31 Days of Dracula- Day 26: Van Helsing

When I saw Van Helsing at the movie theater, I hated it.

It's good to know it's just as good on dvd.

It's a sort of tribute to the classic Universal Horror movies, directed by Stephen Sommers, the fellow who did The Mummy movies. It has Dracula, Frankenstein's Creature, The Wolfman, and the Hunchbacked assistant, like the classics House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.

Of course, the House movies didn't have superninja Van Helsing with ubercool steampunk weapons played by Hugh Jackman.

Nor did they have Kate Beckinsdale, playing Transylvanian battle vixen Anna. (Van Helsing and Underworld seem to have made her action-chick, which is disconcerting for me since I learned to love her during multiple cinema viewings of The Last Days of Disco.)

But Richard Roxburgh has a heckuva time playing Count Dracula- playing it over the top, since he is an undead prince of darkness.

Frankenstein's Creature is probably the most sympathetic here than in many productions in recent memory- in fact the opening sequence of the birth of the Creature and the angry villagers at a burning windmill is the best part of the whole movie, filmed in black and white, the sets reminiscent of the James Whale Frankenstein movies for Universal.

There's a nice tip of the hat to serious horror fans with the town undertaker, with his top hat, scraggly and feral teeth, he's reminiscent of Lon Chaney Sr in London After Midnight.

I think my main problem with Van Helsing is that it's a summer blockbuster- lots of fight scenes and explosions and plot holes you can drive a tank through (how many nights of the full moon does this story have?). I think I'd have liked it if it were a little tighter a story that wasn't so caught up on the special effects.

Crestwood House Monsters

Well, I mentioned the Crestwood House books a couple of posts ago... well it was these beauties that gave me my love of the movies- prior to actually seeing any of these films.

The first wave of these titles, as seen on the back of one of the books, was King Kong, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, and Mad Scientists.

Heavily illustrated with black and white photographs, these books tell the stories of the movies and then supplement them with information about the sequels and behind the scenes production stories.

Later sets included The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and- as seen in the second picture- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of the 1932  Bela Lugosi Universal movie, which is... an odd choice for a children's book.

The covers were distictively orange (someone's even made t-shirts of them).  They fade into yellow but some schools had them rebound into sturdier, but less attractive volumes- see the brown Draculas in the pictures, as well as The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets Wolfman.

This is my collection so far- I've picked them up at library fairs and thrift stores and trained Igor to keep an eye out for them in our travels.

For years, I thought I was the only person who remembered these outside of a small circle I'd been lucky to meet- and then came the internet.
Cinemassacre has a great video about them here.
Branded in the 80s deconstructs the Frankenstein volume here, and Titans, Terrors and Toys does a nice quick overview here.

Thank You Universal! Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection.

As October approaches, I make a point to check the video sections of Target, Walmart and other such places, because that's when Horror Movies season is at its peak in the bargain video sections.

Today I was in our local Walmart with Igor and saw last year's Legacy collection releases for the Mummy and Dracula.  Having both, from a previous legacy release, I decided to check them anyway for the extras... and there they were: Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, I had a moment of nerdrage- I DON'T WANT TO BUY THESE AGAIN! - when I noticed Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection, featuring the two mentioned above and ...Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and ...Meet the Invisible Man.

...Meet Frankenstein is special because it's the last movie in the original arc of Universal Horror films as well as the return of Bela Lugosi in the role that made him famous.

Plus there's commentary and a documentary.
The documentary is David Skal's Abbot & Costello Meet the Monsters from 2000, with commentary from Costello's daughter, Lugosi's son and other genre scholars.
Tom Weaver, one of the authors of Universal Horrors is one of the commentators on Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.

It's been a crazy kind of week, so it was nice to find this collection- it'll be hours of fun.