This month on the Guilty Pleasures podcast, we invite a couple of special guests to help us dissect a monster of a bad movie, “Van Helsing”.
EPISODE SUMMARY
We ran a poll on social media platforms to see which film we would look at in our “Big Budget Bombs” episode of the series. It was between 2004’s Van Helsing and 2010’s The Wolfman. And by a decent margin, you voted for Stephen Sommer’s action-packed Universal Monsters mash-up Van Helsing.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: “Van Helsing” (WITH SPECIAL GUESTS LEX JONES AND GRAHAM HUGHES)
Alongside NHE host Scott Murphy, we have a couple of great former guests in the form of “The Old One and The Sea” author Lex Jones and Death of a Vlogger director Graham Hughes.
Over the course of the episode, the three of them dissect how Van Helsing essentially the same story twice (with the climaxes in the second and the third act), how the film can’t quite make up its mind whether we should pay attention to the plot or not, and how they are collectively confused by the fact Hugh Jackman should be the perfect lead for this but somehow isn’t.
Plus, they get into how even the many of the good things in the film overstay their welcome while having a good laugh at the accents on display and noting that not everybody seems to be in the same film.
Elsewhere in the episode, our intrepid trio gets into this movie’s great love of dramatic rope escape, the wonderfully campy performance of Richard Roxburgh as Dracula, and just how rubbish Frankenstein is in this movie.
Listen to Graham Hughes’ previous appearances on The Guilty Pleasures Podcast here and his original interview appearance on the show here.
Listen to Lex Jones’ original interview appearance on the show here.
You can watch the trailer for Van Helsing here. The film is available to watch in the US on fuboTV, Sling TV, DIRECTV, BBC America, and AMC Plus.
ABOUT THIS PODCAST:
Guilty Pleasures is a monthly spin-off show of the popular New Horror Express (NHE) podcast. Each month, NHE host Scott Murphy, alongside some former guests on the interview podcast, takes a deep dive into a 21st Century “Guilty Pleasure” horror movie as chosen by you the listener in an online poll (based on a particular theme).
Host Scott Murphy is a freelance journalist, reviewer and podcaster. He got into horror in his early teens and has not looked back since. As well as reviewing on New Horror Express, he currently writes reviews for The Wee Review and has previously written for Slimehouse TV, Subtitled Online and The 405. His favourite horror movie is The Shining, and his favourite horror novel is Interview with The Vampire.
Be sure to tune in the first Saturday of every month for new episodes of THE GUILTY PLEASURES PODCAST on the Morbidly Beautiful Network.
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