Copyright (c) 2000 by Mike Resnick.

Just saw Van Helsing. I have to preface this by saying I thought Stephen Sommers' The Mummy was a better film than any of the Indiana Jones films, and that the sequel, though flawed, was at least enjoyable.

This one isn't quite as dumb or as bad as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but it comes mighty close. An hour into it Carol, who never leaves a film or a play, turned to me and whispered that she was ready to walk out if I was. I couldn't believe it wouldn't get better, so we stayed. I was wrong. It got worse.

The culprit -- well, there are a lot of culprits -- but the major culprit is the ability of CGI to put anything on a screen that you can imagine -- and lately, movies have been substituting it for character development and rational plots. Just stick a werewolf on the screen battling a vampire and no one will care that it's dumber than dirt, right? (For example, the hero was left on the doorstep of an Italian church when still a baby, presumably centuries ago -- so why is he Van Helsing instead of Luciano? And for that matter, why is he still alive and why, at age 400+, does he look like Hugh Jackman?)

The CGI effects in this film are remarkable -- but they are overused beyond belief. One vampire might, under the right circumstances, be interesting; 8,000 of them are not. A hero fighting one supernatural being might, under the right circumstances, be interesting. A hero who has something like 25 encounters with them, each more grotesque than the last, in a little over 2 hours, is not.

If you saw The Mummy, which is not, I freely admit, Lawrence of Arabia or even The Maltese Falcon, you know more about the hero, the heroine, the heroine's brother, the mummy, the smarmy little bad guy, and the 3 Americans than you know about any character in Van Helsing, including Van Helsing himself.

And the film swipes from everywhere. These are not so much homages as a total lack of creativity. From Universal, we get Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's monster (which is, of course, called "Frankenstein" throughout the film except for the first 5 minutes); from The Stepford Wives, we get three lady vampires -- a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette; from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, we get Tuco's great line -- rather bolluxed here -- about "If you have to shoot, shoot -- don't talk"; from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen we get a Mr. Hyde who looks like The Hulk but without the green skin (and does anyone currently working in Hollywood remember that Spencer Tracy played him with no makeup?); and cetera.

If there is one thing I never thought Sommers could do with a $135 million budget, it was produce a boring movie. But he proved what every beginning author is taught: if the reader/audience doesn't care about your characters to begin with, then they won't care about what happens to them or who wins and loses.

The two happiest people in the afterlife right now must be Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker. Reason: neither received any mention in the film's credits.