Van Helsing

Last night, all the cool kids in the neighborhood came over to watch Van Helsing. The Butcher, the Red-Headed Kid, the Cute Guy, the neighbor with runes on his back, the neighbor with the blue cat: they were all in my living room eating ice cream cake and watching Van Helsing. How bad is this movie? This movie is so bad that when young teenagers found out it was rated PG-13, they rioted to try to get it an R rating so that their parents wouldn't dump them at this movie for the afternoon. Not only could I have written a better movie, I could have acted better in a better movie than most of the folks in this one. Here's how to make a movie as bad as Van Helsing. 1. Smoke a lot of pot and listen to hours of Led Zepplin while watching old horror movies. 2. Spend most of your high school career sketching out gruesome drawings of men ripping off their flesh to reveal werewolves. 3. Make some kids' movies. 4. Make some Brendan Fraser movies, but not the artsy ones. 5. Befriend the special effects guys from your Brendan Fraser movies. 6. Relive your high school years by sitting in your dad's basement with said special effects guys smoking pot, listening to Zep, and watching old horror movies. 7. Show them your flesh-rending werewolf drawings. 8. Let them convince you that they can render such flesh-rending on film. 9. View their special effects efforts and be duly wowed. 10. Decide to make a movie that features werewolves so you can use this awesome special effect. 11. Use your awesome werewolf special effect to convince big name stars to be in your film, inadvertently hiring Will Kemp (this is important; more important than your big name stars. You must get Will Kemp.). 12. Get some good costumes. Someone should look like a Pilgrim gone wrong. Your female lead should wear a tight corset and high heels. This will be sexy. Never mind that it would make it physically impossible for her to run and jump and flip. It counts that she looks good. You can chalk the rest up to her "super powers." 13. Once everyone shows up on your lavish sets, they're going to expect a script. 14. Oops. You spent all your time developing the special effects. 15. No matter. These are actors who've been in movies. They can come up with something to say that will carry us from one special effect to another. For instance: [Brooding beauty with perfect hair is sullen because she's not allowed to kiss handsome leading man yet. Leading man is pensive. Perhaps he's considering firing his agent.] "I [dramatic pause] have never [dramatic pause, accentuated by hair toss] seen the sea [remember, the character is Transylvanian. The actress should speak as if she's got a mouth full of angry marbles.]!" 16. Ignore the fact that Romania has a coast. 17. Don't be bound by other inconvenient facts of geography. If your characters need to head towards Rome, through the Carpathian mountains, no one will think it's weird that they end up in Hungary. Or did you mean Bucharest, not Budapest? No matter. Bucharest isn't between our heroes and Rome either! 18. No matter how big a place is--castle, country, continent--it's only populated by our characters. This means that if someone is in danger on one side of an enormous castle, there's no reason why another character can't just happen to swing over from the other side of the castle and just happen to pop into the right window to save you. 19. No matter how bad the movie is, no matter how implausible the action, Will Kemp will somehow make the most of his part and tempt your audience to believe that there must be another, alternate Van Helsing, with real dialog and a plot and this is just some Stoppard-ized movie that runs parallel to the good one. Perhaps they will hang out for the whole movie thinking this is your answer to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Yes, yes, that's it. Pretend you intended to make the movie just like this! You are a genius. Your movie is great. And anyone who can't see that is a fool.