How is everyone? Good? Great! Lets bring you up to speed on the last few days, shall we?

Birthday! Who's you ask? Why mine of course, silly. My family, being the generous giving people they are, got me the phenomenal gift of a Wacom Graphire3 Tablet, giving me the ability to sketch directly to the computer instead of having to rely on my aging scanner and the fickle nature of pen & Paper. I am so horribly addicted to my tablet now. I can't imagine how I ever settled for using the mouse while using PSP.

Bear! No, not beer, Bear. Recently sightings of a large Black Bear have been confirmed by police just 5 minutes out of my home town. The bear has reportedly been roaming the wooded areas of liberty/girard, Ohio. Why is this relevant? Well:
1) Bears are not native to the suburbs of Youngstown.
2) I live very close to this area, and I think it's kinda nifty.
3) the best reason yet. Johnny (who lives in Girard) is 2 of the sightings :) Apparently, his back yard is like the cool place to hang out if your a bear (it probably wants our beer, NO DEAL BEAR, NO DEAL!

Movies! I'd recommend waiting until the cheap seats to go see Van Helsing if you have not seen it yet. If you don't want a nice little Van Helsing spoiler, then you may as well just stop reading here.



Still with me? Good. Now, as much as I like Hugh Jackman, and as much as I would love to give any movie with Kate Beckinsdale in it an awesome review, alas, I cannot in this case.

VH is a plotless wonder. VH himself (Jackman) is a cross between his Wolverine character, James Bond, and Stephen King's Gunslinger, and contains very little original material at all in my opinion. Beckinsdale's character is no less predictable and 2 dimensional, but she looks damn good doing it ;)

I have a feeling, that when the writers sat down to make this movie, their goal was to cram as many classic monsters into the film as possible, and make them all part of some big conspiracy. Here's the quick and dirty:

Dr. Jekyl/Hyde makes a guest cameo for about 3 minutes, then dies. Not relevant to the storyline.
Dr. Frankenstien creates his monster, but does so while working for Count dracula. Dracula reveals some horrible plan involving the monster, and Dr. F freaks out and he and the monster escape, only to be killed by angry villagers.
One year later, VH is sent to Transylvania by the church to assist the last surviving member of an ancient family that's been fighting dracula for centuries. The last member of this family is, of course, a beautiful princess. Prepare for massive amounts of sexual innuendo (so much so, at one point in the movie Chavo leaned over and said "dude, it's like it's a bad porn...")
The actor playing Dracula was bad enough to have me stifling fits of laughter in the theater, anyways, big D has an evil plot that will be carried out by a hoard of evil oompa loompa things, Igor, and a few werewolves. The key to this plan is the miraculously still alive Frankenstien monster, who is befriended by VH.

The entire film is just a series of somewhat amusing slapstick and action sequences that tie together some great special effect scenes and classic creature appearences. I'm not even going to go into the horribly penned version of the dracula creation story, or how Van Helsing is tied to it. The movie hints at profound connections, but never delivers. I'm also not going to spend the time to tell the ending, which sadly, is anticlimactic at best.

Bottom line: Worth $1.50 at the cheap seats, YES. Worth full admission? Not if I had to do it over.