Blast From The Past Movie Review: VAN HELSING (2004)

I first saw Van Helsing back when I was in college. I don't remember too clearly how much I liked it then--I think I liked it broadly but didn't like the end. I did use a GIF of Richard Roxburgh's Dracula as an AOL Instant Messenger avatar, at least for awhile.

The film podcast Myopia Movies dedicated October as vampire-movie month, with Van Helsing originally planned as the Patreon special. Although I wasn't slated to participate, I'd rented the movie already and so watched it anyway. Here's a free snippet and instructions how to get whole episode FREE. And now my review..

The Plot

Amnesiac Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is a monster-hunter working for a Vatican knightly order. Owing to how many of the creatures he kills revert to human form upon death and how close-mouthed the Vatican is about supernatural threats like vampires, werewolves, etc. he's viewed by the general public as a serial killer and is the most wanted criminal in Europe. After dispatching Mr. Hyde in Paris when we first meet him, the Vatican sends him to Transylvania to assist the Valerious family in their centuries-long battle with none other than Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh).

Upon arrival he allies with Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsdale), the last living member of the family after the presumed death of her brother Velkan (Will Kemp), and does battle with Dracula and his three brides. Things get complicated...Dracula seems to have some kind of prior history with Van Helsing and the vampire king has a very dangerous and complex plan involving none other than Frankenstein's Monster (Shuler Hensley) and werewolves.

The Good

*For starters, the movie is pretty exciting and never dull. That's why, even though there's so much to criticize about it, I'm going to give it a good review. It's just plain fun. I watched about 1/3 of it on the elliptical at the gym and it made the time go by so much faster.

*The acting works. Hugh Jackman is good as Van Helsing, while David Wenham is fine as the inventor-friar Carl. Kate Beckinsdale does a decent job as Anna. Hensley, who won the Tony Award for his role as the pitiable but dangerous Jud Frye in Oklahoma!, puts a lot of pathos into his portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster. But the one who's clearly having the most fun is Richard Roxburgh, who plays Dracula himself. He chews the scenery like he's chewing on somebody's neck and it's always entertaining. In particular he plays Dracula incredibly snarky and I liked that.

*One innovation Van Helsing brings to vampire films is the characterization of Dracula's vampire brides. Rather than just being residents of the Count's house of horrors in Transylvania without individual characterization (this fanfic even depicts them as a sort of hive mind), they play a major role in driving the plot and have personalities.

*I also liked the characterization of Frankenstein's Monster. Rather than some freak with the mind of a toddler (or in the original film an executed murderer) in the body of a professional wrestler, he's very intelligent, has some very pointed things to say about monster-hunting, reveres Dr. Frankenstein as his father, and is even a devout Catholic despite being, well, the parts of seven men strung together and reanimated with electricity. I think this is more heavily tied in with the novel where the creature was more intelligent.

*There's a lot of humor in this movie. I laughed out loud several times.

*The Valerious patriarch who goes missing before the story begins is referred to as "the King of the Gypsies." Given how in the original Dracula novel and the 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula his minions are explicitly depicted as being Gypsies (or Romani as they prefer to be called), this seems like a deliberate choice to deconstruct the old story. Rarely does one put "thoughtful" and this film together in one sentence, but it looks like they put some thinking into it.

The Bad

*For all its spectacle and fun, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make a lot of sense. For starters, when Anna tells the villagers that Van Helsing is the first man to kill a vampire in over 100 years, that raises some questions as to what exactly the Valerious family has been doing in all the centuries they've been fighting Dracula. Have they been keeping the vampires contained as much as possible to keep them from harming others, but avoiding killing them outright because that might provoke revenge attacks? Given how they don't initially know where Castle Dracula even is, that seems unlikely. Does Dracula primarily use werewolves and human minions, with the vampires only coming out to fight occasionally? It would've been better if Anna had lectured the villagers about their ingratitude for Van Helsing saving their lives.

*The action goes back and forth from Transylvania to Rome, often by carriage. Does distance mean anything? If Dracula has a townhouse, it'd probably be in a much closer big city like Bucharest.

*Also, why does Van Helsing try to kill Dracula with methods that don't work (in this universe) like the silver stake? If the Valerious family has been fighting Dracula for centuries and tried various means of killing him (Anna talks about burning, stabbing, clubbing etc., which means they've gone hand-to-hand with him repeatedly), why aren't they sharing this with the Vatican? And why didn't the Vatican share this with Van Helsing? Someone has blundered.

*Does being a vampire mean lack of volume control? Dracula and his brides sure like to yell and scream overdramatically, especially the shrieking-prone brides. Roxburgh's hammy Dracula is fun, but the brides can get pretty annoying.

*For a world in which Catholicism is factually true, their take on Catholic theology is...dubious. For starters, Valerious the Elder making a vow to God (and apparently some kind of deal with the leadership of the Church) that nobody in his family would go to Heaven until Dracula was dead and the cardinal's worrying the entire Valerious family would end up in Purgatory if the family were killed before Dracula's death. Firstly, even if Valerious the Elder was foolish enough to make such a vow in the first place (see the Hebrew judge Jephthah), the cardinal has no reason to think God would honor it. The only way for this to make sense theologically is if the most extreme version of the apostles' authority to bind and loose (see Matthew 16:19) and that the Catholic leadership and in particular the Pope are the successors to the apostles in authority are both correct. If Catholicism is factually true the latter works, but the former is really pushing it. On a lesser note, Purgatory is temporary, even if it is unpleasant, so the Valerious family will enter Heaven eventually. When dealing with a timeframe of eternity, even a century or two matters little. Also the film implies that Van Helsing is actually the Archangel Gabriel, who has taken human form but lost his memory. Angels do not work that way.

It would have been much better if the Valerious family has been keeping Dracula contained in Romania, but they've recently suffered a series of reverses like the disappearance of Anna and Velkan's father. Van Helsing is sent in as reinforcements, since if the family is wiped out, Dracula will be free to spread his dark influence across Europe. And give Van Helsing a more conventional origin story. He's just a monster-hunter working for the Vatican and that's it.

*Also, Van Helsing's knightly order is pretty multi-faith...there are Muslim mullahs, Sikhs, and Buddhist monks present at its headquarters in the Vatican and Dracula comments that Van Helsing has been trained by "monks and mullahs from Tibet to Istanbul." That kind of ecumenism isn't something that would happen in that era. Leo XIII was Pope at the time and although he was more left-wing politically and economically, he wouldn't acknowledge salvation outside the Catholic Church (that didn't happen until Vatican II), let alone outside of Christianity. Furthermore, when faced with evidence that the Cross and other specifically Christian holy items have supernatural power against evil, I imagine non-Christian witnesses would convert relatively quickly. This is empirically factual evidence of the truth of Christianity, and Catholicism specifically. Better to have it all Catholics, but multiple ethnicities. The Japanese Christians would have just come out of hiding, there's the Eastern Rite drawn from the Greek world, the Middle Eastern Maronites (whom ignorant Westerners might assume were Muslims), etc. 

Hmm...Van Helsing trained in ninjutsu by one of the Hidden Christians? That'd be cool. Such a character could've even been a replacement for Friar Carl if they wanted to go with "martial arts" over "steampunk technology"--a man who'd secretly practiced Christianity as an instructor in the genocidally anti-Christian Shogunate's official ninja academy would do a very good job in training VH in sneaking around and assassination.

*Valerious the Elder's vow is also a missed opportunity for when Dracula attempts to seduce Anna. He can play up the idea that she'll never go to Heaven, so she might as well live forever on Earth. And owing to the people's ingratitude toward the family for protecting them from supernatural threats, might as well eat them too. Even if theologically that's all nonsense, Anna might not know that and Dracula can use it to manipulate her.

*Although the brides do more than just perv on Jonathan Harker (who isn't even in the film), they could have been better developed as characters. Per the almighty TVTropes, in interviews the actresses revealed a lot about their back-stories...one is Dracula's favorite and primary wife, another was a Gypsy in her mortal life, and one hates Anna because she thinks that Dracula will try to make her one of his vampire brides. Some of that stuff is hinted at in the film (Anna and vampire bride Aleera seem to be on a first-name basis with each other), but not enough.

*A "king of the Gypsies" with a bad-Latin name? The Gypsies/Romani originally came from India. Depending on how assimilated they are (this one even became a Romanian prince), they might have Hungarian or Slavic names. The only way this works is if Anna and Velkan's father was elected to the position, as a sort of liaison to the non-Romani. Also, Valerious was the ancestor's first name, not his family name. I don't really have an issue with the first names--being Christians a Biblical name like Anna makes sense and Velkan sounds appropriately Eastern European, but their ancestor's first name becoming their last name? How did that happen?

The Verdict

Fun, but don't think about it too much. 8.0 out of 10. If you want to listen to my colleagues--who were much less merciful--make fun of the movie, sign up for the Patreon here.

Dracula and the Gypsies: A New Story Idea?

For Myopia Movies' Halloween vampire month, we watched the 2004 action-horror film Van Helsing for our Patreon feed (it's not posted yet, but don't worry it'll be there) and the 1992 sort-of classic Bram Stoker's Dracula as a public episode. I posted on Twitter a couple times about the two films' (and possibly the original novel's) portrayal of the Gypsy (Romani) people.

Let the record state I'm generally not a fan of "political correctness" or its more modern and virulent "woke" and/or "cancel culture" mutations. Seriously, a whole lot of their antics remind me of Cultural Revolution "struggle sessions," only on Twitter, and they sure love to eat their own. I'm not going to accuse the original novel or the 1992 film of being racist toward Gypsies like  this article does simply because I'm aware of what the anti-Gypsy stereotypes are and neither story uses them. Gypsies/Romani are often stereotyped as beggars, thieves, cliched fortune-tellers, and even kidnappers of children. Heck, Cher put out a song about how the Gypsies were disdained as "tramps and thieves" in the American South in 1971. However, in the 1992 film and a graphic novel adaptation using text from the book, Harker makes the following remark:

"The Count's gypsies, fearless warriors who are loyal to the death to whatever nobleman they serve - day and night they toil, filling boxes with decrepit earth from the bowels of the castle."

Not only are they NOT work-shy bums and petty criminals, they're very diligent workers and even, to cite TVTropes, a Proud Warrior Race. The "loyal to the death to whatever nobleman they serve" even reminded me of the samurai code of Bushido. Making this particular group of Romani into some kind of band of Eastern European samurai might not be historically accurate (IIRC most Romani were peddlers, metal-workers, etc), but not only is it anti-stereotypical, it's actually kind of cool.

However, I do agree with the "woke" crowd of the importance of varied, non-stereotypical representation of minority groups in media. Not only does it avoid encouraging negative stereotyping and its unfortunate consequences (ranging from the hypocritical snobbery in the Cher song to outright violence like this recent series of attacks on French Romani after rumors of child abduction), but it also allows for more complex and interesting stories.

So here's an idea I had for a Dracula story focused on the Count's Romani servants that takes place during the actual novel. The Gypsies living around Castle Dracula have served him and his vampire brides as general-purpose minions, warriors, etc. for centuries and he in turn has protected them from rampant racism (Gypsies were actually legally enslaved in Romania for a long time) and spared them his predations. Although the Gypsies serving the Count are probably Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, Dracula as a verifiably-real supernatural figure might occupy some kind of spiritual position among them, since regardless of the faith they practice many Romani include certain elements that may date back to India.

But now the Count wants to move to England. As depicted in the book and film most attend to their traditional duties as his servants and bodyguards and some might even think this is a chance to travel to what is to them an exotic new place (Britain), but there is conflict within the community. Some feel like their patron is going to abandon them to the racism and cruelty of broader Romanian culture, while others (perhaps more educated or more zealously religious) have come to realize just what Dracula is and the danger he represents to the wider world. Given how Dracula has historically been the community's protector and how a Romani community in this time and place is more likely to be traditional and insular, the elders might put down grumblings by dissidents. After all, if the alternative is rampant persecution, members of minority groups often have unpleasant choices to make. I'm not going to judge Iraqi, Syrian, and Egyptian Christians for their support of secular dictators and I know darn well why Jews have historically asked "is it good for the Jews?" re: the ascension of a new king or a political development.

However, when Dracula returns to the Transylvania with several hunters hot on his trail, the conflict within the community reignites. As in the book many will fight to the death to protect their Count against outsiders, but others might want to stay out of it or even assist the vampire-hunters. And given what's going to happen to the Gypsies in forty years, the traditionalists may have a very good reason to mourn the loss of their protector.

Given my own work obligations and higher-priority projects, this is something I probably wouldn't write myself. Owing to how it's set so deeply into a culture that's not well-known by outsiders, it might be a good idea for anybody who wants to take this story and run with it to do extensive research. Googling isn't going to be enough unless you find some real primo academic journal articles like this one on Muslim Roma--the Writing Excuses podcast recommended attending festivals to learn about different ethnic groups. Here's a big one in Spain, for example, and another in France. There was a Gypsy music festival in New York City that went virtual due to this year. Failing that, libraries (especially college ones with a lot of really niche books) or someone more familiar with the culture to assist would be good ideas well.