ONE OF THE hazards of being addicted to iconic Victorian monsters is the pain of watching people play with them. In Van Helsing, the director Stephen Sommers takes unspeakable liberties with three of the genre’s crown jewels: Dracula, the Werewolf and Frankenstein’s Monster. The black-and-white melodrama is pure Hammer, the mutual loathing palpable, the atmosphere electric.

The original maestros — Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr and Boris Karloff — would look as comfortable as cardboard gravestones in this maelstrom, and they would doubtless be horrified to find themselves in the same picture. In Van Helsing the three classic fiends have a greedy need for each other, and are hunted by a hero once regarded as a senile, sanctimonious prop.

Hugh Jackman’s ultra-cool Van Helsing is 6ft 2in (1.88m) of beefcake. He is a Vatican bounty hunter, a Mad Max loner, and the 007 of the Catholic Inquisition. He stalks his prey in a pointy hat and a floor-length designer coat, and you’d have to be headless to miss him. He nails his supernatural targets with medieval ghost-busting gadgets (exploding crosses, etc) designed by David Wenham’s short-sighted friar (Q?).

Moreover, he is, as the programme notes would have it, haunted by a past he cannot remember and driven by a mission he cannot refuse.

What is that mission? Ostensibly it’s an order to make haste to Transylvania and murder Richard Roxburgh’s Count Dracula. But why waste a multimillion-pound blockbuster on the demise of one classic fiend? Why not dispatch the lot in one fell swoop? Sommers couldn’t have pitched this film more perfectly to illiterate 16-year-olds if he had spent his youth on Steven Spielberg’s knee.

Jackman’s only ally is a haughty aristocrat (Kate Beckinsale), sporting some of the kinkiest corsets this side of Victoria’s Secret. Needless to say, their fighting skills are breathtaking.

But it’s the monsters that command the picture; not so much their bestial appetites, but the transforming moments when their bones crack and their faces contort from seductive humans into snarling horrors. In Van Helsing werewolves physically rip their skin off, so painful and rapid is the change. Vampires have python jaws with the razor teeth of angler fish. And the Monster’s depressed mood can probably be blamed on the jam pot of luminous stewed plums where his brain should be.

The idea of cramming Victorian villains into the same computer-generated space is hardly new. But I admire Sommers’s cheek. All his kind nods to the Universal Studios classics can’t hide the fact that he has weighed and measured those wormy old glories and found them wanting. He’s right in every respect. Fond as I am of hard-core Victorian nostalgia, it’s time to admit that the terrors have run out of steam.

The irony of Van Helsing is that it’s as old-fashioned as the ghost train that trundles around Clacton pier. It’s a fright machine that requires no imagination. Even so, it’s shamelessly enjoyable.

But the action, for all its flash polish, feels decidedly second hand. The setpiece duels lack pedigree — surely the single most important ingredient of any homage. There are the usual frantic coach chases across Transylvania; hair-pulling girl fights between the luscious Beckinsale and Dracula’s Brides; and a romance between Miss B and Jackman that wouldn’t threaten your pulse rate (dead or alive).

But so many other bits and pieces of graphics, plot and action are simply lifted willy-nilly from films as unrelated as Shrek, X-Men and Hulk. The result is an anachronistic and anarchic orgy of special effects. Perhaps that is Sommers’s point: perhaps this is the future for horror.

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