Branduil said:
Perhaps, but though other movies I've seen may be worse in most regards, they didn't have a multi-million dollar budget. For the price spent on this thing there's no excuse for not having an adequate story.
This sort of comment always puzzles me. Just to make this clear for everyone: not only does spending lots of money on a movie do
nothing to improve the quality of the story, but the more money that's spent on a movie, the dumber you can in fact expect it to be. A big-budget blockbuster is going to have a dozen different writers on the payroll. Although they may be credited as "concept designers", "story contributors", or any of a dozen different other titles, don't be fooled: they're writers. And none of them can simply say "hey, this is great!" and pass it on. Perfectly decent scenes are re-written, new scenes are added on, and senseless plot twists occur for no discernable reason.
The production staff calls the director in for meeting after meeting, watching the movie's development like a mother hen because of all the money they're investing. Nobody wants another
Dune. And they can't just say everything's great either. They have a whole franchise they want to protect. After all, movie tickets are only a small slice of the pie. Can you do some product-placement--maybe Van Helsing likes eating subway sandwiches or can catch a monster by using candy as bait? Can we have some scenes where you're driving something we can sell as a toy? Can you use more gadgets (for the same reason)?
Focus groups get in on the act. Can you have that character murdered without having any blood spilled so the movie stays PG-13? Can there be more romance, but less sex? Can the female character be tougher, yet more vulnerable too? The cravenly monk tested well--give him more cooky stuff to say.
In the end, it's a miracle if even a single intelligent moment has managed to survive. Instead of subtlety or sincerity ou can expect lots of cute one-liners interspersed with explosions and people leaping across chasms.
Van Helsing is a big, fun, loud movie that joins the ranks of
Independence Day,
Charlie's Angels, and
Armageddon. But anyone who wasn't expecting a dumb spectacle was really kidding themselves, and their complaints about plot holes are a bit on the absurd side. Branduil, do you get how posting that long, long list of questions about every detail of the plot like that is kind of like detailing why a knock-knock joke doesn't follow consistent rules of logic?
You get quality big-budget movies once in a while when the director's emotionally-invested in the project (e.g.
LotR, Batman, Titanic). These guys were willing to put their careers on the line (and in Cameron's case, his house and a heap of his own money) to have final cut. But this is just a paycheck movie for Sommers. Universal called him up and said "we want to cash in on all of these monsters we have rights to--can you direct something we can turn into a new theme-park ride?"
And the roof on fire was from the nitroglicerine indeed. The thick forest was probably just the reason why the brides didnt spot the other coach and why there were to parellel roads one not even having a bride across the chasm. Only god knows 
