To be fair, House of the Dead was the worst movie I've ever seen, follwed by Club Dread . . . but Van Helsing, disappointingly, is still pretty low on the list. So many great concepts and mostly good special effects, but it couldn't save it from the painfully bad script and the horrible cliche' s (I mean, come on, the misunderstood hero with amnesia? And the final embrace between Van Helsing and Anna looked like it was ripped from a dollar-store romance novel cover? How about the hero riding off into the sunset? Yeah, it's from a comic book, and of course you have to account for some degree of cheesiness because sometimes it just doesn't translate as nicely into movie form, but hell, this was pretty bad). It all went downhill from the beginning. I was cracking up at the end, but I don't think it was intended to be a comedy. With so much to work with, with so many possibilities, they could have come up with something better than that. 2 stars is generous.
