Van Helsing (TV Series) - Netflix Review

Another new series takes a trip down post-apocalypse lane, this time Vampires have taken over the earth (or at least a city in America).

I will be honest and say that I didn’t have high hopes for a new survival based post-apocalypse series as this is already an over-saturated market in TV land. It seems these days we like to see how people will cope with the end of the world.  This time we are dealing with Vampires. 

After a Day of the Triffids style event, it seems like the sun has been blocked out which is never completely explained or even referenced very often. This gives the Vampires the push they needed to take over.

A Vampire apocalypse is an interesting idea, mainly because it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. As films like Daybreakers and Blade 3 have explored, Vampires need us to survive and if we die out, so do they (or they all remain very hungry for eternity). 

Van Helsing is the story of one special person who alone can defeat the vampires, but with a Walking Dead style group trying to survive. It did appear to me that the series needed to choose which it was going to focus on, our less than enigmatic hero, or the group of plucky survivors who turn out to all be terrible people.

The series also tries to incorporate mindless zombie like Vampires, steam punk Vampires and sexy True Blood Vampires all at the same time. This is not a particularly effective combination when trying to take over the world or make a TV show.

The series started off quite well, a few interesting ideas, a few interesting characters but this quickly declined into a very muddled story with too many throw away characters. When there are big revelations or characters died, I wasn’t fussed and by the end of the series I was struggling to make myself keep watching.

The mythology in this series wasn’t really given a decent explanation. Vampires exist, when the lights go out, they take over, and for some reason the hero has special powers clearly relating to the fact that she was adopted. Other than this it’s mostly just a day to day apocalypse and we don’t even get to see the way it all happens, just what it looks like after everything goes down.

Summarise!

Given the generic, tacked together story, this series was better than it could have been, but it wasn’t great.

2/5 Slices