The ‘Disappointing Script’ of Cinema [Van Helsing (2004)]

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Dir. Stephen Sommers

Czeck Republic-USA

Film #20 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

From http://www.mattfind.com/12345673215-3-2-3_img/movie/q/a/p/van_helsing_2004_1920x1280_300240.jpg

It seems logical to start reviewing blockbusters like this as well as the art films and cultish (or forgotten) movies I have covered so far. I have reviewed the Nicolas Cage film Drive Angry (2011) but that was an attempt at a grubby exploitation film from the past than the phenomenon known as the blockbuster, B- (and even C-) movie material that, whether a good film or not, has the budget of an A-movie, and an illustrious choice of actors and people in the technical and production areas of filmmaking to draw from. It is ironic to say this since a lot of what these movies consist of – the explosions and action sequences, the quick pace jumps in the plot to new dangers and situations, the gratuitous special effects – are not that dissimilar to everything from old classic Hollywood serials from the Poverty Row studios to straight-to-DVD pulp. Dare I say that a lot of these films, especially with Van Helsing, are not that different from Sharktopus (2010) or even the rip-offs like Transmorphers (2007) aside from their streaks of seriousness and the fact that, with their budgets and production staff, they cannot be made cheap because of the craftsmanship behind them. That’s a pretty controversial statement to make, but if a blockbuster is great, then I will celebrate its existence. This is more of an acceptance that for all their cost to be made and their stars they are just expensive, or over expensive, B-, C- or even Z-level ideas made into movies. Some are good, some are masterpieces, but like the other grades of movies, a lot of them are poor. These ones should not have the privilege of countless DVD releases, or be the premier releases for new formats, considering today’s review was viewed on a late HD DVD player, and never to be discussed about in ways to suggest they were unforgettable signposts in cinematic history when even the ordinary public, not stuck-up snobs like myself, though they were bad on their release.

From http://image.hotdog.hu/user/sajuri/magazin/van_helsing_2004_1920x1280_823447.jpg

This is significant with Van Helsing because it was an attempt to celebrate the classic horror films of Universal Pictures – B-movies that have yet grown to become important within the canon of global cinema and pop culture, and with James Whales’ Frankenstein (1931) quite justifiably so. At the right age demographic for the film when it came out, I remember how much promotional and tie-in material was released for Van Helsing, signalling how it was one of Universal’s most important films for that spring – a videogame, an animated side story released for domestic viewing, and more interestingly, a grand scale re-release of the studio’s classic horror films on double bill DVDs. I never saw the film at the cinema, missed the tie-ins, and sadly never investigated the re-releases of the classic films until a long while afterwards. Viewing this long after its release again - a film I read about in the magazine Total Film when I still read that magazine - is like viewing something through the glass of a museum exhibit which I grew up side-by-side with.

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Without memories of his past aside from a nobility to fight for good, Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is the top man for a religious organisation that rids the world of evil beasts, warlocks or scientific follies. Sent to Transylvania he must protect the gypsy princess Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), one of the last of a family that have offered their souls’ ability to go to Heaven to destroy the accursed Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), while the Count himself plans to bring to life his undead offspring with the creation of Dr. Frankenstein. If one doesn’t view the film as a continuation of the classic Universal horror films, but its own reinterpretation of mythological and literary beings, then this could have worked. As with a lot of blockbusters of the fantasy and horror genre, as was the case with Son of the Mask (2005), one can see the production team – costuming, set designs, location scouts – do their hardest to make something memorable. Like many genre films thankfully, there are grains of great ideas and images within the film. One that stands out is that the organisation Van Helsing works for is not just a Christian one, but in scenes of the technological and weaponry workshop, has Muslim and Buddhist members working together,  depriving the viewer with a tantalising concept both of these religious groups, in a beautiful way, unifying together as equals against evil, and that a Christian based character like Van Helsing could have gone against Asian mythological demons and ghouls with their own set of rules and weaknesses. The look of the film feels too stuck between the classic Universal horror look and a glitzy blockbuster shine at points but in just the scope and surface look of the film, it shows what it could have been.

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Sadly the film is bad, and I am blaming most of it on the script for the core flaws. I feel guilty saying this as director-screenwriter Stephen Sommers dedicated this film to his father, but his script for Van Helsing is everything wrong I have encountered in blockbusters put together. It’s far from the worst film I’ve seen generally, let alone in this season of reviews, but still another example of incredibly generic and tedious plotting, compromised further by having to match the beats and pace of a blockbuster of that period of the early 2000s. Its biggest problem is that for a film with a two hour and six minutes long length, it is empty and lacking in even basis genre tropes and pops. A key aspect of Jackman’s character, of having nightmares of a long distance past, is spoken of but never conveyed or shown at all for the viewer, making it far more egregious than even the infamous porpoise line from the Adam West, feature length version of Batman (1966) which played that moment for intentionally surreal hijinks. It may have been something looked into in the animated spin-off from the film, but considering how obscure that has become now, that would have been a terrible business decision on Universal’s behalf in leaving your audience in the dark. There are so many coincidences, logic holes and inconsistencies in the film that it’s impossible to enjoy the second or third time someone manages to crash into a room by accident to save an ally from being attacked by a monster. It’s not enjoyably ridiculous as Turkish Star Wars (1982) or Batman & Robin (1998) for myself as, justifiably, such films are closer to the intentional surreal structures of films like Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974); their random tangents just by their appearance in the narratives have an effect on the viewer even if they were unintentional and do not have the deep messages and quality of a Bunuel film. Van Helsing is just a mess without any of the fun of other ‘bad’ films which have an unexpected and imaginative, exquisite corpse nature to their haphazardness.

From http://skirmisher.com/uploads/images/van%20helsing%20vampire.jpg

The extensive use of computer animation is a severe issue as well. I am willing to give a lot more leniency now for CGI, especially if one views blockbusters as the B-movies they truly are. The problem is that, not only has it ostracised trades such as stuntmen and practical effect artists from most areas of cinema, but like other technical tools, laziness in the use of it undermines a film badly. If one has to fight against a low budget or the limits of the technology of the time, or purposely plays with the artificiality of computer effects, it is more acceptable for me. Van Helsing has great ideas, such as how men literally rip their own skin off when they transform into werewolves, but it feels at lot of times that the CGI was being used as a white undercoat on the film’s canvas than the vast array of colours and textures that need a creative person to use them effectively. Like the plot too, there are too many inconsistencies to the logic of the film, how creatures die or move, and how everything is put together. Small, picky thoughts they may be, when I should just turn my brain off and ‘just enjoy the movie’, but even the simple mindedness of pulp entertainment must have logic to it or be so dreamlike in its mood to be able to work for me. The most memorable of fiction for me, not just cinema, must have an inherent logic to it, from the truly abstract plotting of fairytales such as The Snow Queen to the flawed yet visually arresting anime adaptation X (1996). The concepts and subtexts to them all are vastly different to each other, but they must have their clear personalities to work. Van Helsing on the other hand feels compromised.

From http://www.shotpix.com/images/52505920878991389105.jpg

It is like a lot of Hollywood films that have the potential, and still have traces of a great movie within them, but feel planed down to the point that they feel brittle and collapse to pieces the moment you feel bored with them. Personal taste does dictate your opinions subjectively on films like this, but Van Helsing should have been a blockbuster that fully embraced the Gothicism of the films it was reinterpreting, even if it’s of a very different genre and tone, through mood and their supernatural mysteries. What we ended up with was a tedious film over reliant on not very good CGI craftwork.

From http://www.movpins.com/big/MV5BMTk2NDIwOTkxM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTc4NDQyMw/still-of-kate-beckinsale-and-david-wenham-in-van-helsing.jpg

Meat Is Murder [Ravenous (1999)]

From http://www.impawards.com/1999/posters/ravenous_ver1.jpg

Dir. Antonia Bird

Czeck Republic-United Kingdom-USA

Film #30, for Tuesday 30^th October, of Halloween 31 For 31

It is sad to think that to have a film for this season directed by a woman, I have to specify a slot in the season to do so, as it slowly closes, when I should have gotten a few in the 31 selections without any specific design to have a gender balance but because there are enough films in existence. I could have had a whole season of 31 works all directed by men just by coincidence, which is startling when I consider it more and more, and while every aspect of film making is just as importance and can be contributed to by women, especially in the case with Ginger Snaps (2000) (Review Here) and its screenwriter, the obvious disparity despite the many women who are making films now is disorientating. Thankfully there are many existing female directors since the beginning of cinema and they are growing in quantity, but the vaster amount of films directed by males that dwarfs it is still a great deal to take into consideration. The fact that, as a male writing this, these words can be interpreted as patronising adds a further problem, in that the apparent disparity, even if it’s a little off from reality, is liable to make film viewers and critics pay more attention to a director’s gender than her work and its merit. I have always viewed gender politics through the metaphor of an unmarked minefield, the path unknown and the ground within a step liable to detonate and harm anyone on multiple sides. Considering the Millennium was ten years ago, the fact that we’ve yet to get a balance in gender within a single global industry like cinema let along remove the lingering bigots and glass ceilings is embarrassing. I can thankfully say that Antonia Bird, in terms of a director, created a film called Ravenous which deserves immense merit by the film’s own qualities. That it slipped into obscurity is a cruel and pathetic act by fate.

Set in 1847 during the Mexican-American War, a soldier (Guy Pierce) is sent to an isolated fort consisting of a skeleton crew and a potential new page in his life where nothing will happen for a long while except getting drunk or being bored for years of his career. Bursting this potential life is a stranger Colquhoun (Robert Carlyle) who stumbles to the fort frost bitten by the torrential snow fall outside and claiming to be a survivor of a party that descended into cannibalism. Warned by one of the Native American members of the fort about the legend of the Windigo, men who become powerful from eating other’s flesh and developing an endless hunger for eating other people, the soldiers at the fort will find themselves dwindling in number and suspicious food substances in the stew.

Within the first image of the film of two quotations on a black screen, Ravenous stands out as much as a black humoured piece as well as a horror film set in 19th century America. Set in a period of American history, off to the side of the Western Expansion of immigrants usually depicted and before the Civil War, which is fresh for me to see onscreen, this immediately starts as an engaging blend of the macabre and the sickly humoured. With a small cast of various nationalities, it has the closed sense of isolation fitting for the story, within the yet-open expanses of the landscape around them, and adding a sense of the dramatic of theatre without sacrificing the fullness of a cinematic work. The story itself is also a fascinating blend of mythology and the tropes of the western, British perspective and the American culture blending into an outsider’s viewpoint of the country without descending into an arch pastiche. Even with the upscaling levels of violence and humour, there is never a sense that one is viewing an over-gritty imitation or descending into clichés of westerns. That it is set in a period where the variety of immigrants was prominent in unchartered land, also allowed an actor as talented as Robert Carlyle to work with his normal accent, adds a sense of the lawless where the country was yet to fully form as the United States of America and these acts of cannibalism could go completely unknown by the existing populous. The acting is solid as well, not just from Pierce and Carlyle, but from the whole of the cast.

Continuing the analysis of music scores I have done multiple times in this season of reviews, the score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn is exceptional by itself as with the other great soundtracks I have talked about. Albarn may be immediately known for his music career – Blur, Gorillaz and his many other projects – but Michael Nyman is a very well regarded musical composer, his most famous work with Welsh director Peter Greenaway, his eclectic and unconventional work matched by a specific pristine sounding use of string instruments that is Nyman’s trademark until they fell out after the production of Prospero’s Books (1991). My musical knowledge of Albarn is very limited, but the folk and blues rock influences sound clearly like his contributions, while Nyman’s use string compositions blends effortlessly with it to create something that stands out. When the shift to the scenes of growing intensity take place - director Bird using editing or lack thereof and the acting of Pierce or Carlyle to depict growing insanity as the starting pieces that work fully - its blending of types of music prevents it from becoming invisible but is put together so that it supports the visuals and acting fully.

It’s relegation to being a under viewed gem is tragic considering it stands out in terms of quality and the individuals involved in various areas of the production. That it is as much a British made horror film too also adds to the disappointment that a great genre from our country, partially shot in the oppressive yet beautiful Eastern European countryside, is forgotten when disappointing and minor ones get credit. That Bird went back to television, her career before involving TV series and a couple of films, is also sad as this showed a director who could have progressed to films just as good or greater. If this review can introduce more people to this film, it could hopefully improve its status.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/ravenous/w448/ravenous.jpg?1289437626

Human Flesh Frappé [Little Otik (2000)]

From http://i2.listal.com/image/productsus/1000/B000077VS5/movies/otesanek-little-otik.jpg

Dir. Jan Svankmajer

Czech Republic-Japan-UK

Film #13, of Saturday 13^th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

With this Czech director Jan Svankmajer makes his third mark on the blog, making him an immediate candidate for a Hall of Fame or Mount Olympus of the Region Incognito site. Adapted from s Czech fairytale called Otesánek, this is an odd choice at first to include in a Halloween festival were it not for the fact that, as with a lot of fairytales themselves, its macabre take on childbirth and human attitudes is equal to the nasty interpretations horror stories make of reality. The husband of a childless couple digs up a tree root that vaguely looks like a child and presents it to his wife as a gift, only for her to start treating it as an actual child. The tree log, dubbed Otik, becomes a living being, but is constantly hungry to the point that it starts eating other living beings within the apartment the couple lives in.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/little-otik/w448/little-otik.jpg?1289443833

This, on another viewing, is probably not recommended viewing for expecting or pregnant mothers and possible readers of this blog and in hindsight may have a different effect on female viewers than to male ones. Otik is transformed into a literal child – its movements at first created from pieces of wood of certain shapes connected together like building blocks to ‘animate’ him, later through puppetry and costumes made from wood – but also a manifestation of both chaos and the id to just consume anything without ever feeling full. Pot after pot of baby food, meat, maybe even a postman, Svankmakjer plays up the horrifying nature of childbirth and how parents have to look after babies. The daughter of a neighbouring family in the apartment Alžbětka, who studies textbooks on sexual dysfunction hidden under the covers of fairytale stories, is obsessed with the concept of childbirth and having a friend to play with, making her a main character throughout the film when the peculiar Otik catches her attention.

The film tackles serious adult issues in its blackly humoured tone, and as with Svankmajer’s other work as a proclaimed Surrealist creator, he does not hold back in terms of content, invoking implied cannibalism, matricide and patricide, and following on after the Tokyo Zombie (2005) review, an old man who ogles Alžbětka from afar and is called a ‘paedophile’ by her at one point. Unlike Tokyo Zombie, Svankmajer’s take on such a controversial subject, like the rest of his work, is barbed and forces you to think about it as it is depicted in such a confrontational way through the animator’s mind. The film is as much about the apparent ‘normality’ of the people living around Otik as it is the wooden child, Alžbětka’s mother constantly afraid of the outside world because of news stories on the television, and her father drinking constantly and sitting in front of said TV as biased ads for meat steaks say that their competition’s product is ‘full of worms’. The absurdity of human life, and the most sacred in childbirth and childrearing, is upfront as Otik’s hunger is more insatiable and he starts growing in size. That the original fairytale is told during the film, in beautiful two dimensional animation, and reveals what the ending will turn out to be signifies this; as with almost all adaptations of stories, it will stay the same but it’s how they go to it which is of more importance.

As is the case with Svankmajer, the animation and puppetry effects are a masterclass and a deep creative well of images and ideas. Using wood and tree matter extensively, his trademark of using textured material is emphasised in a character in Otik, who is a living, almost sweet, creation, but is also unbelievably alien and off-putting at the same time, constantly crying for food, and gesticulating and spasming with its branch limbs and ever changing mouth with teeth and a single eyeball within it to glace at its next meal. This film also puts one of Svankmajer’s most obsessed about topics, food and the act of eating, within the centre of a feature work. His cinema is a food – cinema of goulash, cinema of stew, cinema of soup, cinema of meat and vegetables – but while the food is lovingly rendered on screen in close ups, likely to cause the viewer (like myself) to hunger for Svankmajer’s interpretations of such dishes to be available in their kitchen, said close-ups also make their liquid-solid, sauce rich matter disgusting as well or too rich for the eyes and thoughts you have of them to handle let alone the stomach. It reminds me as I write of what Vincent Price’s character in The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) (Review Here) must have felt when he could only consume the most plain of substances. In such detail, and with soundtracks full of slurping, crunching and the sound of the human gullet and mouth chewing and ingesting food, it both reveals in the concept of eating but sees (and feels) how disquietingly strange such a primal concept (to nourish oneself) is. While I may have brought this up in another review of his work, Svankmajer’s history of dietary problems as a child, and the attempts to correct it by his parents and doctors, is a piece of autobiographical information that explains so much about this obsession. Otik consumes for the sake of food, not just as sustenance, but of the concept of consuming any other matter for whatever metaphorical reason, without desires of normal morality and codes of the people in the apartment block have, but just to fill its little wooden belly. Eating as an aggressive act, as in most of his films especially the 1992 short Food, but also admitting how meat, sauce, dumplings and creams are all as much surrealist materials to play with as Salvador Dalí put boiled beans in his paintings or was inspired to create his famous melting clock motifs from melting Camembert cheese. Bread shoes, lobster telephones, the Surrealists played with the motifs of food, but Svankmajer would also subvert the concept of eating itself as well amongst the other thought lines and interests in his work, existing in most of his short and feature work but directly part of Little Otik.

The availability of the film is problematic in the United Kingdom. Most of his cinematic output has been thankfully put on DVD on some point or another, this year especially thanks to New Wave Films, but if it can be located by you the reader, including non-British readers, in some way it is quite a good start into Svanmajer’s work, balancing his live action filmmaking with animation, with a story that is dark and adult but has a clear narrative through its fairytale origins that eases new viewers into it. It is certainly a film that suits the Halloween season more than some actual horror films, its gruesomeness at times undercut by prompts to question and learn from the gristly eating onscreen. Even if he believes in pure imagination as the most important tool of creating his work, Jan Svankmajer especially in his feature work always leaves critiques and distortions of conventional society throughout them, prodding one to question its validity against the animated creations of wood, bone, toys and even meat and preserved animal parts, that have been given as much life on-screen as the puppet-like actors.

[Note: My apology for the pop-up that appears in at the start of the trailer. Thankfully it does not disrupt the rest of it.]

Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (Jan Svankmajer, 2010)

Since I discovered the short films of the Czeck filmmaker Jan Svankmajer in college, borrowed from the private stash of DVDs in the office of the Film Studies tutors, I can say he is one of my cherished filmmakers.  Having seen all the other shorts and films, the through line from the famous short works to long form movies is a fascinating progression. One of the best living animation directors, his knowledge of traditional techniques (puppetry, stop motion etc) is matched by a distinct use of everyday objects – toys, wood, metal, animal bones, even pieces of meat – that are moved and crafted in ways that pushes the films into the areas of texture as well as sight and sound, allowing the viewer to ‘feel’ them by their nature and the grain and details you can see. This trademark, through decades of shorts, was combined with various types of ideas, from adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe and fairytales to satire, and his idiosyncratic obsessions such as childhood to food and the act of eating, the later the result of digestive issues as a child, and the attempts to fix it by doctors, that made him fascinated and disgusted by them. (Going into a Svankmajer work, you will both see food as a beautiful substance and utterly vile, which Surviving Life continues with the new addition of projectile vomit.) With his first feature film Alice (1988), Svankmajer would incorporate live action, but not in just having actors in front of the screen but having them being as much figures for the director to animate as well as actual people. Svankmajer incorporated this in short films, 1983’s Down To The Cellar a predecessor of his debut Alice, but after he started to concentrate on feature films, this has become a central part of his work. With Lunacy (2005), the film before Surviving Life, the live action would have completely taken over were it not for the continuous scenes of animated cow tongues that are intercut between plot points. With Surviving Life, Svankmajer’s fanbase is either met with an experimental tangent from his previous films, his bitterly humorous opening monologue to the camera introducing the film as a result of a lack of money for production, or a potentially new direction for the next decade.

Created using cut-and-paste photographic images, ‘like old children’s cartoons’ as the director compares it to in the opening introduction, Surviving Life follows an older man Eugenie whose life is punctuated by dreams of a beautiful, red dressed woman whose name continually changes and exists in a dream reality which continually fluxes out of his hands. Becoming a patient for a psychoanalytic doctor, and delving into other methods of guiding  his dreams, he tries to understand the images he sees every time he sleeps.

The plot sounds quite common and paradoxically, this is the closest for me yet Svankmajer has gotten to a ‘conventional’ story - including the layer of clues and images you discover on a second viewing - but is one of his least conventional works in a filmography that would be viewed as abstract against traditional views of animation. The cut-up images that make up the entire film, spliced with live action moments (usually close ups of intricate actions or gestures), is incredibly different from what I have encountered in cinema. If anyone, like I did as a child, used to cut out images from magazines or comics and either moved them about like toys, or spliced pieces of them together to create new ones, this is what the entirety of Surviving Life feels like, only taking to it to an entire feature length film, from the background to most of the moments, being created from two dimension images cut out and finished digitally on computers.

This style of animation has been used by Svankmajer previously, including outside his film work, but here it is allowed to breathe out into this entire construction. The results are surreal, human beings and their photographic copies alive and mixed with a story where dreams are in the centre of the narrative. As he describes in a making-of for the UK DVD, Svankmajer has played with the concept of dreams in his filmography, but this is the first one where they are the central subject. With this, expect Freudian images of everything from eggs to flowers, giant hands coming out of windows to drag bystanders up to their doom, a dog with a suited office worker’s body, and an entire film where reality and the dreams, while separated, still bleed into each other, continuing Svankmajer’s message at the start of the film, through quotation, of how only by combining the both of them together can a human being be full. The result is unconventional even for animation, incredibly creative with its imagination and technical production, and with a wonderful sense of disgracefulness in Svankmajer’s old age, a newly acquired sense of vulgarity that did not even come out in Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), his take on sexual fetishes, but erupts in this wonderfully in its sex obsessed, puke filled, poodle fucking mentality filtered through the obsessions with childhood, food and the fantastical. This may have started in Lunacy, with its combination with the Marquis de Sade with stories by Edgar Allen Poe, but while that film was serious in its takes of blasphemy and of the concepts of freedom, the self proclaimed follower of Surrealist Art Svankmajer has properly added a sliver of crudity to his repertoire with Surviving Life and uses it perfectly. The film is also abstract in that, it does not only look at dreams but incorporates psychology. My knowledge of the area is slim, but my small reading is enough for me to realise that this adds further complicated strands to the plot. The plot is incredibly obvious by its ending but by invoking the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, personifying their real life combative and disagreeing views of psychology through living portraits which fight each other, Surviving Life introduces layers that, while very easy to grasp, cause the scenes you see to take on new and peculiar lights to them.

Upon watching this and Lunacy this year, I realise I am biased for Jan Svankmajer, but it’s through his skill of an animator and as a creative figure, still able to create such imaginative and stimulating work after fifty years or so since his first projects. To step into a Svankmajer film, while part of a rich culture of animation (especially European animation), is to encounter a truly unique voice, driven as much by ideas behind the images as by the creations on screen. Surviving Life combines a full narrative with this, as seen in his other features, and gets the best of both worlds. That it is also humorous and, by its ending, deeply poignant also adds to its quality.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low) – High

Personal Rating – 10 out of 10