Hokum horror fun

Will Self on film

VAN HELSING is hokum, pure and simple. The hocus-pocus comes from the bastard brainchildren of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, filtered through the limelight of the classic Universal Pictures horror movies of the 1930s, but the bunkum is entirely director Stephen Sommers's own.

Sommers has a good track record for taking a familiar spooky tale and injecting bogus plausibility and high-concept special effects: The Mummy was one of the highestgrossing films of the 1990s and, just to show it was no fluke, The Mummy providentially returned in 2001 to net the then second biggest opening in cinema history. The Mummy had the virtue of being funny (sort of), but its return was as ponderous as a trip to casualty, and I yearned for it to contract a superbug.

From the opening sequence of Van Helsing, we know it's business as usual for Sommers. The back-story is filmed in black and white and the steals from the classic versions of Frankenstein and Dracula are comprehensive.

The big twist on these done-toliving-death narratives is to join them together. It's a "what if ?" scenario that ranks in silliness with last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, wherein Dorian Gray, Sherlock Holmes et al fought to save the Victorian world.

In Sommers's horrific miscegenation, Dracula needs Frankenstein and his monster because, by hooking the life-giving techno-gubbins up to his vampiric offspring (who are dangling around the castle like a gallery of giant gooey testicles), he can jolt them into life. Nuff said.

Enter Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman), who, far from being the ascetic intellectual of Stoker's original, is instead a leather-clad he-man with a Gatling gun crossbow. This piece of kit comes courtesy of Carl (David Wenham), a friar boffin in the employ of the secret Catholic ghost-busting society who are also Van Helsing's masters.

The scene in which the two of them are introduced in a bizarre secret laboratory beneath the Vatican is a risible lurch into James Bond's territory, and I kept expecting Carl - as he hands his agent another spring-loaded stake - to say: "Now, pay attention, Van."

This sense of genre-bending queasiness isn't helped by the fact that Van Helsing has just come hotfoot from Paris, where he has despatched Mr Hyde in the belfry of Notre-Dame. But there's no time to lose because Van and Carl have a new mission, the big one, and must take ship across the Adriatic, and then horse across the Carpathians.

CUT to Transylvania, where Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale) and her brother Velkan (Will Kemp) are the last members of a long line of gipsy kings (stop laughing at the back), locked in mortal combat with Dracula (Richard Roxburgh). If these oxymoronic bluebloods are knocked off, Dracula will triumph, and, using his Frankenstein generator, people the world with his bat babies! Ha-ha-ha! A-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha!

There is quite a bit more to the plot than this - rather too much, in fact.

Van Helsing is in denial about his own Transylvanian past and keeps having bad dreams about fighting the Romans at Masada. As for Frankenstein's monster (Shuler Hensley), he's in denial about being a monster at all. What these guys need is some constructive therapy, but all they get is the legions of the night. Bummer.

Despite all of this arrant nonsense, there's quite a bit to like about Van Helsing. The central performancesaren't ever tongue-incheek-even Richard Roxburgh's camp Adam Ant of a Dracula; which just goes to show that the legendary stupidity of actors, like all of nature's other contrivances, is a beautiful marriage of form and function.