VAN HELSING:THE LONDON ASSIGNMENT is a half hour cartoon made to promote the live action movie. Which I've not seen. And after this I've not sure I want to see it. The whole plot seems lifted from Alan Moore's LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde is apparently also Jack the Ripper, who goes around Whitechapel stealing the essence of souls and sealing them in little glass vials. Dr. Jekyl takes the souls and injects them into QUEEN VICTORIA turning her into a young lady with no memory of being the Queen of Britan.
The problem with this is that it's not presented as a horror story. Instead it's an over the top action set piece with barely two dimensional characters.
There's a documentary of the making of VAN HELSING also on the DVD, which runs longer then the cartoon. Somewhere in it the director comments that, "If the people who made the original movies could (refering to Universal's DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN and WOLFMAN) they'd make them this way." Gee, I don't know. They were making HORROR movies and you're making an action movie. There's a difference.
ZATOICHI: THE BLIND SWORDSMAN is good, really good. I'm rather fond of the ZATOICHI movies that play on IFC's Samurai Saturday. But Takeshi Kitano's take on the blind massuse is rather, well, fun.
This is an action movie. The violence is exaggerated. When using his sword Zatoichi becomes superhuman. But it's the spaces between the action that are filled with quirky bits of humanity and charm. Shintaro Katsu's Zatoichi was a machismo figure, while Takeshi's Zatoichi is awkward and existential.
People have commented about the cgi bloodletting. Yeah, it's noticeable. But if you've seen older samurai sword operas with jetting blood spraying everywhere, you've got an idea of what they were trying to accomplish.
The final reel is possibly the best dance festival in any samurai flick, ever....
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