PK's Reviews of Movies
Based on Comic Books
- introduction -
For some reason, I ended up watching a fair number of movies that are based on comic books, even though I rarely read the comic books themselves. So, inspired by such fine B-movie sites as Stomp Tokyo and And You Call Yourself A Scientist!, I just thought I'd give my rankings and reviews of which are the good and the bad in this category of film. And once I'd seen about fifteen of them, I figured I might as well start filling in the rest of the list. Little did I realize, back then, how many there actually are.
Now that a whole ton of new comic book movies are coming out -- and you wouldn't believe how many are in development -- this may offer a little perspective. Especially since they are now making so many of them that I wouldn't be surprised if they oversaturate the market and cause a crash in the popularity of the genre.
Making a movie based on a comic book is a difficult art. The film medium demands a certain realism that the comic page seems to demand an absence of. There is a difficult set of choices to be faced about how much to tone down the outrageous parts -- too little and your film story can lose all believability, too much and you lose the flavor of the comic. (Should Captain America have silly winglets on his head, or be sensible and wear a helmet? Should the Hulk make mile-long jumps, or just stomp around? In each case, both approaches have been tried.) And do you present the world in which the action takes place as realistic and true to life, or as stylized and artificial, distanced from reality? Too much of the former and any scientifically impossible elements of the story put a real strain on believability unless you tone them down, and too much of the latter makes the story uninvolving and meaningless.
And how much do you remain "true to the source material"? That's what the serious comix fans want from you, but failing to expand beyond the limitations of the comic book medium can impose major limitations. Sticking close to what worked in the comics will probably give you a film that's solidly in the middle of the pack. Departing in an original direction can send you to the bottom, or to the top.
In the left-hand frame, you will see that I have ranked the titles roughly in order from best to worst. Alternately, you can switch the index in the left-hand frame to list the titles alphabetically, or in categories based on the type of comic it was made from. I have put in placeholders for those films I haven't seen yet (which are mostly pointless sequels). Unseen film titles are in italics. Each title has a little popup quote from the accompanying review that displays itself when you move the mouse over it (this feature won't work in old browsers).
I'll rate the movies with capes, from four capes for the ideal comic book movie to zero for the worst possible comic book movie. Only two films rate all four capes, and one of them is not even a true comic book film. Conversely, only one very special film earns zero capes. I will also add from zero to three tents to indicate a film's level of unintentional amusement. One tent means it's unintentionally amusing once in a while, two means it's getting toward "so bad it's good" and will entertain you if you're easily amused by bad movies, and three tents means it's an Alternative Classic, practically another Robot Monster. Only two films here earn three tents. The tent symbol is meant to suggest camp value, but you don't earn any tents by being campy on purpose. It's a measure of accidental entertainment.
To put it another way, tents are how we separate the good bad movies from the bad bad movies.
This is a cape: 
and this is half a cape: 
and
this is a tent: 
and
half a tent: 
Everyone should allow some room for differing points of view... so in some cases I will include a quote from a reviewer whose, ah, standards are very different from mine. To wit, John Stanley, principal author of Creature Features: The Science Fiction, Fantasy, And Horror Movie Guide. Long ago, John Stanley hosted a late night movie show called Creature Features... a show I watched religiously in my teens -- especially when its previous host, the godlike Bob Wilkins, was in charge. Bob Wilkins was the greatest movie host in the history of television, but never mind that... he handed the show over to John Stanley, who has an encyclopedically thorough knowledge of genre movies, especially horror, as his Creature Features Movie Guide proves. But... god damn, is he a terrible critic! At least, to me. Here's an example of how John Stanley rates movies... according to him, each of the following is worth exactly the same rating, three stars (out of five):
- Terry Gilliam's magnificent The Adventures of Baron Münchausen
- Godard's seminal Alphaville
- William Shatner's own Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
- The Three Stooges Meet Hercules
- Mortal Kombat
So for certain films where Mr. Stanley's judgement differs sharply from mine, I'll give his star rating and a quote from his review. For example, my review of Judge Dredd awarded one cape, but John Stanley granted it four stars out of five, so I quote his review thusly:
those bizarre shoulder pads of Judge Dredd couldn't have been
filled better than by Sylvester Stallone... frequently stunning,
and always exciting.
You'll notice I'm generally talking about superhero-type comics here, not about underground comics or manga. I don't include the marvelous film Ghost World, for instance, because it really has nothing to do with the others I'm reviewing. There is nothing in the film that indicates a comic-book origin. The same applies to Road to Perdition or A History of Violence, and for that matter, to Tales From the Crypt. American Splendor is even farther outside this page's territory.
(Tiny personal connection to Ghost World: the author, Daniel Clowes, lives in my old neighborhood. Whee!)
Certain measures had to be taken to keep the list down to a manageable size. I disregard stuff over 50 years old, such as the serials popular in the nineteen thirties and forties. I summarize what I know of this old stuff in a special section. I will include a few newspaper comic strips that encroach near a superhero-like form, but ignore most newspaper strips -- no Blondie or Garfield films. I reject characters who have a presence in comics but originated elsewhere, like Tarzan. (But The Shadow slipped through as an exception. Green Hornet will probably be another, just because of Kevin Smith.) I will also disregard TV movies, except for mentioning their existence in passing in another special section, and animated films in general (with one exception)... actually, almost all superhero animation comes under the TV category anyway. And I can't cover manga films such as the blood-drenched Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami) series -- which I hear is now being remade by, of all people, Darren Aronofsky (hopefully not as a western, as some are saying) -- or, in general, films made in languages other than English. (This is another area where I had to make one exception.)
Within this realm, I will try to include most everything that you'd have any chance of finding in a video shop. And I do include some films about superhero-like characters which are not derived from any actual comic. Parodies, for instance.
One big reason I've avoided non-superhero films is that the ratings here have to be rather heavily, ah, prorated. Graded on the curve, that is. No less than five of the movies I'm reviewing are currently on the IMDb's list of the 100 lowest rated films of all time, and not one is in the top 250. (Road to Perdition did get onto that list.) Quite a few of these films have been nominated for Golden Raspberry awards, a.k.a. Razzies, which are granted annually to the worst films of the year. Some of these are Razzie winners, sometimes in multiple categories. Many have also won awards from the Razzies' less prestigious rival The Stinkers, whose own list of the 100 worst films of all time includes seven of these movies. These are hardcore B movies, for the most part... and even worse, many of them are Summer Blockbusters*. This is a group of films where a mess like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen actually ranks as better than average! (Slightly.) Including something like Ghost World in the rankings would mean that nothing else would be able to get more than about two and a half capes.
The two films that I awarded four capes to are the only ones here that I would hold up as competitive in quality with "real" movies. And even they aren't going to be fully appreciated unless you have one foot in the B-movie world.
Furthermore, even among the good ones, the majority are essentially
juvenile. Only a few of these films qualify as authentically
grown-up. These films are marked with a special grownupness icon, to wit,
a balding head. Or half a head for movies that are partly grown-up and
partly still, ah, young at heart.
What the hell, here are the approximate cape ratings I'd give for some of those excluded films, graded according to the same curve:
| Ghost World | |
| Persepolis | |
| Road to Perdition | |
| A History Of Violence | |
| American Splendor | |
| Lone Wolf and Cub | |
So forget about fine art, it's time to put on your long-johns and join the battle against Communism! I mean, against crime.
