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. Continue reading
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