VAN HELSING: FROM BENEATH THE RUE MORGUE & THE LONDON ASSIGNMENT

This weekend’s escapist, light-hearted superhero post looks at the sidequels to Hugh Jackman’s 2004 movie Van Helsing.

FROM BENEATH THE RUE MORGUE (2004) – This Dark Horse comic book companion to the Van Helsing film is set in between scenes in the movie. After the death of Mr. Hyde in Paris, we see that Van Helsing winds up arrested for murder.

The monster slayer is ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death, but priestly agents of the Vatican (for whom Van Helsing works in his crusade against unholy forces) engineer an escape. Our hero flees through the catacombs beneath Paris.

Soon, he is forced to abandon his plans to escape the city when an unseen force abducts a female spiritual medium. Van Helsing follows the screaming woman and her invisible abductor to a secret laboratory beneath the Rue Morgue.

That lab is the lair of THE Dr. Moreau in his younger years. The mad scientist has created a number of beastly man-monsters that are barely controllable, unlike his later experimental creations.

Van Helsing learns that the invisible being which abducted the medium was made so by a process that Moreau stole from England’s Invisible Man, whom he double-crossed. The unseen figure is made visible and is a Moreau creation that resembles the much later Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As the resulting battle between Van Helsing and Dr. Moreau’s animal-men goes on, our hero eventually learns that the medium is the wife of one of the mad scientist’s formerly human creations. Van Helsing is unable to capture him for her, but he does defeat and kill it and the rest of Moreau’s man-beasts.

The laboratory beneath the Rue Morgue winds up destroyed but Dr. Moreau escapes, while deciding he should set up his next lab on a remote island somewhere. Van Helsing eludes the Paris police and returns to the Vatican, where his movie adventures resume. 

THE LONDON ASSIGNMENT (2004) – I’m cheating a bit by including this 33-minute animated film, but since it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves I decided to go with it. Hugh Jackman provided the voice of Van Helsing.

The London Assignment is a prequel story that depicts the events leading up to Van Helsing chasing Mr. Hyde to Paris, where the 2004 live-action film begins. The Vatican sends Van Helsing to London, where the monster slayer tries to stop Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego Mr. Hyde from continuing a series of murders.

Amid much action, Van Helsing eventually learns that the bodies of Hyde’s victims are being used by him to create an experimental Youth Serum. Mr. Hyde manages to abduct Queen Victoria during her Jubilee celebrations.

Ultimately our hero rescues the queen and pursues the fleeing Mr. Hyde across the English Channel to France. And from there the events of 2004’s Van Helsing movie play out, with the character also fighting vampires, including Dracula himself, plus werewolves and the Frankenstein Monster.

VIDEO GAME – The official video game companion to the Van Helsing movie got mixed to terrible reviews and merely offered variations of the scenarios in the film. A separate game (at left) that I think could have better fit the characters and situations of that flick while also adding some fresh material was the 3-Part 2013-2015 game. The entire trilogy is available in The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut.

That game featured the central character accompanied by a beautiful female ghost named Katarina, and I feel the ghost could easily have instead been the ghost of Anna Valerious from the 2004 movie. That way she could still share his adventures and continue their tragic love affair in ghostly form, like a gender-flipped Ghost and Mrs. Muir situation.

The fictional East European nation of Borgovia is the setting for the game’s action. Players get a nice blend of Goth-infused Steam Punk death traps, architecture and weapons as well as an entire menagerie of grotesque new monsters. Much more variety than the zombies and living skeletons offered by similar games which also use characters named Van Helsing.  

FOR MY LOOK AT THE 1973-1983 STORIES OF BLADE THE VAMPIRE SLAYER CLICK HERE.