As Catherine mentioned, last night we watched Van Helsing. It was surprisingly bad in the same way that getting hit in the groin is surprisingly uncomfortable: even if you know exactly what's coming, your expectation can't truly convey how unpleasant the experience will be.

I was ready to like this movie. There are two reasons for this. First, I love Halloween, and the Van Helsing universe is a pretty obvious attempt to capitalize on the holiday. Second, I have terrible, terrible taste in movies.

It's not that I can't recognize quality in films, or at least echoes of quality. It's just that I find the idea of emotional investment in a film completely exhausting and discouraging. Thinking about how I felt when I walked out of the theater after Requiem for a Dream... yeesh. I can't muster up the mental stamina for that very often. Put me on a couch, hand me a beer and start up Under Siege for the dozenth time. Check back with me in 90 minutes, or when you hear the sound of the bad guy's head getting shoved into that radar screen at the end.

So Van Helsing seemed like it might satisfy my perverse movie watching habits, even though the presence of radar screens for purposes of head-smashing seemed unlikely in a movie set in the Victorian era.

The plot is completely incomprehensible. There's a bit about Dracula needing Frankenstein to electrically bring his stillborn vampire children to life. Then there are werewolves, who serve Dracula, but are also the only thing that can kill him. Fortunately, though, Dracula has a special lycanthropy-curing serum that he can use to change a werewolf back to human, should one ever turn on him. Except of course werewolves are mentally enslaved to him after the final stroke of midnight on the first full moon after they're bitten. But they only become werewolves for the first time at the first stroke of midnight, providing a seconds-long Dracula-Killing/Lycanthropy-Curing window that the movie agonizingly explains, then completely ignores. And I haven't even gotten to our hero yet. He works for the Pope.

I can only imagine the circumstances under which the writers came up with this shit. It's late, in a nondescript LA conference room: the air stinks of whiteboard markers and half-smoked joints, and the table is a mess of coke residue and spilled candycorn. Finally somebody says for the one-too-many-th time that he doesn't understand something about the tragedy of notecards taped to the wall. He's fired and everyone goes home. Eight months later a movie pops out.

On the upside, the monster per capita ratio is hard to beat, and Kate Beckinsale appears in a number of outfits that Catherine assures me would be not at all practical for slaying the undead.

The worst part, though, happens immediately after the final shot. First, an obviously fussed-over graphic proudly declares: "WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY STEPHEN SOMMERS" (screenwriter for Deep Rising and The Mummy Returns, both of which I am ashamed to say I have seen).

And then, the buzzkill -- a dedication to his late dad. Well, shit. Suddenly my snarky putdowns of a disposable action movie make me a bad person, instead of just a boring one. Thanks a lot, Stephen Sommers. I'll be going into your next awful movie with a grudge.