Van Helsing
5 minutes. That’s all it took for us to switch this off in disgust. Not because what was on screen was repulsive visually, spiritually or any other -ly you can think of, but because the concept of a monster-slayer who works his way through the Universal horror classics (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Hunchback of Notre Dame) apparently gave the writers licence to mash up and spew out accepted versions of well-written horror stories and come up with something so vulgar that it wasn’t worth spending any more time on it. Lowest-common denominator film-making of the type that totally patronises its target audience rather than addressing them as human beings - “these 14-year-olds who are going to see it don’t have any concept of the original stories, so we can re-write them in whatever messy way we want.” Absolute horse manure. No star rating as we didn’t get to the end, but I doubt it would have got more than one.
I think we perhaps got a little further than you did before doing the same. But not much.
Our main objection was the warped presentation of what the Church does, and that was enough to turn us off - the ghastly demonic type creatures tipped the balance still further.
A waste of time and money.
Comment by nikki — 14 August, 2006 @ 5:37 pm