor to find the cure while Van Helsing goes to free Frankenstein's monster. Igor escapes while the final bride, Aleera, assaults Anna as Carl tries delivering the cure to Van Helsing. Igor confronts Carl on a bridge, but the confrontation sends Igor falling to his demise. Frankenstein's monster saves Anna and urges her to help Carl and Van Helsing. She kills Aleera and arrives at the castle. As the new Wolfman, Van Helsing and Dracula battle. Dracula tries reasoning with Van Helsing but he bites Dracula, who dissolves into a skeleton. Anna bursts in, causing her to be attacked and accidentally killed by Van Helsing, but not before she delivers the cure. Van Helsing returns to normal, stricken with grief over what he has done.

At a funeral pyre, Van Helsing witnesses the spirits of Anna and her family ascending into the clouds while Frankenstein's monster rows away on a raft out to sea. Van Helsing and Carl ride off into the sunset.

This movie was all over the place.  Stephen Sommers does great action and when he blends horror into the mix he does so without sacrificing the swashbuckling adventure angle.  This movie was jam packed with characters and creatures and I can’t say that this was a good thing.  I grew up watching the classic monsters, even in to their shared cinematic universe and into the Abbot and Costello days so to have all these big guns back on the screen together, and not in “Monster Squad” was a big draw for me.  But there is a balancing issue with this piece where while everyone got time on screen, you don’t feel like their characters were each given their due.

Richard Roxburgh devours scenes as Dracula and does so with shameless glee in his over acting and, weird as it sounds, it works for this movie.  You are 100% sold that this Dracula is not faking a damn thing and it’s kind of a silly beautiful thing to watch.

Beckensale as Anna was, I think, a weak point in the film.  She had recently come off “Underworld” and she was clearly going to for the same tone everyone else was trying to strike in the film but I don’t think she quite made it to the top of that tree.  She seemed just a little left of center of the rest of the film universe around her.  There wasn't any real chemistry between Anna and Van Helsing so this was a certainly a case of "Forced Love Interest".

David Wenham as Friar Carl sold it, and he was a treat.  He was goofy, silly, but actually functional within the story itself.  His job was to hand Van Helsing the next deadly object he needed to kill the monster, and he did his damn job so well that you forgot that this was literally the only thing he was responsible for.

One character barely mentioned in the write up of the plot was Igor played by Kevin J. O’Conner who you may remember from the 1999 “Mummy” movie as the ill-fated resident rat Benny.  Here he is the ill-fated resident rat Igor and for all the moments he has in the movie has actually little to do with the plot.  He could be completely removed from the movie and it wouldn’t change anything.  

The makeup effects they did for Igor were less “Hunchback” and more “Radu from Subspecies’ less impressive cousin.”  I might get to Subspecies one day, but I promise nothing.

Speaking of effects, and I told you I’d get back to this, let’s talk about 2004’s attempts at fully CGI characters.  This time around we had Mr. Hyde, all three versions of the Wolfman, Dracula and his bride’s monster forms, and the vampire gremlin babies.

Mr. Hyde looks like a pink Shrek.  His character does not feel like it’s in the same world as Van Helsing is, and that takes you out of the action.  Seeing that on screen and knowing that one of my personal favorites, the Wolfman, was also fully CGI made me very nervous from the get go.  This was compounded because the last time I saw a fully CGI werewolf on the big screen was in 1997’s “An American Werewolf in Paris” and that looked like garbage.

Dracula and his brides didn’t fare much better, but I will say that when the brides were flying around the village early in the film under thick cloud cover, they actually didn’t look too bad.  They weren’t great, but better than Hyde.

The Wolfmen.  Oh the Wolfmen.  Okay, they weren’t terrible.  You were very aware you were looking at a CGI character, but it was clear the team tried on this one.  Each Wolfman looked unique and you could tell that some effort was put into this character.  The result, again, not great, but better than I thought it was going to be.

The vampire gremlins looked fine.

I think my problem with the movie is it’s over reliance on CGI.  The practical effects they did use in the film looked amazing but I can certainly see why they would want to find a happy medium.  If everything they used CGI for was done practically, the budget would have been astronomical.

So does it hold up?  Well, yeah if you go into it with the right mindset.  If you approach this movie as a fun adventure ride, then you are going to have a good time.  The movie feels more like a video game, with levels and boss battles culminating in a final big boss battle in a level you have to solve a puzzle to get into.  There are gadgets and side characters and quests and my friends and I consider it very much an unofficial Castlevania movie, to the point that we sometimes refer to it as “Belmont” because it would just make more sense in that vein.  

It’s certainly a lot better than anything Universal’s “Dark Universe” as crapped out lately.

Thanks for reading.

The Howling...Does it Hold Up?

Hey folks, welcome back.  Wow, two posts in one week?  Not enough really to make up for my recent drought but it’s a start.  So when last we met I talked about “An American Werewolf in London” and this time around I want to touch on everyone’s OTHER favorite werewolf movie, 1981’s “The Howling”.

So for some background, I didn’t see either of these movies until much later in life, since I was all of 3 years old when they both came out and my parents aren’t exactly horror buffs.  So when I tracked them down in my misspent youth I devoured them and kind of made my own head cannon that they existed in the same film universe.  My justification was that the werewolves in "The Howling" were much more powerful as they could change at will and thus needed silver or fire to kill them where as in David in “An American Werewolf in London” was brand new and unstable and could be brought down with regular ammunition.

I do want to amend one thing: using silver to kill a werewolf was kind of sort of established in folk lore in the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan from France.  It’s really the only folkloric reference to the metal being used to bring down a werewolf-like creature (that I could find) and even then it was established long after the events so I guess take it with a grain of salt.

That’s my disclaimer; now back to the movie…

“The Howling” opens with Los Angeles anchor Karen White getting caught up in a sick game being played by serial killer Eddie Quist.  Suffering from what amounts to PTSD after the police bring down Eddie in a hail of bullets, she is directed by her psychiatrist Dr. Waggner to go get her head together at a secluded resort called “The Colony” that he just so happens to run and likes to send his patients.

So Karen and her husband Bill head off to the Colony and meet a cast of whacky characters including a leather clad nymphomaniac who tries to seduce Bill right away.  Oh and her name is Marsha Quist.  Ya know, like the guy who tried to rape and kill Karen, and not necessarily in that order.  Great place for mental health, doc.

Bill rebuff’s Marsha, and is later attacked by a large, dangerous animal and bitten on the arm.  Now it’s at this point where SANE people would realize they should have packed up and left the Colony after meeting Quist’s sister.  Nope, Karen decides to stay, but does call her friend Terri in for back up.  Terri connects the resort to Eddie through a sketch he left behind…God these people are stupid.  Sorry, sorry.

Anyway Karen gets worried about Bill and not just because he is hanging out with the lady who tried to all but rape him earlier.  Bill eventually does the no-pants dance with Marsha and they both turn into werewolves.

Terri shows up and is attacked by a werewolf in broad daylight but chops the monster’s hand off with an axe in what was actually a really intense sequence.  Suddenly everything we knew about the monsters was thrown off and we didn’t know the rules for these creatures.  Terri runs to Waggner’s office and calls her boyfriend Chris who is already on to the fact that there’s something shady going on at the Colony.  While on the phone with Chris, Terri starts looking for information linking Eddie to the Colony and sure enough finds it…because Eddie’s alive and right there waiting for her.  He kills her in werewolf form and Chris hears the whole thing, prompting him to load up with silver bullets to kill the monster what killed his woman.

Karen later is attacked by Eddie who transforms in front of her in a transformation sequence that is good enough that my young mind immediately linked this with “An American Werewolf in London”.  The sequence isn’t a repeat of the former, but it’s good enough that I could associate them with a shared continuity.  Karen responds to Eddie’s violent advances by splashing plot convenience acid in his face and gets out of there.  Chris finally arrives and is confronted by the human again Eddie who tries to transform again, only to be shot by Chris and is finally dead.

Karen and Chris are attacked by the Colony because everyone’s a werewolf here.  They kill all the werewolves, Karen is bitten, and they return to Los Angeles.

The movie has one of the more famous horror movie endings of the era because rather than settle on the final girl and final guy riding off into the sunset they move a step further.  Being a news woman, Karen decides the world must know about werewolves and uses her last time on TV to transform before a live viewing audience only to have Chris shoot her before she can attack anyone. 

I have a lot less nitpicking about this movie because it really is a much more streamline concept.  It wasn’t a horror/comedy like “An American Werewolf in London” set out to be, where they balanced the horror with jokes until things got too serious.  “The Howling” played it safer by have virtually no humor and playing it as a straight horror.

It also played by its own rules with subverting the restrictions werewolves had prior to this movie.  It sets you up to think that the werewolves need moonlight to change, but then has them attack in the daylight.  It gives them actual regenerative abilities and makes it very clear that the only way to kill them is with silver or fire.  It also established the idea of these monsters not being mindless killing machines but that they could develop their own society.  Having to deal with one werewolf may be bad, but to have a village full of them…and they are organized even as monsters…that’s a rough package to handle.

The biggest diversion it made from other horror movies of the 80’s is that there isn’t a “final girl”.  Karen, who you were rooting for to make it out alive simply because of how much trauma she dealt with only to have her CHOOSE to die at the end upended the concept because you didn't have this survivor dealing with the trauma of the events but rather choosing to die by her own terms.  Chris may have pulled the trigger, but it was suicide with a purpose of warning everyone of the supernatural threat.

The special effects were good, great by their time but some of them haven’t aged so well, but that’s to be expected.

So does it hold up?  Well yes.  The story is unique enough to keep you guessing if you are a first time viewer, and even if it’s your 100th time watching it, its visually engaging enough for you to stay interested.  So if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you check it out.  Just don’t watch the sequels.

I also recommend you check out the 1977 novel the movie is loosely based on by Gary Brandner, by the same name.  The story is different enough for you to get into both movie and book and not spoil one or the other.

There have been some talks about doing a remake of the film and I think if they stuck to practical effects it could be really good.  My fear when I hear about remakes of horror films is that they are going to rely too much on CGI and for rarely has CGI done anything good for a horror movie.

Thanks for reading.

An American Werewolf in London…Does it Hold Up?

For most fans of the werewolf subgenre of horror films, if you asked them “What’s the best werewolf movie ever made?” they would shoot back with one of two answers: “The Howling” or “An American Werewolf in London”.

Now, the latter of those two is highly regarded in werewolf movies, more so, actually than “The Howling”.  This, from what I can tell, is because the character of David in AWiL is more relatable than the protagonists of “The Howling.”

I was thinking about this the other day, as friends of mine have set up a Google + page that is devoted to werewolves, along with other fantasy creatures, and I was wondering to myself “Does An American Werewolf in London still hold up today?”

Given that the film came out in 1981 and is likely older than many of those reading this blog, I don’t think I need to worry about spoiling the film for anyone, however, in the spirit of fair play, please take a moment to view the film before you continue if you haven’t seen it yet.  I’ll wait.

Done?  Good.

So our film opens with David and Jack, best friends, who are back packing through the English country side and stopping off in a pub called the “Slaughtered Lamb” because it is the only establishment within walking distance.  Why else would you stop at a place called the Slaughtered Lamb unless it was literally the only place around?  They ask about some quasi-satanic art deco pieces in the pub and are promptly met with hostility.  Because if someone asks you about a protective sigil that wards off an actual mythical beast made flesh you should immediately treat them like an asshole and make them leave the only place they would be safe for the next twelve hours.  How dare they ask questions about stuff they know nothing about?

Well, treated like assholes, Jack and David decide to leave, despite the land lady asking the patrons to be less dickish and let them stay the night.  But no, they are kicked to the curb and told only “Stick to the roads, stay away from the moors.”

Because that’s easy when there is no physical difference between the two in the fog and dark.
Sure enough they find themselves wan

dering the dark moors in the fog and, if you read the title of the movie you went to see, you know what comes next.  Out of the night comes a monster that rips Jack apart and bites the ever-loving crap out of David.  Well not everyone in the pub is a dick because some of them come out and drop the monster with a few well-placed bullets.  I’m going to loop back around to this in a little bit because there is a BIG damn question here.

Three weeks later David wakes up and has only fuzzy memories of what happened, insisting that he was attacked by a large dog or wolf, which is true from his perspective.  Then Jack comes back, looking a little more…shredded than he used to. 

Ghost Jack explains that he’s “undead” (which…he’s not.  He’s a ghost.  Only David can see him, he can’t interact with anyone or anything…he’s a ghost) cursed to exist unless David dies because he’s carrying “the bloodline of the werewolf” what killed him.  Ghost Jack explains that if David doesn’t kill himself before the next full moon he’s going to turn into a werewolf and mindlessly kill people.  David passes this off as a hallucination…which from his perspective makes total sense.

While David’s doctor checks out “The Slaughtered Lamb” and tries to validate this “big dog” story, he’s stonewalled by the pub goers except one guy who actively tires to tell him about the werewolf and David’s horrific future, but is cut off because the notion of a transforming blood born ailment shouldn’t be general knowledge.

David puts the moves on, and succeeds in getting in with a pretty nurse who lets him crash at her place after he’s released from the hospital.  Is that a thing that happens?  Was it just the late 70’s to early 80’s where you could take home someone you knew for a handful of days?  Anyway, Ghost Jack comes back, looking deader than ever, and continues the warnings.  David brushes off the ghost and goes on with his life while Alex (said nurse) goes to work.

What comes next is probably the most famous scene of the whole damn movie.  This has been considered the benchmark of werewolf effects for the last 30+ years and has been done and re-done so many times.  David painfully transforms into a werewolf and frankly whether you watch the movie proper or not, go to YouTube and check out the transformation sequence because damn is it intense.

This results in the deaths of six people, and David waking up naked in wolf enclosure.  David is now convinced of his curse and does start to try and kill himself, but chickens out.  He’s then lured into an adult theatre (sure, he was “lured” there) by Ghost Jack who, holy cow he is decomposing fast.  Anyway, Ghost Jack and now the ghosts of his victims all try to convince him he needs to die, but nobody owns a watch and David transforms again, this time unleashing furry fury into a densely populated area and even biting the head off the detective from earlier in the film in the process.  He’s then riddled with bullets and dies after Alex briefly calms him because Beauty and the Beast is a thing.  We end the picture on a shot of David’s naked and bloodied body.

And that’s it.  No end credits scene, not stingers, nothing…just dead werewolf man.  Nobody got “bitten but survived”.  This was intended to be a standalone film, but because it was so popular and a landmark in the genre, it did get a spiritual sequel by way of “An American Werewolf in Paris” in 1997 which was just garbage.

So after 30 odd years, how does the film hold up?  Well, the transformation sequence is what almost everyone remembers from the film and, it stands to reason.  It was a really well done, visually arresting sequence.  We’d never seen anything like it before and frankly we haven’t seen anything that matches it since then, so there is a lot of nostalgia tied into the movie based entirely on this one sequence.  The film does have more than its fair share of plot holes, though.

Let’s start back at the Slaughtered Lamb” where we find out that 1) Werewolves are a thing in this universe that people know about.  2) There are apparently ways to ward them off.  3) They are no harder to kill than say a particularly large dog.  They don’t use any special bullets to kill it, just regular old ammunition.  This is established because, at first I thought they went after the first werewolf with silver rounds, but at the climax of the film police gun down David-wolf with regular ammunition.  So these folks who were living in fear of this monster for quite some time could have just busted out with their guns earlier and ended the whole cycle before David and Jack blundered into their pub.  Basically the whole start of the movie hinges on the fact that these pub goers are lazy as hell.

Let’s talk about poor old Jack on this one.  He explicitly states that he has to walk the earth until the werewolf’s bloodline is ended.  Okay, but if that bloodline is carried from the previous werewolf into David, shouldn’t David be getting visits from the left over victims of the first werewolf?  The curse, as Jack explains it, hinges on the bloodline being active.  Where are the previous ghosts?  Did they rot away?  Was Jack the one person the previous werewolf killed?  My peeve here is that the curse on Jack is actually woefully under-defined.

But those are nit-picks, and they don’t make it a good or bad movie.  As I was writing this review I wanted to actually kind of pull this movie apart.  I recalled that the final monster effects didn’t match up to the quality of the original transformation effects, or that the look of the final monster didn’t mesh with the elements we saw during said transformation.  I remembered a lot of black hair during the transformation and the final beast being mostly gray.  I also remember that there wasn’t a lot of expression in the monster’s face and that his movements looked a lot like a guy in a suit.

Then I had to remember that 1) Memory is never perfect and 2) this was 1981.  The latter allowed me to cut some slack on say the guy in the suit or the constant rage face and stone still lips, but the former really came into play because as I researched I found that there was a lot more gray hair during the end of the transformation than I remembered.  Elements of the transformation did in fact match up to the final monster and while the effects weren’t perfect, they were far better than they had any right to be.

So…does it hold up?  Yeah, as well as any 80’s era movie holds up.  Not as good as some, but better than most.  If you haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommend checking it out.  It adds some stuff to the werewolf mythos and doesn’t play strictly by old movie rules (silver bullets were strictly a movie creation, never in old lore).

Should you check out the sequel?  Absolutely not, it’s terrible and not in a so-bad-its-good way.

Thanks for reading