Stan Helsing (2009)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is a spoof horror movie. So it is supposed be funny. But it is not. It is scary. It is to scary. The hummer is a awful. Leslie Nielisen plays a woman. And that is to scary. I am not an easy person to scary. But this on did it for me. 3.6 is not a good rating. But still 3.6 is overrating this movie. It is badly written. It is also a lot of the actors in this movie are awful. The is pooh pooh. There is scene were Freddy Krueger is taking a pooh pooh. And there is a another scene with a man dressed as Frankenstein taking a pooh pooh. This is the proof that it is not funny. It is just pooh pooh. I do not want to see Frankenstein taking a pooh pooh. And I do not want see Freddy Krueger taking a pooh pooh. And I do not want to see Leslie Nielisen dressed like a woman.

Despite the poor reviews, I gave it a try. I LOVE horror comedy. On the comedy scale I gave this a two. On the horror scale it's an absolute ZERO.Leslie Nielsen is wonderful, but his role is sadly minimal. The monsters, such as they are, are present, but never actually injure, attack, or kill anybody! Our "heroes" spend ninety percent of the movie running away from them.There is NO morbid humor whatsoever. All of the jokes, and as far as I can remember, and I do mean ALL of them, are sex or potty related. Better than half of them are poorly timed or badly executed, and while we can tell that it was supposed to be funny, it doesn't manage to actually evoke that much laughter.The first half hour, I was thinking "this isn't so bad", expecting it to get better as the action ramped up. An hour later, it still hadn't.Regardless of whether you're looking for laughs or blood, you'll find neither one here.

As a drive-by connoisseur of horror; this was a pretty darn funny send up. Beats the last couple Scary Movie spoofs that relied on too much cameo/star presence. This was formulaic, but in a good way, goofs, send-ups, mocking with some actual WTF weirdness. I'd rather watch this for the genre than another Scary Movie rehash. Bottom line, kookier, creepier, and fresher than the genre staples have lowered themselves to.Also, the actors are above par for a 'tongue-in-cheek' parody. If your expecting witty repartee, your in the wrong place. If you want a goofy send up of cliché horror tropes, you've arrived.

"Stan Helsing" is a dreadfully dull comedy that is poorly written, poorly paced, and not very well thought out. It's a shame, too, because the movie's title made me laugh.If you've seen the DVD cover of this movie, it tells you that the movie is made "by the executive producer of 'Scary Movie' (2000)". It makes me wonder why "Scary Movie" worked as a comedy and as a spoof, yet those who collaborated upon it have failed miserably when making their own spoof movies in a similar vein.Of course, I'm talking mainly about Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, two out of the six writers of "Scary Movie" who went on to make abominably unfunny parody films like "Date Movie" (2006) and "Meet The Spartans" (2008). In fact, the reason I wanted to see "Stan Helsing" in the first place was because Friedberg and Seltzer had absolutely nothing to do with it. However, while "Stan Helsing" is slightly more deserving of a theatrical release than anything by Friedberg and Seltzer, it shouldn't be commended simply because it sucks a little less than "Date Movie".In fact, you can tell just how desperate this movie is when the opening credits read "Stan Helsing: A Parody". Whenever a comedy tells an audience in writing what sub-genre it is, you may want the next hour and a half of your life back already.Stan Helsing (Ashton Kutcher lookalike Steve Howey) is a clerk at Schlockbuster Video (Yep, that's the name of the place). In one of the worst set-ups to any story, he is ordered by his manager to deliver a set of videos to the boss's mom. The problem is that it's Halloween, and his friends are picking him up in their van to go to a party.His best friend Teddy (Kenan Thompson) is dressed as Superman (reminding me immediately of Thompson's recurring character Superdude from his days on Nickelodeon's "All That" (1995)), and has two gorgeous ladies in the van with him. Stan's ex-girlfriend Nadine (Diora Baird) is allegedly dressed as an Indian, but is scantily clad enough to make any man in the audience not care. Teddy's squeeze is ditsy stripper Mia (Desi Lydic), who changes costume in a relatively clever running gag.Reluctantly, Teddy drives Stan to deliver the videos first, but of course they get lost. Stan keeps hearing that his ancestor is Van Helsing, who is described in this film as a monster killer. Of course, anyone with the slightest familiarity with vampire movies (not necessarily novels) will know Van Helsing as the man who hunts down Dracula in the Bram Stoker novel of the same name.I guess some people's minds have been poisoned by the Hugh Jackman vehicle, "Van Helsing" (2004). In that film, Jackman, as Helsing, attempts to kill not only Dracula, but Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man. The movie bombed, and came out six years before this one, thereby making it not very ripe for parody.Anyway, rather than Stan Helsing taking on the classic Universal monsters, he finds he has to kill more modern horror movie villains: Freddy Krueger ("Nightmare on Elm Street"), Michael Myers ("Halloween"), Pinhead ("Hellraiser"), Leatherface ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre"), Jason Voorhees ("Friday the 13th"), and Chuckie ("Child's Play"). The people playing these monsters not only look nothing like the originals, but they are also each equipped with cheap gags. Freddy Krueger wears a large watch around his neck a la Flava Flav, Pinhead has darts protruding from his head, Leatherface carries a leaf blower instead of a chainsaw, and Michael Myers wears a yarmulke.Yes, you read that right: Michael Myers wears a yarmulke. Why? Well, that character wears a white-washed Captain Kirk mask, and Captain Kirk was played by William Shatner, who is Jewish, I guess. The point is, these props don't make you laugh for very long, and mostly remained unexplained.In an even more wasted role, the late Leslie Nielsen just plays a guy in drag. Yeah, that's it. If someone had tried to call him Shirley, it may have been funny, but he just shows up, is in women's clothing, and that's really about it.There's also a tired Michael Jackson/pedophile joke that goes nowhere. Given that the film came out in 2009, the year Jackson died, the timing of the gag couldn't have been worse. The main cast isn't funny, the story makes absolutely no sense and goes nowhere, and there's an even dumber climax involving a karaoke contest. It doesn't even seem worth it to commend this film for not making outdated pop culture references.If you find yourself falling asleep during this film, just hope that Freddy Krueger appears in your dream and slashes this film reel to bits. At least that way, your dream will be more entertaining than this movie.