Van Helsing

Susan and I saw Van Helsing recently. It was bad. It was so unbelievably bad. It’s another one of those movies where a few live actors have been stuck into an otherwise completely computer animated movie. And it’s not very good computer animation at that. The animators seemed to think that bigger was better and made everything so much bigger than life that it simply became unbelievable. Castles were higher than 100 story office buildings, My Hyde was about 16 feet tall, the wolfman was about 16 feet tall, Dracula was about 16 feet tall. And all these 16 foot tall monsters appeared to be operating in some other universe with completely different physical laws that allowed them bounce off walls and stick to the ceiling. Every five minutes Van Helsing or one of the other rare human characters would fall hundreds of feet out of a giant castle, land on the stone floor, on their head, and suffer no apparent harm. Some of the animation was done at ILM and they must have had a special that week because they threw a few hundred Ewoks into the deal. That’s right folks, Dracula had an army of Ewoks wearing welding goggles to do his bidding. Oddly the Ewoks walked and talked exactly like Jawas. And despite being way too long, no time could be found to have anything resembling intelligent dialog or character development.