FilmBlather.com

"Feed my darlings! FEED!"

There are certain things that Van Helsing is not: coherent (at all), intelligent (in the conventional sense), revolutionary, or even remarkable. All of this is irrelevant. Stephen Sommers' $170 million extravaganza is a lot of other, much more important things. Inventive, light on its feet and beautifully, hilariously campy, it's a hell of a way to kick off the summer -- a two hour and ten minute stretch of wall-to-wall action that never becomes wearisome or dreary. Sommers showed a flair for highly amusing nonsense with The Mummy, which made him a hot property in Hollywood; here, he takes that formula about as far as it can go. Van Helsing never lets up.

The trailer worried movie buffs all over the planet, and we had good reason to be anxious: the advertising gave off definite League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vibes, and that Sean Connery co-directed crapfest was one of last summer's biggest disappointments. Fortunately Sommers, unlike Stephen Norrington, happens to know what to do with a big budget and a diverse set of mythologies. He's not afraid to disrespect and bastardize Count Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Dr. Jekyll, etc., but he does it in a way that's amusing, and self-deprecating, and all in good fun. Or maybe I'm just required by law to like any movie with a character named "Marishka" and where other characters yell that name in impassioned tones during action scenes.

The opening scenes of Van Helsing border on brilliance, and as the title card "Transylvania" faded in over the black and white images, my expectations for the film shot up from dire to unreasonable. The monochrome lasts for only ten minutes, alas, and shortly after we see the first glimpse of color, Sommers slams on the gas and never looks back. Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman), a fighter of the evil and supernatural hired, for some reason, by the Catholic Church, proceeds to swing, run, leap, shoot crossbows and transmorgrify as he helps a cursed Transylvanian family (represented by Kate Beckinsale) vanquish Count Vladislaus Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) and his plans to unleash a flock of his vicious vampire children upon the world.

I doubt I can muster the vigor necessary to properly rave about Richard Roxburgh here, but I should probably try anyway. He gives the sort of performance I always adore, plunging headlong into his absurd character, nibbling on the scenery for a while before starting to bite off gigantic chunks without warning. It gets to a point where one is not even surprised by the sight of his Count Dracula suddenly walking up walls and on ceilings, because that's precisely what one has been expecting the actor to start doing any minute. At about the halfway point, I just started giggling uncontrollably every time he would appear on screen, sneer, and utter his impossibly overblown lines in that ridiculous, indeterminate accent. He's sheer genius.

And that's not it, either. Dracula has three Brides, who just look like vampish Swedish supermodels until they start sprouting wings, screeching like banshees, flying all over the damn place and grabbing principal characters in their horrendous-looking talons. When they capture one, they sometimes start bickering among themselves -- one will yell "I want first bite!" and then another will unhinge her jaw and do this bizarre half-growl half-screech. In the meantime, I am very nearly rolling around on the ground with hysterical laughter.

The special effects are genuinely impressive -- not in their degree of technical advancement so much as the ingenious and effective ways in which they are deployed. The aforementioned Vampire Brides are creepy as hell, and the movie is seamless in blending the actresses' faces with the clearly CGI-animated half-human, half-reptile bodies. The sweeping wide shots of Paris, Rome and other recreated locales set to Alan Silvestri's punchy musical score quicken the heartbeat all on their own.

There are other little individual things to admire -- I liked what they did with Frankenstein's monster, who serves both as comic relief and a source of pathos -- but what makes the movie work is Stephen Sommers' astute handling of this potentially bumpy material. Van Helsing simply screams along with one neato set piece after another, never giving us time to question, get bored, or even think. It's a blast.