Adventures of Young Van Helsing: The Quest for the Lost Scepter

I saw this film late one night after some friends saw it in the $5 bin at Wal-mart.

This is quite possibly one of the worst films ever made - acting straight out of a home movie, dialogue apparently written by an 8-year-old, and the most clichéd and ridiculous plot imaginable.

Don't watch this unless you're with a group of friends that likes to make fun of bad movies.

Oh, and btw, the last 20 minutes are basically a bad music video, so feel free to turn it off as soon as the characters show up at the school dance.

This is to director Kevin Summerfield what the Holocaust is to Hitler--a masterpiece.

This seems to be a film made for tweens, but at the same time it's rather bloody and gory. If I were a tween, I'd think this film has the worst acting, ever. As an older and more mature person, I can say that it just has the worst acting I've ever seen. The back of the box advertises that the story involves a "whimsical" professor. Now, I've seen some whimsical professors in my day, but nothing tops this guy. He looks like they walked into Whimsy Mart, asked him if he ever had a hidden passion for acting, and then superglued an Einstein wig to his head. At one point, there's a closeup where he opens a door, and his head moves in and out of the frame, as if saying "HA! I AM FAR TOO WHIMSICAL FOR A MEASLY CLOSE-UP!" It's also hilariously, ineptly racist. I can't possibly believe that in the year 2004 a movie was made that features a black man looking at something and shouting "DAAAAYYYYUUMMMM!", but this movie does. The plot, which helpfully has a flashback at the beginning, and a bizarre tangent of a flashback near the end that make the plot only even more retarded. There's a time-telling device that is obviously a CD player painted tan with jewels on it. I really wonder if this wasn't a student film, but Kevin Summerfield has been making movies for a few years before this one.

If you see this in the five dollar bin at Wal-Mart (which thankfully I did not have to go through the trauma of, and saw this through a friend), you probably will not want to pick it up. Unless, of course, you are a racist, retarded sort of pre-teen.

I bought this DVD at a yard sale so I'm only out two bucks but I was tempted to return to the yard sale and demand my money back. I must admit that I did not watch the entire movie. I couldn't make it past the first 5 minutes. The fat kid with black face makeup on (to fool into believing he was Indian or Pakistani) was too ridiculous to continue watching.

How do movies this bad get made? Is there really a market for movies that can only be called an embarrassment? How is it that this movie DID NOT make your 100 worst movies. Are there really at least 100 movies worse than this? God help us.

Actually, as bad as the movie THE ADVENTURES OF YOUNG VAN HELSING is, the as-yet-unpublished novelization is very good. I was fortunate enough to obtain a copy of the novelization by R.H. Jones before I saw the movie, and can say that this is one instance where the writer took tremendous liberties with the script...and the result was excellent! In fact, this is a better movie novelization than many I've read. It has a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer feel to it, and I felt like I was reading a TV novelization. Should you have the opportunity to read the novelization if it ever gets published, don't bother ever seeing the movie!

There is not one good thing that can be said about this awful film. The "acting" was horrible. To even call it acting is an insult to real actors. It was worse than kindergarten kids reciting a poem. The professor character pushed his glasses up on his nose so often the you wanted to super glue them to his face to stop the annoyance. The direction was so bad that it seemed not to exist at all. The pace was so slow that a scene that should have taken 1 minute went on for 4. The last scene of this atrocity was an extended music video of a tuneless song done at a high school dance that went on forever. The only good part of the film occurred when "The End" flashed on the screen.