Your Daily Dracula – Michael Hoad as Van Helsing, Van Helsing (2022)

Your Daily Dracula – Michael Hoad as Van Helsing, Van Helsing (2022)

The onscreen title is Van Helsing, but some listings call it Van Helsing Hunter of the Damned or Wrath of Van Helsing – probably to distinguish it from several other films and a TV series.  This VH has made a pact with dark forces to become a monster hunter – and gets several resurrections (nearly used up) into the bargain.  He says he has a son called Abraham who’s in the same business, so that may be the one we know about.  A mercenary ex-priest called Igor (Darrell Griggs) acts as his agent-sidekick, but only on their umpteenth case together – they’ve hunted a lycanthrope in Mongolia and a succubus somewhere – does VH bother to fill him in on any of the backstory.

Ellie (Antonia Whillans) and three gal pals go for a fun weekend exploring sinister tunnels near an abandoned village in the North of England where there’s supposedly been a radioactive spill – and don’t come back, so her parents hire Igor to get VH on the case, which involves exploring the same tunnels while waving a small crossbow and a samurai sword.  Lurking down here are some monk-robed, stiff-faced vampires – judging from the graffiti, they’ve been feeding off Leeds United supporters, poor bastards – and a big bad in an all-over-the-head mask who is labelled a cenobite (which, contrary to Hellraiser, is a kind of monk not a synonym for demon).

Directed by Soner Metin from a script by Tom Jolliffe, Van Helsing is obviously a low-budget British production – with resources even more limited than those available to, say, Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing or Wrath of Dracula – with understated-to-a-fault performances (Hoad almost hilariously shrugs off his doomy history) and the kind of fight scenes you get if actors are really worried about hurting each other.  It uses blackouts to cover violence and a few rude words are blanked in the print online.  I’d suspect it was made because the filmmakers found a cool tunnel location – and there’s an eerily deserted seashore too.  The mythology is reasonable, as if this were the pilot for a further adventures series – but the connections with Bram Stoker are opportunist … they’d have had to come up with another title, but calling the hero Carnacki or John Silence or any other out-of-copyright occult detective/warrior would have been a fresher angle.