Van Helsing hopes to answer a question that has stumped scholars for ages: namely, exactly how badly can you anally penetrate a work of fiction before the author shoots smoking out of his grave and lands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean?

Super Bowl audiences got a quick trailer glimpse of Van Helsing, a film that takes characters from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, then rolls up its sleeves and gets down to the business of shaming its source material. The titular Van Helsing (an elderly professor in Stoker's original book) now romps around Transylvania with arms flexed and trenchcoat flapping in the wind, most likely grunting catchphrases about being one week from retirement.

Viewers paying attention during the halftime show might have seen a comet-like object streak across the sky. This, of course, was Bram Stoker's corpse spinning like a top, leaving a thin smoke trail on its way to the sea. If you count last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which the chaste Wilhelmina Murray (also of Stoker's Dracula) slinked around in a catsuit kung fu kicking 19th century terrorists in the face, it's entirely possible Bram Stoker could be the first author propelled into space solely through the intensity of his own shame.

The trailer for Hidalgo shows leading man Viggo Mortenson beating up sheiks, casting seductive lusty glances at his female costars, and casting even more seductive, uncomfortably lusty glances at his horse.

Hidalgo wants us to think of it as a rollicking Indiana Jones-style adventure. We'd argue that there's an important distinction between Jones and this film; namely our hero, who gives us the sense that after performing acts of heroism, saving the girl and beating up the bad guys, he'll politely drop the girl off at home and fuck his horse senseless. We've seen Temple of Doom several times, and we're fairly certain Harrison Ford hardly ever does that.

According to one of two lines of dialogue in the trailer, Hidalgo concerns itself with “a 3,000 mile race across the Arabian desert," no doubt welcome balm to to hundreds of thousands of die-hard sand racing fans out there. With no more Lord of the Rings films forthcoming, Hidalgo should also appeal to women in need of a hot Viggo injection. The third target market for a film where our hero's love interest eats oats and foreplay consists of "clop once for 'more', twice for 'stop'" is a group of people we'd all probably rather know nothing about.

Kurt Russell stars as H.I. McPiddlesticks, a 12-time hot dog eating champion who discovers he's been left a minor league hockey team in his great uncle Hubert's will. Initially concerned that managing a hockey team will cut into his hot dog training, McPiddlesticks eventually comes to love this group of rag-tag misfits: there's Milkman, the four-foot-tall ladies' man with wooden teeth and a heart of gold; Pedro, the illegal immigrant who makes up for his poor English with the ability to turn objects to stone; Gopher, who breathes green fire with the help of a powerful genie; and Ralphy, the female goalie who wants to prove herself to her hockey star dad, and whose power to stop pucks with her mind may come in handy.

Do these plucky ne'er-do-wells have what it takes to win the tournament, find the fabled Chalice of Ackbar, and cure Pedro's harelip? I have no idea. I don't even know what the movie's about, to be honest, since the Super Bowl trailer was about 0.00056th of a second long. I realize that buying ad time during the Super Bowl is pricey; but still, this is Disney, for crying out loud. Sure, purchasing thirty seconds of ad time might be out of my price range. At certain times of the month, buying ramen noodles is out of my price range. But I don't own any theme parks raking in a million dollars an hour. Your guess is as good as mine why Disney felt Miracle was important enough to advertise during the most-watched sporting event of the year, but not important enough to spread out to more than a strobe light-quick five frames. If you were lucky enough to watch the Super Bowl with a marmot tripping on speed, be sure to ask it about the Miracle trailer once it's come down.

Everybody's favorite 70's cop show gets a makeover for the year 2004, with as much modern irony as science is capable of injecting into a film without collapsing it into a black hole of quote gestures. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson play the cops Starsky and Hutch as if they were harmlessly retarded dogs, and the 70's are exploited to the point where the entire decade starts to look about as grounded in reality as the Happy Days episode where Fonzie time travelled into space on his motorcycle.

Lost somewhere in this mountain of wide 1970's lapels and enormous 1970's moustaches is the original Starsky & Hutch television show; a show that, believe it or not, people once enjoyed unironically. I'm sure these people are bound to be good sports about being made to look like idiots for actually having once enjoyed Starsky & Hutch. But I wonder if it grates a bit to watch your childhood heroes ridiculed on a big screen for the benefit of twenty-somethings snorting Pepsi One through their noses at it.

Being in my twenties myself, I have no fond memories of Starsky & Hutch. I'm even looking forward to the film, since it looks pretty funny. Still, I hope I'm as good a sport when all the stupid shit I used to watch (Dukes of Hazzard, A*Team, Air Wolf) gets similar point-and-laugh treatment in the decades to come. The small part of me that's immune to irony kind of wishes every eighteen-year-old laughing at Starsky & Hutch in 2004 feels impossibly stupid in fifteen years, when Stone Cold Steve Austin: The Movie, starring Skoot Ulrich-Hewitt and Freddie Prinze III, hits theaters.

After the trailer for The Alamo aired, we broke up into discussion groups to discuss the trailer and our personal feelings about the Alamo. Some ten minutes later, we regrouped to the embarrassing realization that none of us could remember what it was. As best as we can piece together, the Alamo was the legendary battle where a handful of ragtag Texan heroes (led by Davey Crockett, General Custer, Billy Bob Thornton and Johnny Appleseed) managed to stave off brutal attacks by natives, Mexicans, Yankees and the dreaded Uruk-Hai. We were a little fuzzy about what they were fighting for exactly, but most likely it had something to do with the right to hang Confederate flags over your windshield while driving and the right to rave like a lunatic about how great Texas is, if contemporary evidence is any judge.

Billy the Kid was notable in his absence from the trailer, which irked a lot of us. Hopefully the integral part he played in the Alamo's final mech warrior showdown is recounted for future generations to learn from.

Let's call it the "Die Hard Principle", for lack of a better term. What you do is, you find a distinguished British character actor in his mid-thirties. He should have starred in a few films—film interpretations of a book or play, most likely—and while he has a small following, isn't what you'd call famous. Once you've found him, cast him as the one-dimensional European supervillain in an action movie. By the law of the Die Hard Principle, no matter how talented the actor, he will only get roles as a leering European supervillain for the rest of his life. I'm thinking here of your Jeremy Ironses and your Alan Rickmans, two exceptional actors who made one bad choice and are now doomed to lose to smirking idiot cops like Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes for the rest of their careers.

No actor embodies the Die Hard Principle moreso than poor Gary Oldman. He's never actually played a villain in the Die Hard films; but in spirit, he's been losing to John McLane for decades now. Gifted with solid acting chops, Oldman's resume reads like a Who's Who of fantastic indie cinema for the first half of his career, and as one long, uninterrupted role as a mincing criminal psychotic for the last half. Gary keeps the streak alive in the latest installment in the Potter series as the Prisoner of Exzema (or whatever), a mincing criminal psychotic who wants to destroy Harry Potter for reasons I don't care enough to explore. Fans of the Potter books will rejoice at a third installment in the franchise, as they'll get a chance to read the book again without all the bothersome page turning and imagination. Fans of reading any one of the millions of books superior to Harry Potter can continue to do so freely, waiting pleasantly until the entire phenomenon exhausts itself.

The Ladykillers stars Tom Hanks as a young Colonel Sanders, who turns his back on a life of lady-killing when he stumbles upon the perfect blend of herbs and spices.

Or possibly not. As the trailer progresses we discover he's in fact a con man and not even Colonel Sanders at all, taking us right back to square one with our assumptions of this enigmatic man. Ladykillers instead tells us the story of a man who just looks and sounds exactly like a young Colonel Sanders, who schemes of  kidnapping the good Colonel and supplanting himself as an exact duplicate in order to gain control of Sanders' vast fried chicken empire, and thus the Presidency of the United States.

Or possibly not.The Ladykillers appears at first to be a period piece, set in the Deep South back in the 1920s. This assumption comes to a screeching halt when a Wayans brother (one of the lower tier "no-name" brand Wayans) inexplicably shows up on the scene, mugging like he gets a $100 bonus every time he looks like he shat himself.

No-Name Wayans (significantly less expensive, and you can hardly tell the difference between it and your boutique-brand Keenans and Damons) ends up getting slapped by a big momma. Repeatedly. The trailer seems to want us to think the entire movie may well be just a Wayans getting slapped in the face for ninety minutes. We'd be lying if we said that didn't make this the must-see event movie of the year.

It is one of our most enduring and most admired legends. Its author is one of the most celebrated in all of literature. And its plot is this, basically: a bunch of soldiers wait outside a town in tents and bitch about the fact that they haven't been home in six years. A bunch of soldiers come out of the town and fight the soldiers outside the town. The best soldier from each army steps up, and they wail on each other for a bit. That's basically it.

There's a beginning bit too (something about Helen of Troy) and and end bit (something about a big damn wooden horse), but those bits aren't actually in Homer's The Iliad. That's right: no beginning, no ending. Mainly it's just a bunch of guys making speeches about how they're totally gonna wail on someone soon, mixed in with scenes of them totally wailing on someone. As evidenced by the trailer, the film version seems to adhere to this pretty closely.

Whether this'll be worth your ticket money remains to be seen. We're just happy we didn't see Rob Schnieder in Greek armor anywhere as comic relief to Brad Pitt. We're fairly certain combining Schneider with Homer's Iliad in any way would result in the implosion of the entire universe.