Van Helsing | |
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Directed by | Stephen Sommers |
Written by | Stephen Sommers |
Based on | Dracula by Bram Stoker The Wolf Man by George Waggner |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Allen Daviau |
Edited by |
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Music by | Alan Silvestri |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 131 minutes |
Countries | United States [2] Czech Republic [1] |
Language | English |
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.
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.
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]
The film's original soundtrack was composed by Alan Silvestri.
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.
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.
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]
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]
Award | Subject | Nominee | Result |
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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] |
Sommers expanded the story of Van Helsing in two direct spin-offs:
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]
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]
Hammer Film Productions Ltd. is a British film production company based in London. Founded in 1934, the company is best known for a series of Gothic horror and fantasy films made from the mid-1950s until the 1970s. Many of these involve classic horror characters such as Baron Victor Frankenstein, Count Dracula, and the Mummy, which Hammer reintroduced to audiences by filming them in vivid colour for the first time. Hammer also produced science fiction, thrillers, film noir and comedies, as well as, in later years, television series.
Stephen Sommers is an American film director, screenwriter and producer, best known for big-budget action films, such as The Mummy (1999), its sequel, The Mummy Returns (2001), Van Helsing (2004), and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009). He also directed The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993), Disney's live action version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1994) and the action horror film Deep Rising (1998).
Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a fictional character from the 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker. Van Helsing is a Dutch polymath doctor with a wide range of interests and accomplishments, partly attested by the string of letters that follows his name: "MD, D.Ph., D.Litt., etc.", indicating a wealth of experience, education and expertise. He is a doctor, professor, lawyer, philosopher, scientist, and metaphysician. The character is best known through many adaptations of the story as a vampire slayer, monster hunter and the arch-nemesis of Count Dracula, and the prototypical and the archetypal parapsychologist in subsequent works of paranormal fiction. Some later works tell new stories about Van Helsing, while others, such as Dracula (2020) and I Woke Up a Vampire (2023) have characters that are his descendants.
The Wolf Man is a 1941 American gothic horror film written by Curt Siodmak and produced and directed by George Waggner. The film stars Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Bela Lugosi, Evelyn Ankers, and Maria Ouspenskaya star in supporting roles. The title character has had a great deal of influence on Hollywood's depictions of the legend of the werewolf. The film is the second Universal Pictures werewolf film, preceded six years earlier by the less commercially successful Werewolf of London (1935). This film is one of the Universal Monsters movies, and garnered great acclaim for its production.
Dracula is a 1931 American pre-Code supernatural horror film directed and co-produced by Tod Browning from a screenplay written by Garrett Fort and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role. It is based on the 1924 stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, which in turn is adapted from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Lugosi portrays Count Dracula, a vampire who emigrates from Transylvania to England and preys upon the blood of living victims, including a young man's fiancée.
Dracula's Daughter is a 1936 American vampire horror film produced by Universal Pictures as a sequel to the 1931 film Dracula. Directed by Lambert Hillyer from a screenplay by Garrett Fort, the film stars Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden in the title role, and Marguerite Churchill, and features, as the only cast member to return from the original, Edward Van Sloan – although his character's name was altered from "Van Helsing" to "Von Helsing".
Monster Force is a 13-episode animated television series created in April 9, 1994 by Universal Cartoon Studios and Canadian studio Lacewood Productions. The story is set in approximately 2020 and centers on a group of teenagers who, with help of high tech weaponry, fight off against classic Universal Monsters and spiritual beings threatening humanity. Some of the crew have personal vendettas, while others fight for mankind out of a sense of altruism. The series aired in syndication alongside another Universal animated series, Exosquad. Universal Studios Home Entertainment released the first seven episodes to DVD on September 15, 2009.
The Brides of Dracula are fictional characters in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. They are three seductive vampire "sisters" who reside with Count Dracula in his castle in Transylvania, where they entice men with their beauty and charm, and then proceed to feed upon them. Dracula provides them with victims to devour, mainly implied to be infants.
The Universal Monsters media franchise includes characters based on a series of horror films produced by Universal Pictures and released between 1913–1956.
Van Helsing is an action-adventure video game for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Game Boy Advance, which is based on the 2004 action horror film of the same name by Stephen Sommers. Hugh Jackman and Richard Roxburgh reprise their roles from the film. The game is one of the few games on PlayStation 2 that can run in 480p.
Lawrence StewartTalbot, also known as the Wolf Man, is a title character of the 1941 Universal film The Wolf Man and its sequels, created by Curt Siodmak. He was portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr. In the 2010 remake of the film, he is portrayed by Benicio del Toro. The Wolf Man was part of the Universal Monsters ensemble.
The Mummy is a media franchise based on films by Universal Pictures about a mummified ancient Egyptian priest who is accidentally resurrected, bringing with him a powerful curse, and the ensuing efforts of heroic archaeologists to stop him. The franchise was created by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer.
Universal Orlando's Horror Make-Up Show, formerly known as The Phantom of the Opera Horror Make-Up Show and The Gory, Gruesome and Grotesque Horror Make-Up Show, is a live show located at Universal Studios Florida that opened on June 7, 1990, along with the theme park. It is a live demonstration of Universal Pictures' legacy of horror movies, with particular emphasis on prosthetic makeup. It was inspired by the former The Land of a Thousand Faces show (1975–1980) at Universal Studios Hollywood. It is also notable for being one of two original opening-day attractions still in operation at Universal Studios Florida, the other being E.T. Adventure.
Vampire Season - Monster Defense is a tower defense/strategy video game produced by Colombian studio Brainz. It was released on June 28, 2012 for iOS devices.
Mad Mad Mad Monsters is a 1972 traditional animated Halloween-themed comedy television special produced by Rankin/Bass Productions in the United States and animated overseas by Mushi Production in Japan. The special aired on September 23, 1972 as an episode of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie. It is "related" to the 1967 stop motion animated film Mad Monster Party?
The Mummy is a 2017 American fantasy action-adventure film co-produced and directed by Alex Kurtzman from a screenplay written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman based on a story by Kurtzman, Jon Spaihts, and Jenny Lumet. A reboot of the Mummy franchise, it stars Tom Cruise as U.S. Army Sergeant Nick Morton, a soldier of fortune who accidentally unearths the ancient tomb of entrapped Egyptian princess Ahmanet. Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, and Russell Crowe also star.
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a 2018 American animated monster comedy film produced by Sony Pictures Animation and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. It is the third installment in the Hotel Transylvania franchise and the sequel to Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015), the film was directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, written by Tartakovsky and Michael McCullers, and features Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, Sadie Sandler, David Spade, Keegan-Michael Key, Asher Blinkoff and Mel Brooks reprising their roles, with new additions to the cast including Jim Gaffigan, Kathryn Hahn, Joe Jonas, Chrissy Teigen, Joe Whyte, Tara Strong and Tartakovsky, while Chris Parnell, who voiced The Fly in the first two films, voices Stan. In the film, Dracula finds love with a ship captain named Ericka while he embarks on a vacation on a luxury cruise liner with his family and friends, but Mavis later discovers that Ericka is actually the great-granddaughter of Abraham Van Helsing, Drac's arch-nemesis who secretly plan to destroy them.
Dracula is a film series of horror films from Universal Pictures based on the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and its 1927 play adaptation. Film historians have had various interpretations over which projects constitute being in the film series; academics and historians finding narrative continuation between Dracula (1931) and Dracula's Daughter (1936), while holding varying opinions on whether Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) are part of the series. Author and academic Gary Don Rhodes stated the all the mentioned films would require an audience to be familiar with Count Dracula, portrayed by Bela Lugosi, and the various character traits the actor established in the original 1931 film.
The Wolf Man is the title of a horror film series centered on Larry Talbot, a man who upon being bitten by a werewolf becomes one himself, and his subsequent attempts to cure himself of his murderous condition. The franchise was created by Curt Siodmak.