[HorrorScience] Van Helsing Mission to London (2004)

A few years ago I commented on the film Van Helsing (2004), where Hugh Jackman represented a modern version of the professor created by Bram Stoker for his famous novel, Dracula.

The figure of Van Helsing as a hero was popularized with Horror of Dracula (1958), where Peter Cushing played the relentless university professor who studied supernatural beings and whose knowledge was key to defeating the vampires, thus being a version quite close to Stoker's original.

However, the Van Helsing of 2004 was a different type of character, an action hero, loaded with weapons and gadgets, capable of facing monstrous creatures without breaking a sweat (or without losing his hat) and with enough time to say some tough guy phrase and take the girl.

The same year that the film starring Hugh Jackman was released, an animated film was created (or a short, as it lasts just over half an hour) which in turn served as a prequel to the live-action film.

Van Helsing The London Assignment (also known as Van Helsing: Mission in London) tells us about the first confrontation between our protagonist and Mr Hyde, whose outcome we can see in the first minutes of the live-action film.

A murderer of women is loose in London. All of them die from a stab wound and their bodies end up being left in a pitiful state, as if they were rotting at an astonishing speed. The state of the corpses will cause the secret society that faces this type of supernatural creatures to send its best gunman: Gabriel Van Helsing, who with the help of his partner Carl, will leave for London to look for the culprit.

In London, murders continue to be committed. The culprit is a huge and disfigured being, known as Mr Hyde, who kills only young women to steal their youth, which he will use to rejuvenate Queen Victoria of England, with whom he is in love.

Hyde escapes from Van Helsing, so they decide to do the classic trick of disguising a man (Carl) as a woman, to use him as bait against the murderer. This will end with a chase to the place where Hyde hides the rejuvenated Queen Victoria, who is unaware that her doctor has killed dozens of women to rejuvenate her.

After the confrontation, Hyde flees to Paris, while Van Helsing goes after him to have the final confrontation, which we will not see in this film, but we can enjoy it in the first minutes of the live-action film.

Van Helsing Mission in London It has the feeling of being an episode of any series from the year 2000. The visual style, the character designs, and the animation (which is quite variable in quality and has great moments and others that are quite weak). In fact, watching this film gave me the feeling that it could have served as an episode of a series where Van Helsing hunts different monsters, something that perhaps would have been worth seeing, not for the protagonist, but for the opportunity to give more development to the classic monsters.

Van Helsing conveys in this version more or less the same as in the live-action film. He is untouchable, he is a pimp, he can't lose and no matter what he does, it will always turn out well, something that I personally don't like too much, especially because that once again relegates Carl's character to a mere humorous resource. Although I do have to say that this Van Helsing is somewhat more tolerable, perhaps because he talks less or because the film is shorter.

The strong point of the film is the character of Dr. Jekyll or Mr Hyde, since they tell us his motivations and allow us to see him in his two forms, as an affable doctor and as a murderous monster, although they make it quite clear to us that this time both forms seem to be totally aware of what the other is doing, or rather, that there is no split personality, just a change in appearance from an old and weak man (Jekyll) to an almost invulnerable Monster (Mr Hyde).

One thing I don't like about this portrayal of Jekyll is that he's closer to being a witch than a scientist. I understand that the formula that separates goodness and evil (which allows him to become Hyde) is something supernatural, but it has always been justified in a “pseudoscientific” way (at least in the original book where his character originates), but stealing women's youth is something much crazier, although I think what really distorts the image of Jekyll as a scientist is the fact of having an army of undead that protect his lair. Is Jekyll a necromancer? Have you found an elixir to raise the dead? Why isn't the movie about that instead of his romance with the Queen?

Leaving aside those doubts about Jekyll's undead army (which only appears in one scene and was surely done to fill a few minutes of footage without taking into account the main plot), Jekyll is exactly what we see in the live-action Van Helsing film, an unstoppable beast, capable of climbing buildings in a single leap.

In general I think Van Helsing Mission London may be liked by those who enjoyed live action movie, since it is basically the same but adapted to a more cropped format, which I would almost say suits it better than the real image.