I saw Van Helsing last night. My excuse is that Morris is a one theater, one screen, one showing per day town, so when I'm jonesing for a movie fix, my choices are limited. I went in with my expectations sinking somewhere below the level of the Abyss, and it met them. Here are a few of the things that went wrong in this movie.

• The first scene is a recreation of Colin Clive's gibbering, scenery-chewing "It's...ALIVE!!!" moment from James Whale's Frankenstein. Unfortunately, the actor playing the part of the insane doctor was a well-fed, pudgy fellow who looked embarrassed to be saying it. I won't call it an homage; it was clueless heresy.
• In two incidents, horse-drawn carriages crash, burst into flames, and explode.
• Most of the bad guys and a few of the good guys speak in those cheesy Transylvanian accents. I wanted earplugs.
• Machine-gun crossbow.
• Bad architecture. What's with these medieval castles that are all vertical spires, built on towering remote mountain peaks connected to the rest of the world by only a slender stone bridge across an unfathomably deep chasm?
• Everyone is a trapeze artist. All that bad architecture also happens to be draped with mysterious cables that have no purpose other than for heroes to grab onto, cut, and swing to the rescue. Once, I could have stomached, but every battle had to have one, two, or three people or cows demonstrating their amazing aerialist abilities.
• Oh, yeah: if you were on top of a ten-story building and wanted to get to the ground quickly, and you saw a rope attached to the roof of another ten-story building a hundred and fifty feet away, would you think it practical to swing down to the ground? There's a simple physics problem somewhere in this situation.
• CGI everywhere. Obvious, overused CGI.
• The vampires had faces like silly putty—every time they expressed an emotion some gonzo computer geek somewhere had to distort their expressions and make their fangs do the hula or something. I felt like slapping Dracula with a newspaper to see if he'd pick up an image of Snoopy on his cheek.
• The plot was absurdly elaborate, involving using Frankenstein's life force to animate the undead progeny of Dracula and his brides. Vampire procreation apparently involves, at some point, the extrusion of slimy, pebbly-surfaced bags of green snot that just lie around forever, tacked to the furniture in the castle. These disgusting drupelets are then regarded with affection by the vampires. Imagine decorating your house with 400 hundred years worth of used condoms and tampons; that's close to the effect.
• They should have just hired Peter Boyle to play Frankenstein's monster. It was done in his same style.

To be fair, the movie did have some good points.

• Kate Beckinsale in a leather bustier and crotch-high, skin-tight, high-heeled boots.
• ...

OK, one good point, but it was a doozy. Almost rescued the whole show.