Welcome back to our ongoing Guilty Pleasure’s bonus series! A series we begun as part of our friends Bloodhound Pix #HorrorNotFear campaign, which will see New Horror Express along with several other outlets offering bonus content up until June 2021. The show will remain a fixture post that though as we have become a proud part of the Morbidly Beautiful network!
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 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.”
Alongside NHE host Scott Murphy to dive into this one 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 the movie tells essentially the same story twice (the climax’s in the second and the third act are the same), how the film can’t quite make up it’s mind whether we should pay attention to the plot or not and are collectively confused by the fact Hugh Jackman should be the perfect lead for this but somehow isn’t. Plus, we get into how even the many of the good things in the film overstay their welcome, have a good laugh at the accents on display and note that not everybody seems to be in the same film.
Elsewhere in the episode our intrepid trio get into this movies 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 The Guilty Pleasures Podcast here
Listen to Graham Hughes original interview appearance on the show here
Listen to Lex Jones original interview appearance on the show here
Check out the trailer for “Van Helsing” here