Van Helsing
VAN HELSING OPENS FRI., MAY 7
ON THE FACE of it, the trailer to Van Helsing is promising. The setting is dark, gothic, late 19th century, kind of a League of Extraordinary Wankers for post-pubescents.
The hero voice-overs, "My life, my job, my curse is to vanquish evil," then sprouts these rotating blades that look like what's under the Norelco electric razor shield.
Van Helsing is directed by Stephen Sommers, who made a killing, so to speak, grave-robbing Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 3 with his Mummy flickshey, at least Sommers is a thief with taste.
The set-up to Van Helsing promises something along the lines of a PlayStation 3 game: a grown-up trenchcoat mafia guy with a variety of pre-20th-century weapons doing battle against several levels of vampires and werewolves in an attempt to save a hot English chick (Wait, a hot English chick? Apparently such a thing existed in the late 19th century) who's being held hostage like some hapless freelancer caught war-touring the Baghdad-Fallujah strip.
That Brit-chick babe is none other than Kate Beckinsale, who recently dumped her British "partner," actor Michael Sheen (with whom she produced a child), in favor of Underworld director Len Wiseman. Now that's a superhero/monster movie I'd like to see! Here's the pitch: A tan, fit, young Hollywood bigshot rescuing England's only babe from the clutches of a pasty Welsh actor who hit his own professional glass ceiling about six art-houses ago. Audiences everywhere would be glued to the screen, perched on the edges of their seats, clutching their loved ones as Wiseman pulls up to Sheen's low-key London residence in a convertible Porsche, revs the engine a few times in the driveway, and suddenly we see a beaming, hurried Beckinsale running out with a single piece of luggage Sheen chases after her, dragging their five-year-old daughter behind him
Sheen: But Kate, what about our child?
Beckinsale: You can have it!
Sheen: But England! What about England?
Beckinsale: Never heard of it! I'm off to the first world! Toodaloo!
Roll the credits as the Porsche speeds away to the world of summer blockbusters, leaving Sheen with little hope other than appearing in the next modestly budgeted, Kenneth Branagh, thinking-man's romantic comedy.
But getting back to Van Helsing. The movie clearly suffers from one problem: a superhero named "Van Helsing." That sounds like the name of a sandwich at a local deli, or a car dealership in some shit-hole like Columbus.
This movie should appeal to teenagers but is designed, by virtue of its BDSM costuming, more for that vast demographic of aging middlebrow fetishistswhich probably describes most of you reading this.