The Santa Clause

hoo ho hooo.

"You've Never Seen Santa Quite Like This Before."

I wish I STILL hadn't seen Santa like this, but alas, no such luck. Welcome to the Tagline everyone, and Merry Christmas. If you don't celebrate Christmas, well don't worry, by the time I'm finished with this review no one will be celebrating. Grinch that I am, I thought I'd spread my holiday cheer by reviewing this ridiculous Kirk Cameron movie about how we need to all buy into the holy godliness of like hot cocoa or something, but my dreams for the world's misery were dashed because the stupid movie is still in a theater somewhere, and therefore not available on DVD. Bitter as this disappointment was to me, Christmas wasn't quite ruined yet. No there was still hope, as I channel surfed and fell right into a movie from Christmas past. This is 1994's The Santa Clause, a movie concept based almost entirely around a pun about contract law. If that sounds offensive, well I haven't even gotten to the part where it stars Tim Allen yet. That's right, fresh off the set of Home Improvement, and ready to ham it up in a Santa suit.  Merry Christmas folks.

Van Helsing

Look at his awesome hat.

"Adventure lives forever."

Adventure DOES live forever, man that tagline has a really good point. Welcome back folks, as always I am your host on this breathtaking tour of the underworld of cinema, and today I'm going to be digging deep into the past to 2004, with the release of Van Helsing, a kind of Universal Studios monster orgy that happened somehow and was gifted with an absolutely insane 160 million dollar budget. Yeah that's right, watch that movie and try to guess where they dumped 160 million smackaroos, because I can't quite figure it out. Anyway Van Helsing is not about Abraham Van Helsing, the character from Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it does involve Dracula prominently. In this iteration Hugh Jackman is Gabriel Van Helsing, an agent of the Vatican who is dispatched to kill Dracula. That seems pretty reasonable, because I'm sure that no one in Rome is a big Dracula fan, on account of him being a vampire and all. So Van Helsing travels to Transylvania with his loyal ammo monk in tow (the guy who played Faramir in the Lord of the Rings no less!) to try and deep six Drac. The Holy Order also charges Van Helsing with helping ensure that the Valerious family doesn't end up ever getting stuck outside of heaven's gates, because I guess they don't get to go to heaven unless they kill Dracula or something who fucking even knows. Of course Dracula isn't the only thing that can kill you in Transylvania. There's also werewolves, and Dracula brides, and... gross baby vampires that explode because they need different kinds of batteries or something... stay with me here guys.

Eragon

It was tough to pick a tagline for this one, because they're all so very choice, but I'm going to go with this one, now seriously hilarious in retrospect:

"The First Chapter of the Inheritance Trilogy"

Looks cool right?

There were signs all over this movie that they intended it to be (as seen above) the first in a trilogy of movies. Why not right? A movie based on a series of best selling books, there's a dragon, and you have a cast of relative competence (mostly...sort of... I guess...) But oh, how very wrong they were. To say that this movie was not good, well that would be the understatement of the century. There is essentially no element of this movie that could rise to the level of 'adequate', and most of it is abysmal. Let's start with the basics, and work our way to the grisly crescendo that is the movie's conclusion.