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Van Helsing (film)

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Van Helsing
Theatrical release poster
Directed byStephen Sommers
Written byStephen Sommers
Based onDracula
by Bram Stoker

Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

The Wolf Man
by George Waggner
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyAllen Daviau
Edited by
  • Bob Ducsay
  • Kelly Matsumoto
Music byAlan Silvestri
Production
companies
Distributed byUniversal Pictures
Release date
  • May 7, 2004 (2004-05-07)
Running time
131 minutes
CountriesUnited States[2]
Czech Republic[1]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$160–170 million[3][4]
Box office$300.2 million[3]

Van Helsing is a 2004 action horror film written and directed by Stephen Sommers. It stars Hugh Jackman as monster hunter Van Helsing and Kate Beckinsale as Anna Valerious. Van Helsing is both an homage and tribute to the Universal Horror Monster films from the 1930s and 1940s (also produced by Universal Pictures which were in turn partially based on novels by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley), of which Sommers is a fan.

The eponymous character was inspired by the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing from Irish author Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Distributed by Universal Pictures, the film includes a number of monsters such as Count Dracula (and other vampires), Frankenstein's monster, Duergar, Mr. Hyde and werewolves in a way similar to the multi-monster movies that Universal produced in the 1940s, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. The film grossed $300.2 million worldwide against a budget of $160–170 million, but it received generally negative reviews.

Plot

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In 1887 Transylvania, Doctor Victor Frankenstein, aided by his assistant Igor and Count Dracula, creates a monster. Dracula kills Frankenstein when he refuses to go along with the vampire's designs for the creature as Igor, revealed to be under Dracula's pay, watches impassively. As a mob storms the castle, the monster flees to a windmill with Frankenstein's body. The mob burns down the windmill, seemingly killing the monster. A year later, Gabriel Van Helsing, a monster hunter who works for the Knights of the Holy Order, an organization that protects mankind, travels to Notre-Dame de Paris and kills Dr. Jekyll after a brawl with Mr. Hyde. Van Helsing remembers nothing before he was found on the steps of a church nearly dead, and hopes to earn pardon for his forgotten sins and regain his memory.

At the Order's Vatican City headquarters, Van Helsing is tasked with traveling to Transylvania, destroying Dracula, and protecting Anna and Velkan Valerious, the last of an ancient Romanian family. Their ancestor vowed that his descendants would kill Dracula or spend eternity in Purgatory. In Transylvania, Anna and Velkan attempt to kill a werewolf controlled by Dracula, but it falls with Velkan into a gorge, biting him as Velkan shoots it with a silver bullet.

Van Helsing and friar Carl, a weapons inventor, arrive at a village and join Anna's fight with Dracula's brides – Verona, Marishka, and Aleera – slaying Marishka in the process. That night, Velkan visits Anna to warn her of Dracula's plans but transforms into a werewolf and escapes. Van Helsing and Anna pursue Velkan to Frankenstein's castle. They stumble upon Dracula's plan to duplicate Frankenstein's experiments to give life to thousands of his undead children, using Velkan as a conduit.

During the fray, Dracula confronts Van Helsing, whom he regards as an ancient rival. Dracula's spawns come to life before dying due to the lack of Frankenstein's original formula. Van Helsing and Anna escape and, at the windmill, stumble upon Frankenstein's monster, who reveals that he is the key to Frankenstein's machine giving life to Dracula's brood. Eavesdropping on their discussion, Velkan escapes with this new information.

While attempting to bring the monster to Rome, Van Helsing and his crew are ambushed by the brides and Velkan, near Budapest. Verona and Velkan are killed, but Van Helsing is bitten by the latter. Aleera kidnaps Anna and offers to trade her for the monster at a masquerade ball. Van Helsing locks the monster in a crypt, but Dracula's allies retrieve him. Van Helsing and Carl rescue Anna and escape from the masquerade guests, who are revealed to be vampires.

At Anna's castle, Carl explains that Dracula is the son of Valerious the Elder. When he was killed in 1462 by the "Left Hand of God", Dracula made a pact with the Devil and lived again. Valerious was told to kill Dracula and gain salvation for his entire family. Unable to kill his son, he imprisoned him in an icy fortress. A fragment, which the Cardinal gave Van Helsing back in Vatican City, opens a path to Dracula's castle.

They find the monster, who reveals that Dracula possesses a cure for lycanthropy because only a werewolf can kill him. Van Helsing, fighting the curse, sends Anna and Carl to retrieve the cure, killing Igor in the process. Van Helsing attempts to free the monster but is struck by lightning, bringing Dracula's children to life. Dracula and Van Helsing turn into their bestial forms and battle, while Frankenstein's monster helps Anna escape Aleera. Anna then kills Aleera with Carl's help. Whilst both return to their human forms, Dracula reveals that it was Van Helsing who killed him and offers to restore his memory. Van Helsing refuses and kills Dracula after reverting back to his werewolf form, triggering his brood's deaths. Anna injects the cure into Van Helsing but is killed by him in the process.

Van Helsing and Carl cremate Anna's body on a cliff overlooking the sea. Frankenstein's monster leaves for parts unknown, and Van Helsing sees Anna's spirit reuniting with her family as they are allowed to enter Heaven at last. With Transylvania freed from Dracula's terror, Van Helsing and Carl ride off into the sunset.

Cast

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Production

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Universal Pictures wanted to reinvent their iconic movie monsters and wanted to replicate the formula that had worked for both The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). This was not only attempted by bringing on Stephen Sommers as the director but also with the release date of May 7, 2004, which was five years to the date after The Mummy opened in 1999. The Mummy took the classic monster in an action-adventure tone, so it made sense to do the same with Van Helsing. While The Mummy was much inspired by Indiana Jones, Van Helsing drew heavily from James Bond films.[5]

Richard Roxburgh, who was cast as Dracula, said that he loved the old Universal monster films, Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu and Gary Oldman's Dracula and in general likes "the dark, sad, kind of naïve, Germanic type of monster movie". About his physical transformation for the role, Roxburgh said that "it's a pretty significant physical transformation. There is obviously darker hair and I wanted a sense of a Romany king or leader, a faded aristocrat. I liked that gypsy element. So the character looks nothing like me".[6]

Soundtrack

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The film's original soundtrack was composed by Alan Silvestri.

Merchandise

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Video game

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Vivendi Universal Games published a Van Helsing video game for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Boy Advance. The game follows a similar plot to the film, has gameplay similar to Devil May Cry, and the PS2 and Xbox versions feature the voice talent of many of the actors including Hugh Jackman.

Slot games

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Van Helsing also features in a slot game produced by International Game Technology. The game is available in real-world casinos and online, though users in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and the US are excluded from playing the online games.

Reception

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Box office

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The film earned $51 million at #1 during the opening weekend of May 7–9, 2004. The film eventually grossed US$300,257,475 worldwide, of which US$120,177,084 was from the US.[3]

Critical reception

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Van Helsing received generally negative reviews from critics.[7] Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 24% of 224 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.28/10. The site's consensus calls the film a "hollow creature feature that suffers from CGI overload".[8] Metacritic rated it 35/100 based on 38 reviews.[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[10] James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave an extremely negative review, rating the film half a star out of four and calling it "the worst would-be summer blockbuster since Battlefield Earth". Furthermore, he wrote: "There are quite a few unintentionally funny moments, although the overall experience was too intensely painful for me to be able to advocate it as being "so bad, it's good". ... Some, however, will doubtless view it as such. More power to them, since sitting through this movie requires something more than a strong constitution and a capacity for self-torture".[11] Bill Muller of The Arizona Republic gave it a rating of two out of five, explaining that the film "looks like a movie assembled by a room full of computer geeks munching Doritos and playing Wolfenstein in between stints of designing Dracula's fangs".[12]

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle greatly disliked the film: "Writer-director Stephen Sommers (...) throws together plot strains from various horror movies and stories and tries to muscle things along with flash and dazzle. But his film just lies there, weighted down by a complete lack of wit, artfulness and internal logic. ... What Sommers tries to do here is use action as the only means of involving an audience. So story is sacrificed. Character development is nonexistent, and there are no attempts to incite emotion. Instead, Sommers tries to hold an audience for two hours with nothing up his sleeve but colored ribbons, bright sparklers and a kazoo. What he proves is that this is no way to make movies".[13] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film 3 stars out of 4 stating that "at the outset, we may fear Sommers is simply going for f/x overkill, but by the end, he has somehow succeeded in assembling all his monsters and plot threads into a high-voltage climax. Van Helsing is silly, spectacular and fun".[14]

Accolades

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Award Subject Nominee Result
Saturn Awards Best Horror Film Nominated[15]
Best Costume Design Gabriella Pescucci, Carlo Poggioli
Best Make-Up Greg Cannom, Steve LaPorte
Best Special Effects Scott Squires, Ben Snow, Daniel Jeannette, Syd Dutton
Best Music Alan Silvestri Won[16]
Teen Choice Awards Choice Action Movie Nominated[17]
Choice Thriller Movie
Choice Movie Actor: Drama/Action Adventure Hugh Jackman
Choice Movie Actress: Drama/Action Adventure Kate Beckinsale (also for Underworld)
Choice Movie Fight/Action Sequence Hugh Jackman vs. Richard Roxburgh
Visual Effects Society Outstanding Special Effects in Service to Visual Effects in a Motion Picture Geoff Heron, Chad Taylor Nominated[18]
Stinkers Bad Movie Awards Worst Film Nominated
Worst Actress Kate Beckinsale
Worst Female Fake Accent
Worst Male Fake Accent Richard Roxburgh Won[19]

Spin-offs

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Sommers expanded the story of Van Helsing in two direct spin-offs:

  • The animated prequel titled Van Helsing: The London Assignment takes place before the main events of the film, focusing on Van Helsing's mission to try to stop Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from terrorizing London.
  • There is also a one-shot comic book, published by Dark Horse Comics, titled Van Helsing: From Beneath the Rue Morgue, that follows Van Helsing on a self-contained adventure that occurs during the events of the film, just after the death of Jekyll/Hyde in Paris but before Van Helsing returns to Rome. In the adventure, Van Helsing deals with Doctor Moreau and his hybrid mutants.
  • In April 2004, a month before Van Helsing opened in theaters, Universal Studios announced a television series titled Transylvania. The plan was to use the set from the original film, and Universal Studios paid to maintain the structures so that they could return to film there, and the series was planned to premiere on NBC in the fall of 2004. Just two weeks into Van Helsing's release, the studio canceled the plans for the television series.[5]

Future

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Cancelled sequel

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Universal Pictures was confident that Van Helsing would be a hit at the box office, and they began development on a sequel before the first film opened. They even paid to keep the original Transylvania sets, as they figured they would need to come back for it and other projects. Despite the film being a moderate success, plans for the sequel were scrapped.[5]

Reboot

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In May 2012, Universal Pictures announced a reboot of the film with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to produce a modern reimagining and Tom Cruise to star as the title character and also produce the film.[20][21] In October, Rupert Sanders entered early negotiations to direct the film.[22] By November 2015, Jon Spaihts and Eric Heisserer signed onto the project as co-screenwriters, though Cruise left his role with the film.[23] In the following year, Cruise was cast to appear in Kurtzman's The Mummy, which was released in theaters on June 9, 2017.[24] Following the poor critical and financial reception to the film, Universal restructured their plan for rebooted adaptations of their Classic Monsters to be stand-alone in nature.[25]

By December 2020, the reboot was back in development. Julius Avery was hired as director, in addition to doing a rewrite of an original script by Eric Pearson. James Wan was attached to serve as producer. The project will be a joint production venture between Universal Pictures and Atomic Monster.[26]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b "Van Helsing". www.filmcommission.cz (in Czech). Archived from the original on 22 July 2018. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  2. ^ "Van Helsing (2004)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 2016-09-16. Retrieved 2016-08-07.
  3. ^ a b c "Van Helsing". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved January 1, 2022.
  4. ^ "Van Helsing". The Numbers. Nash Information Services, LLC. Retrieved January 1, 2022.
  5. ^ a b c "Van Helsing: Universal's Plans for the Franchise That Never Was". 7 October 2022.
  6. ^ "Richard Roxburgh Interview - Q & A".
  7. ^ Wloszczyna, Susan (2004-05-10). "Marketing goes to heroic measures". USA Today. Archived from the original on 2015-11-23. Retrieved 2014-10-15.
  8. ^ "Van Helsing". Rotten Tomatoes. 3 May 2004. Archived from the original on November 29, 2017. Retrieved November 19, 2019.
  9. ^ "Van Helsing". Metacritic. Archived from the original on 2019-11-05. Retrieved 2014-10-15.
  10. ^ "CinemaScore". cinemascore.com. Archived from the original on 2018-01-02. Retrieved 2018-01-22.
  11. ^ Berardinelli, James. "Van Helsing". ReelViews. Archived from the original on 2021-02-27. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  12. ^ Muller, Bill (May 7, 2004). "Monster mishmash: 'Van Helsing' stuffs creatures into empty box of serial effects". The Arizona Republic. p. 69. Archived from the original on November 6, 2024. Retrieved November 6, 2024 – via Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  13. ^ LaSalle, Mick (May 7, 2004). "'Van Helsing' a monstrosity of a movie". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on 2013-12-21. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  14. ^ Ebert, Roger (May 7, 2004). "Van Helsing". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on 2022-03-03. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
  15. ^ "NOMINATIONS FOR 31ST ANNUAL SATURN AWARDS ANNOUNCED". Film Threat. 10 February 2005. Archived from the original on 2018-01-23. Retrieved 2018-01-22.
  16. ^ ""Spider-man 2" Big Winner at the 31st Annual Saturn Awards". Saturn Awards. Archived from the original on 2005-07-25. Retrieved 2018-01-22.
  17. ^ "Teen Choice Awards 2004". Hollywoodauditions.com. Retrieved June 23, 2011.
  18. ^ McNary, Dave (2005-01-10). "Spidey pic catches 6 f/x noms from VES". Variety. Archived from the original on 2018-01-23. Retrieved 2018-01-22.
  19. ^ "Stinkers Bad Movie Awards - 2004". The Stinkers. Archived from the original on 4 May 2007. Retrieved 24 September 2019.
  20. ^ Kroll, Justin (2012-05-02). "Orci, Kurtzman sign two-year Universal deal". Variety. Archived from the original on 2013-08-16. Retrieved 2012-05-02.
  21. ^ "Universal Signs Kurtzman and Orci; Pair Takes On 'The Mummy' and 'Van Helsing'". Deadline Hollywood. 1 May 2012. Archived from the original on 2 May 2012. Retrieved 8 October 2018.
  22. ^ "BREAKING: Rupert Sanders Circling Universal's Tom Cruise-Starring VAN HELSING". Twich. 2012-10-10. Archived from the original on 2013-01-18. Retrieved 2013-01-23.
  23. ^ Kroll, Justin (November 14, 2015). "Universal's 'Van Helsing' Reboot Enlists Scribes Jon Spaihts and Eric Heisserer (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Archived from the original on November 30, 2017. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  24. ^ Kroll, Justin (November 11, 2015). "Universal's 'Van Helsing' Reboot Enlists Scribes Jon Spaihts and Eric Heisserer (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Archived from the original on May 11, 2018. Retrieved April 28, 2018.
  25. ^ Kroll, Justin (January 25, 2019). "'Invisible Man' Finds Director, Sets New Course for Universal's Monster Legacy (EXCLUSIVE)". Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  26. ^ Kroll, Justin (December 1, 2020). "Universal And James Wan Tap 'Overlord' Director Julius Avery To Direct New 'Van Helsing' Movie". Deadline. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
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