I admire Rogen's honesty.

VAN HELSING is a crap movie even if you don't dig monsters. It's just lousy filmmaking that tries to ape superior action films. Sommers has a thing for James Cameron apparently, since he lifts action sequences from many of his films, including the egg hatching sequence from ALIENS in this film. The big difference is that Cameron understood pace and tension and Sommers never had a clue how to meld them together with any kind of logic.

The film is miscast and terminally stupid so much as to insult anyone with even the most passive attention span (or intelligence.) If anything, it did provide my most memorable filmgoing experience as I attended this opening night with eight of my best friends and a really great crowd of wiseasses who slowly turned hostile as the film began to reveal the height of it's awfulness. Poor Alan Silvestri provided a nice epic score for this but as soon as the guys behind me began to mouth the PREDATOR theme behind me, I nearly lost it. The one liners by the crowd were really terrific and showed that everyone was on their A-game. The biggest laugh of the night was not from the crowd though but from the moment when Beckinsale and Jackman finally kiss. People were just dying! Then when Beckinsale's image appears in the clouds at the end like she's Mustapha or something was a classic bit for me that I still reference today whenever a character looks up at a cloud dramatically in a film.

To this day, my friends still bring up that evening and the ensuing "discussion" that occurred afterward at a local Wendys where we all waxed philosophic over the film's many complexities(insert sarcasm.) I think we all crashed at somebody's home that night and watched THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS in an attempt to find some more cerebral entertainment, something that would aid in repairing the brain cells lost during Sommers ode to Universal monsters.

One nice thing was that during the week, all the newbies in the group were shown the real deal and the results were more than adequate, though nobody could ever agree on what one was the best. Some discovered the classics through this, so there was a light at the end of the tunnel, however dim it was.