It's tremendously strange how 'Van Helsing' was absolutely underestimated by many stupid critics taking that idiotic total narrow-minded position toward it owing to the fact those morons found themselves completely unable to comprehend the film's conception and the style in which it's shot at all!
'Van Helsing' is obviously a splendid work, for it's a perfect combination of the original content and the form of its expression: a masterly woven plot built on the idea of the combination of the classic horror characters, as a tribute to the Universal horror monster films, and a luminous ironical and self-ironical postmodern style of execution.