You Sure His Name Isn't FRON-ken-STEEN?
Photo: Are these two identical? Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing (© Universal), and Mel Brooks as Van Helsing in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (© Columbia).

I finally succumbed and bought a ticket to the film. (No, I'm not one of those privileged people with free tickets to movies.) About fifteen minutes, a horrible feeling came upon me.

This was a Mel Brooks parody without Mel Brooks, and without parody.

Anyone who's seen Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs or High Anxiety recognizes what this means. The movie he's parodying doesn't matter. Brooks just wants to make a bunch of jokes with the handful of funny people he knows. The parody of the specific genre doesn't matter. What matters is that one-liners from The Borscht Belt All-Purpose Joke Book can be squeezed into the story.

What does this have to do with Van Helsing? Very simple. Instead of lame tummeler jokes about yogurt and Jewish wives and "May The Schwartz Be With You," Van Helsing has special effects. They aren't used to tell a story. There isn't much of a story to tell. Comics use a drummer's rim shots to tell people when to laugh. In this film, effects are used to tell us when to gasp.

In the original Universal horror films, they really didn't have effects, not like today's computer stuff. Their shock effects were done with ideas that were outrageous for the time. A man who rises from a grave to drink your blood? A tortured soul built from dead bodies? Quite shocking in the 1930's.

The best horror movies remembered their monsters were people, and that the stories had to go somewhere. The small British studio Hammer Films remembered, and their films are remembered as fondly as the Universal classics. The people responsible for this movie…didn't.

The only thing in Van Helsing that has any integrity is Hugh Jackman himself. The script didn't help him much - like giving him a character or a story or anything - so he plays the monster hunter like a combination of Wolverine, James Bond and Batman. He is the only human element that comes through the blitz of CGI flying vampire women and skin-ripping werewolves, and then only on occasion.

Every time Richard Roxburgh did his mid-European Dracula voice, I imagined the cartoony villain from Mystery Men, Casanova Frankenstein. (And Kenneth Mars's incomprehensible Inspector Kemp from Young Frankenstein.) Drac's three "brides" sounded uncomfortably like the Gabor sisters, Zha Zha, Eva and Magda. And while Kate Breckinridge's female slayer has a real cute butt, I noticed that her big sword was swinging from her hip without a scabbard to cover the edge, which should have covered her real cute butt with real painful cuts.

I could slam this movie forever, but it did have one beneficial effect. After years of neglect, Universal has released its original classic monster movies, the real Frankenstein and Dracula and Wolf Man, in DVD collections. They have been absolutely unavailable over the last five Halloweens on tape or DVD - you had to tape them off AMC if you wanted them. What was just a marketing ploy by some suit at Universal (now NBC/Universal) has given us something to enjoy for years to come.

As for Van Helsing, there is one moment that is worth seeing. At the very end of the film, Van Helsing looks up in the sky…and smiles. Jackman never smiled as Wolverine. But his smile is something genuine and warm. It suggests he should play a real romantic lead someday, and wind up in a film with a happy ending. Or maybe he was just extremely happy that this expensive slipshod film was finally over.

Thomas E. Reed is a television engineer in Orlando, Florida. He embarrassed himself at this showing by doing Rocky Horror style comments during the film. When the hundred people in the ballroom turned, and all of them were vampires, he yelled like a Southern sheriff, "You in a heap o' trouble now, boy! Squee-eel like a pig!" You can hear him squeal at hatemail@off-model.com.