Honourable Mention: Van Helsing (2023)

This is a computer-generated animation that starts with a battle on the moon. But… You said it’s called Van Helsing. And that it is… Jack Van Helsing (Ernesto Galan), whose grandfather was THE Van Helsing. So, we get a vampire mentioned in passing, saying how his grandfather destroyed the fiend, and an image of it. Plus an image of Vlad Ţepeş because… yup, Dracula was Ţepeş in this never returned to backstory.

Essentially it looks at the end of the world, and has a preachy bit about devastating wars ignored because we’re all looking at phone screens (I very much doubt we’d ignore warfare on the doorstep, even if we ignore warfare in other countries often). Then it became nuclear.

vampire was mentioned in passing

We get some survivors – Jack appears in a hazmat at first and manages to get those survivors killed, then he gets to the moon (by stealing a space shuttle) and teams up with a colony there lead by Lilith (Jennifer Fourteen) – who is Lilith in name only. They then get killed, though he survives again. The transitions from a contemporary world destroyed by nukes, a moon base and then space-faring people and space warfare are jarring.

Jack Van Helsing

Of the enemies, one is a zombie (for that read more like a ghoul from the Fallout series) who stole a space shuttle! Yes, NASA just leaves those things hanging around with the keys in the ignition (so to speak)… Anyway he becomes a galactic despot and the moon base was destroyed by Xterminator (Edson Camacho) – an anti-human AI driven robot… kill all humans… Who gets a galactic taskforce… His faction also create a rebuilt, cyborg (with the memories of the human, but with loyalty to the AI) Lilith. Not much happens with that storyline as Jack goes to meet her on the recovering Earth, in the strangely still functional Hong Kong…

a bat creature

If it sounds a mess… well it is, as is the animation. Some looks detailed, other bits look terribly untextured. I’m not sure how it was built (and doing a budget driven cgi is brave) but it doesn’t look consistent. The voice acting style is melodrama 101. The storyline just seems to stitch ideas together with no thought as to the logical viability. You never see Jack’s face (though you do see Abraham) rather he is behind gas masks or helmets. Not great but genre connected (oh and a big bat creature at the very end).

The imdb page is here.