Darkman (1990) Dir. Sam Raimi Universal Pictures Rating: B-
Several, actually. But we'll get to that.
Sam Raimi, despite apparently
contracting the same parasitic brainworms that infect fellow
once-talented director Tim Burton, is reasonably good at
his job when he actually cares about what he's producing. Most of the time. He's basically the Great Illustrated Classics version of Peter
Jackson, who happens to be the Publix version of Guillermo del Toro, who is in turn the Temu version of Ridley Scott, who is a distant descendant of the divinely inspired F.W. Murnau. Tolkien writes extensively about this concept in The Silmarillion.
I grew up on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man
films. The first two, anyway. I saw them both in theaters multiple
times and watched the DVDs so often I've nearly got the
screenplays memorized (see also: Batman '89). I did not see
Spider-Man 3 (2007) in theaters and put off watching it for
many years because I heard that it sucked. As alien as it may sound
to some, hate-watching did not become a mainstream phenomenon until
around the time YouTube started allowing videos longer than ten
minutes in length. If word on the street was that a movie wasn't
worth plunking down the seven bucks to see in one of the three
theater chains within a twenty minute drive of your house, you could
take that assessment at face value and wait a few months to rent it
at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video for four bucks. We did not know how
good we had it in the Bush era. Eventually I snagged a DVD copy of
Spider-Man 3 during Hollywood Video's going-out-of-business
fire sale and yes, it was just as disappointing as I was lead to
believe.
But lo, I also picked up a different DVD around the same time. A lovely three disc set out of a Walmart bin called the DARKMAN TRILOGY. It featured this flick and the following two Darkman films which got straight-to-VHS releases and starred Imhotep from the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies in the lead role. Yes, I am planning on eventually watching those as well. Especially since I cannot remember a damn thing about them.
"The Mummy movies or the Darkman sequels?" you ask.
"Yes," I respond.
- - -
To
repeat the same cliffnotes version of the movie's production that
every hack video essayist has cobbled together, Darkman came
about when Sam Raimi couldn't get the film rights to either Batman or
The Shadow and decided to create his own OC instead 'cause he's an OG
like that.
The
point where I differentiate from other hack essayists is that I
unironically love this character more than either Batman or The
Shadow. Batman is a dead franchise; totally played out in every
logical and illogical extreme to the point it has no stories left to
tell and the character is a perfunctory part of the bleached,
threadbare American psyche being kept on life support for merchandising rights. Similarly, The Shadow is a really
cool idea that is sadly never coming back into prominence again no
matter how much psychic energy RazörFist
expends in attempting to manifest it as a tulpa of bygone better
days. Whenever he's not hypocritically stealing from it for his own
stories, that is.
I'm just teasing, Razör. I love you. We bald men need to stick together.
- - -
Our movie in question stars part-time actor and full-time douchebag Liam Neeson trying and failing to pull off an American accent as Dr. Peyton Westlake, who in typical superhero fashion is an overworked scientist of unclear doctorate working upon a cool invention that he's gonna find multiple alternative vigilante justice based uses for. In this case it's a synthetic skin he's attempting to master the formula for so it can be mass produced and replace skin grafting for burn victims. Trouble is he just can't get the damn stuff to hold form after an hour and thirty minutes. Fortunately for him that's just enough time to watch this movie without anyone suspecting a thing.
Peyton, despite being an emotionally stunted Reed Richards type, has somehow managed to land a supportive girlfriend his own age named Julie Hastings (played by the very pretty Frances McDormand) who works in a law firm. Julie inadvertently gets mixed up in a RoboCop-esque landgrab scheme by her obviously evil corpoboss Strack (Colin Friels) and his paid off gangster gang ran by finger collecting miniboss psychopath Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake; not to be confused with the more famous Larry from Den of the Drake).
Strack's EVIIIIIIIL plan is to demolish the crumbling side of the city and rebuild it, thereby creating thousands of new jobs and cleaning up a polluted riverside while also stimulating the local economy and running off the ghetto crime lords inhabiting the slums. The fiend! Because he utilizes Robert G. Durant's gang to dust the local bangers and pays bribes to the city zoning committee this makes him a villain in the fiction. In the real world this makes him an efficient civil contractor and a potential gubernatorial candidate should he later choose to enter politics.
Just once I want a competency porn movie where these guys are the protagonists and the myopic hippie fuckasses who don't understand how the game of politics is played are the meddling morons paid off by the real villains. It'd basically be Thank You For Smoking (2005) but played straight.
Strack is not memorable in the least and his grand evil scheme is entirely inconsequential to the plot. You could have cut him out entirely and the story would've been better for it. Robert G. Durant, following in the fine tradition of minibosses, is far more interesting and has some real rizz to him, as the TikTok Americans say. In fact, the main villain plot and the vast gulf between supervillain and miniboss memorability harkens back to the aforementioned RoboCop to the point I wouldn't be surprised if Raimi had it on in the background while hashing out the script.
Peyton has the absolute worst timing in the world as he has a major scientific breakthrough regarding his synthetic skin - that it is photosensitive and will hold form in the dark - right before Durant shows up and has his goons beat him near to death in an extremely memorable extended torture sequence that includes fire stunts, claymation hands getting electrocuted, and ends in the supremely hilarious sight of a burning Peyton getting shot straight into the air out of his exploding laboratory toward the camera while screaming like a Roman candle.
POV: Satan witnessing John McCain arrive in Hell on 25th August, 2018
Fortunately Peyton kicks out of this thanks to
an experimental procedure (the Rangeberitz Technique) performed on him by Nurse Alex Price (whom
is laying low in America after her last patient
turned into a werewolf and mauled all those people in Piccadilly
Circus). Said procedure deadens all his nerve endings (and apparently
somehow prevents infections from taking root in his multiple open wounds). As a result
of this Peyton cannot feel pain. In fact, Peyton cannot feel any
tactile sensation at all. He basically gets turned into a babyface
version of Superman: TAS's excellent take on Metallo. And much like
Metallo, the complete loss of the most basic of all the senses drives
Peyton completely mental as he begins lashing out physically and
verbally to compensate for a locked-in brain starving for
stimulation. Understandable.
Nurse Alex Price will finally have her
karmic balance come due later that year when Charles Lee Ray rather
lamely cuts her throat off-screen.
Peyton stumbles back into the ruins of his laboratory, salvages what little he can from it, then hides out in an abandoned factory (which looks really familiar - I think it might be the same one from either the finale of A Nightmare on Elm St. 2 (1985) or Dirty Harry (1971)) and begins rebuilding.
I'm also 90% sure that's the same cat actor from Pet Sematary.
The remainder of the movie is rather good scenes of angst acting from Liam Neeson intercut with him trying to rekindle his relationship with Julie and systematically murdering the shit outta Robert G. Durant's gang using misdirection tactics and pure force. I'm a sucker for a good supernatural revenge story. See also: The Crow (both the 1994 movie and the original James O'Barr series) and the very underrated grimdark furry comic "Cliff" by the team of David Hopkins and Roz Gibson.
After a few months in hiding, Peyton finally gets a working mask of his old face and proceeds to meet up again with Julia in the most romantic and reassuring way possible: stalking her to the cemetery and standing stiffly in the distance, silently glaring right at her in broad daylight while she's standing over his gravestone in a shot that looks straight out of The Innocents (1961) or The Haunting (1963). She understandably nearly has a heart attack. This is a man of charm and tact.
I say this as if that isn't exactly how I'd do it, too.
Peyton's attempts to woo Julie are hampered by his extreme self-confidence issues stemming from being horrifically deformed and his attempts to hide it from her. This isn't a deal breaker for Julie once she finds out, ironically enough. I guess she always suspected him getting exploded into a fireball would leave some lasting marks.
Following a very out of place, much too long, and not too terribly well done helicopter chase stunt scene that almost certainly ate up most of the budget and ends with Durant getting violently blown up (he gets better), Peyton follows Strack to the top of his construction site in order to rescue a kidnapped Julie and they have a standard superhero movie finale that ends withPeyton dropping Strack off the rigging to his death. Julie tries to comfort Peyton and convince him they can still salvage this and have their old life back... but Peyton is having none of it. Juiced up on adrenaline and mentally wrecked from the whole sequence of events, he admits to her that he doesn't feel right anymore. He doesn't feel human anymore. He flees from her, using his synthetic disguises to blend into morning foot traffic. As he does so he declares that Peyton Westlake is dead. From now on you can call him... Darkman. Chef's kiss.
- - -
Now... why do I like Darkman so much as a character? Largely because he scratches my angst itch. He's an outsider. A loner. A man desperate for connection. He's also his own worst enemy. He's trapped within himself, unable to feel pain or pleasure and believing he's no longer deserving of either. He could use his synthetic skin to look like anyone. Hell, he's legally dead - he could go anywhere and start again. There's nothing stopping him from letting the world know he's alive and picking right back up where he left off. But he's been so decimated emotionally that he may as well not even be a man at all. Basically, I dig him because all those things people superimpose upon Batman and The Shadow in a flailing attempt to make them seem deeper than they are? That's what Darkman textually is. He is a man who is not really a man. Not anymore. Fully formed right outta the box. No decades of fanwankery or haphazardly incorporated retcons required.
Cannot wait to see how they fuck that up in the sequels.
- - -
Danny Elfman's score is a mixed bag. While the main theme is pretty underwhelming and comes off as a less cool version of what Jerry Goldsmith would do for The Shadow (1994) some of the ambient tracks like the music inside Darkman's warped DIY laboratory are appropriately great and really get across how this dude is a mentally unstable Universal Horror character in spirit.
The VFX are also a coin toss. While the costuming and the stylized in-camera stuff that's supposed to look like a comic book are great and the handful of digital images utilized are surprisingly good for the time, the blue and green screen stuff is really, really quite bad on the whole. Everyone knows bad CGI is bad. Bad blue screen is even worse because you'll have people with nostalgia goggles on tell you that it's charming and not engagement destroying trash.
Raimi's ever interesting framing and editing is what makes this movie as good as it is. The plot and acting is so-so, the music is Danny Elfman's cutting room scraps from Batman '89, and the action sequences actively detract from my enjoyment. All you need to make a movie like this work is to have a cool character concept and shoot it in a fun way. Either things will come together or they won't. Raimi's experience as a horror director really shines through in this. His innate understanding of how goofy and unnerving are two sides of the same coin has always been the main appeal of his work.
Seeing as how this is a crime movie filmed like a horror movie and follows a good man in a bad situation, this meets RazörFist's criteria for being a film noir. Unlike The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942). But I'm sure he'll throw in some other arbitrary qualifier if he ever reads this.
- - -
FAVORITE QUOTES
PEYTON: [his flaming silhouette flying by the camera as it gets exploded] GAAAAARAAAAAAAAH-!!
[Peyton inadvertently sets one of his bandaged hands on fire with a Bunsen burner. He stares at it curiously before putting it out with a wet towel.]
PEYTON: My... my hands. They took my hands. [Begins sobbing; in the exact same voice as the famous "I could have done more" speech from the end of Schindler's List] THEY TOOK MY HANDS!
[Peyton utterly snaps; puts a funnel on his head and begins dancing around]
PEYTON: See the dancing freak! Pay five bucks! To see the dancing freak! Only five bucks!
JULIE: [to Strack] If you're not going to kill me... I have things to do.
[Peyton holds Strack by the ankle over the edge of a building.] STRACK: You let me die and you'll become as bad as me! Worse! You can't! I know you too well! Dropping me is not really an option for ya. That's not something you could live with.
[Peyton drops him like a sack of moldy oranges; Strack screams]
PEYTON: [deadpan] I'm learning to live with a lot of things. [Distant CRASH of Strack's body hitting the road]
JULIE: [looking upon Peyton's deformed face fully for the first time] You'll perfect the skin. You'll make it work. It doesn't matter. PEYTON: Julie... don't you think I told myself that, night after sleepless night? It's just a burn. Skin-deep. It doesn't matter. And if I covered it, hid behind a mask, you could love me for who I was inside. Without pity. But a funny thing happened. As I worked in the mask, I found the man inside was changing. He became... wrong. A monster. I can live with it now, but I don't think anyone else can. JULIE: I want our life back. [Peyton turns to leave; Julie calls after him]
JULIE: Peyton! Peyton! DARKMAN: Peyton is gone.
[closing narration] DARKMAN: I'm everyone. And no one. Everywhere. Nowhere. Call me... Darkman.
Batman Forever (1995) Dir. Joel
Schumacher Warner Bros. Pictures Rating: B- (B+ including
deleted scenes)
"Riddle me this, riddle me that...."
Continuing on the subject of movies I
watched a dozen times on VHS as a kid is 1995's Batman Forever.
I unapologetically like this movie. I like all of the first four
Batman films in their own unique ways. (First five if you count the
Adam West one.) Hell, Batman '89 has been my favorite film for
the last fifteen years of my life. Batman Forever is
the flawed emerald of the series; it's pretty, it's gaudy, and in
your mind's eye you love it for what it could be instead of what it
is.
- - -
The
film follows Batman / Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) as he ineptly tries to
apprehend the villain Two-Face / Harvey Dent (Tommy Lee Jones) who in
turn spends the entire runtime ineptly trying to murder Batman for
having failed to prevent the incident that turned him into a
bifurcated neon pink freak. For some reason the writers chose to
forego adapting the exceptional backstory these two share in the
comics of being former allies and the deep seated guilt Bruce feels
for having failed to prevent Harvey's marring by presenting it as
barely touched upon background lore. Two-Face is one of the
surprisingly few Batman villains (the others being the Penguin, Black
Mask, and post-'Heart of Ice' Mr. Freeze) that actually works as a
proper dramatic foil to Bruce Wayne and for some reason we're just
not gonna take advantage of that here. Their loss.
Tommy Lee Jones, who'd make a great
Two-Face if they were playing the character straight like almost
every other adaptation does, somehow still manages to make a great
Two-Face while having to play the character like a raving comedic
lunatic. Accurate to the source material? Hell no. Entertaining in
its own right? Very much so.
Bruce
also has to deal with obsessive Wayne Enterprises employee turned
tech startup guru Edward Nygma (Jim Carrey) who moonlights as The
Riddler to enact his hyper-fixation on destroying Bruce Wayne after
being snubbed by him during a routine factory inspection. Two-Face
and The Riddler quickly team up to go on a crime spree to fund
Nygma's startup company; a business partnership that turns out to be
mutually beneficial when they learn that – shock of shocks –
Bruce Wayne and Batman are in fact the same person. I do love it when
supervillains pal around with one another like goobers.
Jim
Carrey's acting is alright. Tolerable. It's neither as good as The
Mask
(1994) or Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(2004) nor is it as painful as The
Cable Guy
(1996) or Ace
Ventura: Pet Detective
(1994) where you spend half the sit just wanting to smack him across
his ridiculously angular canuckistanian head and tell him he should
actually try hanging around human beings for a bit if he insists on pretending to be one for a living. There are a handful of moments
where he goes too over-the-top but he mostly fits in with the comic
book feel of the movie. I'm never gonna bash a comic book film for
actually feeling like a comic book – I am a better man than Doug
Walker is – but I will criticize Jim Carrey for being a nutjob who
needs to tone it down. I dunno what kinda white boy designer drugs he
was on during this period but he needed to halve his dosage.
For whatever reason Nygma is presented
in this tale as an obsessed Bruce Wayne fanboy. A weird facet of the
character that is carried over into The Batman (2022). I
suppose it makes more sense for a one-off story than to have him be a
rando puzzle / video game designer like in the comics and jump
through the narrative hoops of explaining how exactly that ties into
Bruce's personal life (Spoiler: it doesn't; not every supervillain
needs to have one degree of separation to the hero, only the ones
that actually matter).
The Riddler's villain origin in this
movie always struck me as being a tamer version of the Mad Hatter's
as shown in the exceptional Batman: TAS episode "Mad As A
Hatter". Nerdy Wayne Enterprises employee with social issues who
specializes in brain manipulation goes off the deep end when he's
rejected and dons the costume of an established fictional character
to go on a crazy spree. Yes, I said established fictional character.
Between the bobble heads, statuettes, and creepy as all hell full
sized animatronic that Nygma keeps in his apartment, it's safe to say
the Riddler is a preexisting and recognizable character / mascot in
this universe that Nygma simply appropriated the look of for his
crimes. I actually kinda dig it. In typical fake smart guy fashion
he's actually a performative loser who cannot come up with his own
original ideas.
"eh-hehe-hehe!"
Special passing mention should go to
Nygma's obviously put-upon supervisor, Fred (Ed Begley Jr.), who
perfectly sells the shame and embarrassment of having to wrangle Jim
Carrey on a daily basis and may well be the best performed role in
the movie despite his very small part. The poor man gets thrown out a
window during Nygma's villain origin for his efforts.
In
addition to all that, Batman meets up with abnormal psychologist Dr.
Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), who is horny on main for Bats and
makes sure he knows it. This leads to a rather funny scene in which
she tries to seduce Batman and Val Kilmer fails miserably trying to
sell disinterest at Nicole Kidman circa 1994 feeling him up while
wearing black negligee. It's like one of those softcore Twokinds
Patreon
exclusive scenes that Tom Fischbach posts to make his fans edge.
...not that I'd know anything about
that.
Chase eventually enters the ol'
superhero love triangle with Bruce Wayne and Batman. It gets to the
point where Bats is fully willing to go to town on her while wearing
the full rubber batsuit... only for her to ruin it by saying she's
developed the feels for Bruce Wayne instead. Women. Getting cock blocked by
yourself is a plot point that occurs surprisingly often in superhero
media. Mary Jane Watson is the best love interest because she avoided
this trope altogether by discovering Peter Parker's secret identity
way back around, like, Amazing Spider-Man #6 and then couching that
information for twenty years, including shooting down a marriage
proposal from him in the seventies because dumbass Peter still hadn't
told her he was Spider-Man yet.
I don't care if that was a retcon –
it still counts.
I
rather like how they use Dr. Chase Meridian in this movie even if
she's not so much a character as a prop for Bruce's personal drama to
play off of. Her surname is not incidental as she symbolically acts
as the dividing line in the tug-of-war between the Bruce Wayne and
Batman sides of Bruce's life: a totem that both parts of him covet
but neither can have unless he can find a compromise between them.
It's never stated outright in the series but the inability for him to
be either Bruce Wayne or Batman to an adequate extent is implied to
be why his relationships with Vicki Vale and Selina Kyle fell through
in the gaps following the previous two movies. Chase even gifts Bruce
a dream fetish doll – which of course is split right down the
middle like Two-Face – sensing he might need a little smack on the
ass to work through his mental issues. The doll doesn't play a direct
role in the plot, but he does give it back to her at the end and
states he won't need it going forwards.
She also keeps this around her room and is surprised when Bruce sees a bat in it.
Caught
in the crossfire of this typical Gotham nonsense is young-ish
traveling circus trapeze artist Dick Grayson (Chris O'Donnell), who
moves in with Bruce and his butler Alfred (Michael Gough) after
Two-Face murders his family during a performance. Dick is a rather
likable character despite the writing snarl of his ambiguous age –
the character is written to be somewhere between fifteen and nineteen
years old despite O'Donnell visibly being a grown-ass adult with
sideburns and piercings in his mid-twenties, and that's not even
getting into Grayson being twelve in the comics when his
parents get aced.
Dick Grayson bonds with Alfred and
Bruce pretty quickly but his pesky teenage(?) compulsions lead to him
discovering the Batcave and joyriding the Batmobile, after which he
demands that Bruce let him become his partner so he can wreak bloody
vengeance upon Two-Face. They have a conversation about the cycle of
vengeance; specifically how hollow it leaves you to kill a person
who's killed your parents. This is obviously a holdover from when
Keaton was supposed to reprise the role as this lacks any real
dramatic punch if he hasn't deep-sixed Jack Napier already.
Dick Grayson's situation causes Bruce
to flash back to the death of his parents at the hands of a young
Jack Napier, pearls and all. The reminiscing carries along to his
parents' wake where he comes across a red book and his eight year-old
self reads it... and that's all the explanation we're ever gonna get
for that. Even though it gets mentioned again when Bruce briefs Dr.
Meridian on his parents being murdered in front of him. Almost like
it's a very important element of the story that does not get
resolved. In the theatrical cut, anyway.
Eventually
everything comes to a head when Wayne Manor is assaulted, the Riddler
destroys the Batcave, Chase is kidnapped (right after realizing Bruce
is Batman) and Bruce Wayne gets SHOT IN THE FUCKING HEAD. In the
theatrical cut this doesn't mean a damn thing as he kips up in the
next scene totally fine but in the deleted scenes it's a totally
different animal. In the proper version of the tale, this results in
Bruce getting a temporary case of amnesia and Alfred jogging his
memory by sending him into the caves underneath Wayne Manor. ONE OF THE BEST MOMENTS IN THE ENTIRE BATMAN FRANCHISE then occurs as
therein he finds the red book he keeps seeing in his flashbacks –
his father's journal – and reads it to discover he's been
repressing the memory of having been the one to badger his parents to
go see a movie the night of their murder, setting in motion the
entire event. Bruce's memory comes flooding back to him as a
metaphorical giant fucking animatronic bat arrives and stands
face-to-face with him. Bruce mirrors its pose and symbolically merges
the two sides of his personality – Bruce Wayne and Batman; not two
separate entities sharing the same body but in fact one man with one
goal. He then emerges from the cave and confidently tells Alfred that
he knows who he is: he's Batman.
YEAH, I DUNNO WHY YOU'D CUT THAT OUT
EITHER.
There is absolutely no excuse for them
leaving the entire dramatic climax of the film on the cutting room
floor despite keeping in all the buildup and post-script to it.
That'd be like if someone made a Lord of the Rings film
adaptation and left in all the foreshadowing to the Scouring of the
Shire but then completely cut out the ending of the story because
they spent too much time on the Battle of Helm's Deep instead, didn't
even do it correctly, and only succeeded in fucking up the pacing in
the process.
That's right – I'm calling you out,
Ralph Bakshi.
Bruce,
having settled his personal troubles, then willingly takes on Dick
Grayson as his partner. Grayson adopts the nom
de guerre Robin
in reference to a touching story he tells Alfred about his parents.
They then lay siege to Nygma's enormous laser powered blender looking
fortress to save the day.
Despite spending the whole movie
telling Dick that revenge is a fool's game, Batman reminds us all
that this is supposed to be canon with the Tim Burton flicks when he
outright murders Two-Face by throwing a handful of quarters at him
while he's standing on a wet girder (that he's somehow managed to
teleport eighty feet down a sheer metal elevator shaft within eight
seconds to be on), causing him to fall screaming to his death on a
pile of jagged rusted metal spikes eighty feet below. Robin initially
reacts with shock at seeing Bruce blatantly go back on his word...
but then he smiles. He's tasted blood for the first time. Homicides,
as we all know, are like McNuggets – you'd kill to have more than
just one.
"Oh yeah, I could totally get into this."
There's a very nice narrative three
beat – literally one of the oldest storytelling tricks out there –
of dramatic handgrab saves; the first being Dick's father catching
him during a trick at the circus, the second being Robin saving
Batman from being buried alive (which doubles as an homage to Tim
Drake's introduction story from the comics, “A Lonely Place of
Dying”), and the third being Batman saving Robin from the deathtrap
at the end of the film and symbolically taking the place of his
father in the process. Planting. Reminder. Payoff. It sucks that I
live in a day and age where this kinda basic narrative structure is
impressive to see done correctly in a film, but oh well.
Nygma gets overdosed with brainwave
energies as his giant Box explodes (giggity). As Batman approaches
him he hallucinates the giant bat from Bruce's dreams swooping
towards him. Completely bereft of proper context for this, Nygma
shrieks like a bitch and has a total mental breakdown. Now that's how
you pay off a motif, kids. The Riddler spends the rest of his days
rotting in Arkham Asylum, Bruce gets a goodbye kiss from Chase, and
we cut to credits on a nice little homage to the '60s Batman intro
with Batman and Robin running towards the camera in silhouette.
FIN
- - -
Gotham City in this story is a hellish
cocktail of neon, dutch angles, art deco, and German expressionism in
which the lightning is always inexplicable and even the lowliest of
street toughs can afford top shelf leather drip and 2002 Jeff Hardy glowstick bodypaint. I love it. The titanic art deco inspired
buildings and beautiful internal decors of the upper class business
districts being offset with the '80s neon hellholes beneath them
creates a beautiful styles clash that makes for great visual
shorthand of this proud, powerful city decaying from the bottom up.
In a move that I'm gonna chose to interpret as intentional, Nygma's
nouveau riche status is
communicated in a scene where he hosts an upper class fundraising
shindig in the penthouse suite of one of these skyscrapers but
gaudily chooses to adorn the room with the same kinda neon naff he lived
in just a couple weeks prior while wearing a suit that's obviously the poor person's ideaof what rich people dress like.
I know I'm in the minority when I say
this is my favorite take on the setting in any medium.
In addition to that we've got some
truly outlandish set and costume designs. They... mostly work.
Special mention goes to the street gang of bodypaint enthusiasts, the
silver action figure look of the second batsuit, and the goofy as
hell Batmobile design which I know has its fans but to me, in the
words of the prophet Chad Warden, it looks like a dildo.
Elliot Goldenthal produces a very good original score, which I associate with Batman almost as much as Danny
Elfman's music. A perfect blend of campy big band nonsense and
brooding atmosphere. While the score is great the soundtrack is
gloriously schizophrenic and deserving of a future review in its own
right. You've got Method Man and Nick Cave on the same album. Even
I'm not crazy enough to square that circle. This is truly a snapshot
of that bygone golden age where we Americans were culturally
untouchable and knew neither fear nor shame.
I love this film more for what it
could have been than what it was. Mix in the deleted scenes and give
this script one more pass in the writing room to square up all the
themes and tone and you'd be looking at a possible A-tier Batman
movie. As it stands it's a victim of a bipolar desire to be both a
deep dive into Bruce's psychosis and a campy, colorful popcorn flick.
It almost makes it work. In fact, it's just this side of being
unintentionally genius since duality's a major theme of the story
itself, from the choice of villain down to the struggle the
protagonist is going through trying to make sense of his two
divergent careers. A happy accident. Sadly, the whole is more than
the sum of its parts and the finished product doesn't quite stick the
landing. It remains a flawed, if pretty gem.
- - -
FAVORITE QUOTES
TWO-FACE: Fortune smiles. Another day of wine and roses – or in your case, beer and pizza!
CHASE: Let's just say I could write a hell of a paper on a grown man who dresses like a flying rodent. BATMAN: [mildly offended] Bats aren't
rodents, Dr. Meridian.
NYGMA: [after dropping Fred out the
window into the comically oversized and improbably placed civic
waterfall on the side of the Wayne Enterprises building] Ooh! Nice
form but a little rough on the landing. He may have to settle for the
bronze.
RIDDLER: [to Two-Face] Very few people
are both a summer and a winter, but you pull it off nicely.
[deleted scene] BRUCE: The night of my parents' wake,
Alfred, I remember running... falling... the bat. There was something
else... or was it just the bat? What was I running from? Is that all
this is - a little boy being afraid of a monster in the dark?
BATMAN: [to Riddler] Release Chase.
This is between you and me. TWO-FACE: And me. [turns cheek] AND ME!
Dir. Frank Oz Paramount Pictures & Columbia
TriStar Rating: C+
No thoughts. Brain scampled egg.
Ah, that span of time from the late
eighties to the early aughts when the noble savage trope became the
default media portrayal for an entire race of human beings. This was
thanks in no small part to Gen X rebelling against the honestly more
grounded portrayal of natives by the previous generation's films such
as The Searchers (1956) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
You couldn't swing a dead cat between the years of 1986 and 1998
without hitting the Obligatory Native American Token Character. They
were everywhere. Didn't matter if it was X-Men, Power Rangers, or that one Star Trek show I still haven't watched – the red man cometh. It wasn't malicious. In fact, quite
the opposite.
If you went through the U.S. public
educational system during the latter half of the 20th century you were programmed to see Native Americans as this one
congealed, homogenized mass of folks who were so peaceful and pure
their culture was neither morally nor technologically changed for
thousands of years until the white man arrived and stole their land
through trickery. Native Americans were framed as the anti-heroes of
history; fighting the good, politically correct fight against the
(conveniently enough) current societal boogeymen of pollution,
colonialism, and that damn evil United States Army who are always
implied to be stodgy conservative types motivated by sheer
materialistic greed, never left-leaning nanny statists who want
everything on earth regulated and think they know better than
everyone else. White folks of all stripes adored them and wanted to
be like them. We used to trace our ancestry so we could brag at
dinner parties about being one eighteenth Apache despite not knowing
the first thing about that tribe or its history. Everybody working a
nine-to-five wanted to be a working class anti-hero in the '90s and
the less of your skin you had to risk to achieve that title, the
better.
Sure, Geronimo straight up admits in
his autobiography that his band murdered and robbed scores of
innocent Mexican peasants and he has no regrets about it 'cause he
doesn't view them as people, but I guess you can't be an anti-hero
without the anti part.
Based on a book series you've never
heard of (by Lynne Reid Banks) and sold for home release in a
clamshell VHS you definitely remember, The Indian in the Cupboard is
cut from that same safe '90s kids film cloth that most kids films
were back when the film industry made movies aimed at more than just
the emotionally stunted thirty-something “adult” demographic. Ya
see, way back before TikTok or even WiFi our parents would rent out
or purchase VHS tapes and sit us in front of the TV for two hours
whenever they needed us to shut up long enough to itemize their
deductibles on their one afternoon off. Thus there was an entire
sub-industry in Hollywood dedicated exclusively to children's
entertainment with only a proximal interest in appealing to adults on
the grounds somebody's gotta be old enough to drive the rugrats to
the cinema. I certainly watched this flick enough times growing up.
This movie, The Swan Princess (1994), Jumanji (1995), Toy Story (1995), Aladdin
(1992), The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lost World
(1997), Batman Forever (1995), and TV rips of Jurassic Park
(1993) and both Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of
the Jedi (1983) were in frequent rotation on the family VHS
player between the years of 1997 and 2003. I didn't watch the
original Star Wars until many years later. My younger brother,
for his sins, was a mark for both Monsters, Inc. (2001) and
The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly (1998).
By then I'd moved on to more intellectually stimulating works of art
such as the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy, which I thought were the
peak of cinema at age nine despite having access to the Indiana Jones
trilogy and the whole filmography of James Cameron at the local
library I walked by at least twice a week every week as a teenager.
Enough disjointed stalling. It's been
twenty years since I've seen this thing and I've been waiting since
high school for the Nostalgia Critic to review this and he still
hasn't. If you want something done right....
- - -
Our protagonist is the stupidly named
Omri (Hal Scardino), who gets a surprise party for his ninth birthday. We get a rare full usage of the 'Happy
Birthday' song, which is probably what most of the movie's $45,000,000 budget
went to. Omri's two brothers (Vincent Kartheiser & Ryan Olson) gift him an old cupboard they found in the alleyway that they've mercifully cleaned up and their mother (a very underutilized Lindsay Crouse) finds a key to fit it that belonged to her mother. This is apparently the only thing she kept from her mother for whatever reason. So likely the key has some unexplained cosmic significance. You just don't point something like that out without it meaning something. Turns out I'm right. The key is outright stated to be a magical artifact in the book series.
Omri's got friends, is doing well in
school, isn't being bullied, is perfectly physically healthy, has a
surprisingly well-adjusted and loving middle class nuclear family...
hell, his dad (Richard Jenkins) even makes a point to kiss him
goodnight every night whenever he's not working on a skylight or
calling him out of the room at plot convenient times. The kid's got
no real problems aside from living in NYC and having a space between his front teeth large enough it could be mistaken for an impact crater. I
cannot decide if it's refreshingly realistic or bad fiction writing.
Apparently I'm a bloomer given how all of my reviews thus far have
been glowingly positive so I'm gonna side with refreshing.
The next day at school Omri's friend Patrick
(Rishi Bhat, whom I remember starring in way more movies than he did; I blame his really expressive eyebrows for this)
gifts him an admittedly shitty plastic Indian figurine that he
probably filched from the random plastic Indian display they have in
the hallway for some reason. Omri puts the figure inside the cupboard overnight and locks it, waking up the next morning to discover it's been transformed into a very much alive (if four inches tall) Iroquois named Little Bear (Litefoot).
Turns out the cupboard is in fact a
highly advanced magical device which turns plastic toys into real
flesh-and-blood people and their accessories into functioning
technological devices, seemingly summoning their real life
counterparts from out of history and / or alternate dimensions
parallel to our own. How? Why? No explanation given. Nor is one required.
Because Omri is a kid this
automatically leads to the most memorable scene in the film in which he experiments to see if it's the cupboard that's magic or
specifically just his crappy plastic Indian toy by dumping a bunch of his action figures inside and turning the key. After witnessing
Darth Vader throwing down with a t-rex while a Cardassian gets in a
firefight with RoboCop, Omri realizes that magic is in fact
terrifying and should only be used sensibly. Such as when Little Bear
gets pecked by a bird and he uses the cupboard to summon up WWI
British combat medic Tommy Atkins (Steve Coogan), whom he easily
convinces is dreaming, to patch him up.
Little Bear initially views the
gigantic-ass mouth-breathing preteen as a god of some sort and pals
around with him out of a sense of religious awe. This thankfully
doesn't last long as Little Bear has more than two brain cells to rub
together and he realizes that Omri, despite being two hundred feet
tall and magic, is just a kid. Then he starts paling around with him
'cause hey, magic giant kid who's just as scared of all this as I am.
This switch occurs when Omri uses the cupboard to summon up an old
Mohawk warrior for the sole purpose of yoinking a properly sized bow
for Little Bear from him. The shock of seeing the eight foot gap
between Omri's front teeth gives the old man a lethal heart
attack. Little Bear correctly chews him out for toying with forces he
doesn't understand while revealing he was in the process of taking
his nephew on a rite of passage camping trip when he was plucked out
of his reality into this one. It's the best bit of acting in the
whole flick and a solid bit of writing.
Omri's equally stupidly named older
brothers Gillion (Vincent Kartheiser) and Adiel (Ryan Olson, I assume
anyway; his name is never spoken in the film and I haven't read the
book so I'm having to go off of IMDB for this one) get interested in
Omri borrowing random shit from around the house to give to his tiny
friend and sneak into his room one day to look for their missing
junk.
Omri responds sensibly and PUNT KICKS
HIS BROTHER'S CUTE LITTLE PET RAT LIKE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATHIC
ASSHOLE, CAUSING IT TO VIOLENTLY DRIBBLE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE STAIRS
IN ITS HAMSTER BALL WHILE SPINNING WITH THE CENTRIFUGAL FORCE OF AN
F2 TORNADO. This is played for laughs. Omri's brothers prove to be
better men than I when they politely leave the room without throwing
him down the stairs after the poor critter which is, mercifully,
unharmed. Hell, these are about the chillest older brothers I've seen
in fiction. They only seek sibling vengeance upon Omri when he later
hides the hamster ball and do so by hiding his magic cupboard in
turn... which they then readily give back after the hamster ball is
returned to them. The fiends! The perfectly reasonable fiends!
Seriously, there's next to no real
conflict in this movie. Unless you hate pet rats for whatever reason. You monster.
Omri eventually tells Patrick about
Little Bear and his magic cupboard. Patrick then makes the 1000 IQ
play of putting a cowboy figure into the cupboard against Omri's
wishes which then comes to life as an emotionally distraught miniman
named Boone (David Keith, who I incorrectly remembered as having been
played by Owen Wilson thanks to Night at the Museum). Little Bear and
Boone eventually bond over their love of children and their shared
manlet status after the expected initial conflagration. I mean, over
a century of time separates them (Little Bear drops 1761 and the
French & Indian War while discussing when he comes from and Boone
outright states he's from Texas in the year 1876) so there's really
no reason for them to be beefing aside from the pure aesthetic of
cowboys versus Indians.
During this sequence Little Bear mentions he's been north to the land of the Mi'kmaq. I wonder if he's seen their famous Pet Sematary.
I should also note each time Omri or Patrick
take a plastic Indian from this random plastic Indian school display
they replace it with a wildly unfitting action figure that goes
unremarked upon by any other character – the first time around an Aracula Skeleton
Warriors figure and the second time one of Limburger of Biker
Mice From Mars fame. I can guarantee you haven't thought of
either of those franchises in a long, long while if at all. Why yes,
I did pause this movie midway through to watch the Biker Mice From
Mars intro four times on repeat.
I was more of a SWAT Kats kid
but damned if this isn't the exact kinda stupid shit I love.
One night Little Bear gets war wacky and accidentally shoots Boone thought the chest with an arrow while the gang watch a particularly violent western on
television. The same thing happened to my buddy Eric once. Little
Bear then has to shimmy down between the floorboards to retrieve the
fallen key to the cupboard. Therein he faces... the rat! The
monstrously evil, confused, chubby, adorable pet rat that somehow
escaped from its cage. Thankfully he doesn't kill it. That poor rat
has been through enough. They then use the cupboard to resummon Tommy
to patch up Boone. This incident is enough to convince the boys that
having tiny men with functioning weaponry as glorified pets is in
fact a bad idea and resolve to send them back.
But first Omri offers Little Bear a
wife in the form of a plastic lady he stole from the school's random
plastic Indian display, which is a plot detail getting a lot more
mileage than I expected it would. Little Bear refuses on the grounds
that he'd be magically kidnapping some random chick who very likely
already has a husband and kids. Aside from being a superstitious
goof, Little Bear is obviously a very morally upright dude contrasted
with Omri and Patrick being dumbass kids dicking around with magic
they do not understand. This apparently becomes the major point of
conflict in the book's four sequels, in which the kids forget the moral of this story and totally fuck
over the timeline in Little Bear's world by trying to play god. In
other news, cannot wait for the Dune movie sequels.
Little Bear does a ritual to become Omri's guardian... stepfather... bloodbrother... tribesmate... something or another before getting put back in the cupboard along with Boone and becoming toys again. Omri fictionalizes the events of this week into a short story his teachers like and the music swells really obnoxiously as if something profound was learned.
FIN
- - -
The child acting is average. Rishi is a
smidge better than Scardino, who tries his best but is just too
reserved and inexperienced to carry a movie. They can't all be Henry
Thomas and Drew Barrymore. Litefoot likewise gives it the ol' college
try and turns in a serviceable performance. He is by far the best
part of the ensemble and he does it while freezing his ass off in
buckskin chaps with sharpie scribbles all over his body. That said,
I'm sure he's better at rapping than acting. After all, his official website does proudly claim he won the “Best Male Artist” and “Artist of
the Year” honors from the Native American Music Awards. I should
mention that I recently won the “Best Blogger” award at the 54th
Annual Balding White Guys Who Wear Jean Jackets and Live in Upstate
Georgia Awards. The BWGWWJJ&LUG association is very prestigious
and I'm honored to be recognized by them.
Update: Shit, he's actually got goodflow! I apologze, Litefoot. Please don't scalp me. I have a bad
enough hairline as is. As far as mid-nineties west coast rap goes it's not bad. Touch underrated, even.
The film score by Randy Edelman is rather good but is kindaratherveryextremely overused to the point it becomes grating. I get that you're dealing with child actors and you need to
do a lot of heavy lifting to support them, but after a certain point
it just becomes blatant you've got no faith at all in the actors to
carry the emotion of the scene and are giving them a set of crutches.
The VFX are (on the whole) incredibly
good and hold up to this day. Big surprise, Industrial Light &
Magic know their shit. Seamless composite shots and the utilization
of forced perspective with oversized sets and props will do that.
Things tend to look the best if they're actually there. The use of
tight close-ups and blurred backgrounds as a cheat in some scenes is
noticeable but forgivable.
This movie ba-bombed at the box office and came up ten million
short of meeting its budget, which means it came between fifteen and
twenty million shy of turning a profit. Much like its contemporaries
Balto (1995) and The Swan Princess (1994) it almost made up for this be having a very
good run on VHS and TV. If you were a kid during the nineties there's
a strong chance you've seen this flick at least once. Seems this
one's really fallen by the wayside in the decades since. I can kinda
see why. It's a solid movie with occasionally great VFX but there's
really nothing that sticks with you. It's one of those “you had to
be there” kinda movies that encapsulates one specific tonal vibe
from a bygone era that just comes off as quaint to those reminiscing
and outright kitsch to those without context.
Disney's Pocahontas (1995) was released just a couple weeks before
this movie and doubtless ate into its profitability. In addition to
the usual expected Disney dirty pool and bastardry with distribution
tactics, the films overlap thematically and Pocahontas does
everything this flick does but much more aggressively and memorably,
delivering a product that's simultaneously better and much worse.
Kids nowadays would not understand the deluge of Native American
guilt posting from back then. Maybe that's a good thing. It was like
if you took blaxploitation but removed all the humor, satire, and badassery that made it work. That and blaxploitation was at least
current – all the stereotypes in these Indian flicks were outmoded
by at least a century when they were released. It's almost like they
were never really about Native Americans at all and there was some
other message the people making these products wanted to get across
and this whole race of people acted as a politically convenient,
easily disposable figurehead for them.
But hey, I could always be wrong.
- - -
FAVORITE QUOTES
OMRI: [practically tweaking in class
waiting to get back home] I love the Indian. He's so great. PATRICK: ...why?
OMRI: Thank you. TOMMY: Only doing my duty. OMRI: Would you like to wake up now? TOMMY: No, I never wanna wake up. Mud,
German shells, awful bloody rats. They eat at wounded men. Ugh.
Still, can't desert. Even in a dream.
OMRI: [after getting mugged by some kid
with a mohawk] YOU DON'T DESERVE THAT HAIR!
BOONE: [after spending all morning
sitting in a fanny pack with Little Bear, bonding while listening to
Omri attend school] ...damn. [Boone and Little Bear both start
laughing at the sheer absurdity of their situation]
Yanno what I love? Professional wrestling. Why? Because I just do. I'm not some emasculated eurotrash or never-made-it-never-will indie geek with a podcast who feels the urge to justify his likes and dislikes to total strangers 'cause I'm trying to convince myself they have some higher artistic merit. I know it doesn't. It's pro-wrestling. It's total brainless low-commala entertainment in which grown men in stupid costumes pretend to beat one another up while grifting for money and sometimes beat one another up for real. I like it 'cause it's cool; the same way some folks like cars and other folks like sports they're naïve enough to think aren't worked. Anyone who tries to peel the layers back and dive deeper in has an agenda to push.
That said, wrestling kinda sucks nowadays. You've got two whole generations of malnourished, left-leaning twinks who are more concerned with recreating moves they've seen in video games and bitching about low ratings on Twitter than putting in the work to get halfway decent at their chosen profession. We live in an age where people unironically believe Bryan Danielson is one of the best to ever lace up a pair and Hulk Hogan is an embarrassing relic of the past. Gimmie a break. The ultimate red pill is that based god Kevin Nash was absolutely right about everything - the majority of guys under 6'4" and 230lbs are not believable main eventers; being entertaining is more important than being athletic; characters sell tickets, not matches; the top draws have every reason to selfishly protect their spots as they're the ones earning the troupe their pay; the moves in the ring don't mean a damn thing unless you train the audience into thinking they do; and the ultimate goal of every pro-wrestler should be to make as much money with as little physical effort as possible.
We must RETVRN.
A little over sixty years ago, one of my favorite matches took place. The Japan Pro-Wrestling Alliance (or Association according to the brain trust at Cagematch.net) was Japan's first of many, many wrestling groups. With some places like Mexico and Europe it's hard to pinpoint exactly when the concept of pro-wrestling crystalized but it's very cut-and-dry with Japan as it was imported post-WWII by the likes of Karl Gotch and Lou Thesz and caught on rather quickly as soon as native hero Rikidozan (ironically Korean by birth) was established as the local star to beat back the evil gaijin Americans currently occupying their land in a much needed escape valve for collective cultural tensions. Sorta like how the Hogan era in the WWF was all about America defending itself from the looming threat of nuclear annihilation through the power of bulging muscles and rock 'n roll and the Austin era was all about a collection of surly individuals kicking back against the rise of an increasingly bland, corporatized, politically correct America that seemed to have a hate-on for the common working man.
But socio-economic conditions and larger political ramifications don't mean a damn thing if the art in question cannot stand up on its own in a vacuum. And that's how I judge wrestling matches. Are they fully functional stories taken on their own from bell to bell? A great crowd and a hot angle can give a real boost to a bout but once you step through those ropes and are given eight-to-sixty minutes to tell a story, whether or not it succeeds or not is up to how good you and your partner are at pantomime.
Rikidozan's villain-of-the-week is Dick Beyer, under his most popular guise as The Destroyer. Dick Beyer is lowkey one of the best pro-wrestlers to ever do it. The man understands how to work a live crowd better than most performers ever dream of. Terry Funk and The Rock are the only two off the top of my head who are in the same league... and he might honestly smoke them both by way of doing so while wearing a mask and relying almost exclusively on body language. He's the Lon Chaney of the squared circle. How good is Dick Beyer at his job? He's the only heel to ever receive a national award for his performances.
Describing the beats of the match is unimportant as the real action is what happens between the moves. The flawless way that they play with the audience. The way that The Destroyer is always moving, chatting, engaging the crowd even if locked in a legscissors. The way Rikidozan teases his big overhead chop finisher. Everything is logical. Everything is built up. It's a perfect blend of realistic sport and exaggerated theatrics. You could know nothing about these men going in and understand them both perfectly by the time it's over. And of course the biggest bump is saved for the finish.
Web of Spider-Man vol. 1 #31-32; The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 1 #293-294; Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man vol. 1 #131-132 (Oct. - Nov. 1987)
Rating: A+
Despite a lot of my favorite pieces of media being overtly dark and cynical and my favorite genre of entertainment being grown men kicking one another in the face until one of them can no longer stand, I myself am not a cynical person. Darkness, I reason, only exists to contrast and frame the light. The great artists always understand this, either intellectually or instinctively as a matter of observable fact - Homer, Rembrandt, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Akira Kurosawa, The Ramones, et cetra. As such I'm not really a fan of the "Dark Age" of comic books - that period from the late '80s through the early aughts in which American superhero comics (most notably D.C. and Marvel) overindulged in the occasionally grim overtones of the preceding Bronze Age and thereby lost the context as to how and why those darker moments worked. They were exceedingly rare and always had long-term character consequence. Heroes are supposed to win. If not physically, then always morally. Any piece of fiction in which the villain manages to eek out a W against the protagonist in both columns is to be regarded as nothing more than an occasionally interesting curiosity bereft of any true artistic merit. All "high" art is morally informative and makes a clear statement. All "low" art either lacks a moral foundation, subverts a preexisting one, or is "up for interpretation" as to its meaning.
Yes, I am telling you there is an objective right and wrong way to tell stories.
Do it incorrectly and you end up with the last 25 unreadable years of Marvel Comics.
Do it properly and you end up with something like Kraven's Last Hunt.
It's an Excedrin(TM) evening.
The story of Kraven's Last Hunt is a simple one, though perhaps not as simple as the back of the trade paperback declaring it "THE ULTIMATE TALE OF REVENGE!" A newlywed Spider-Man reflects upon the dangerous nature of his vigilante work and the multiple friends, allies, and enemies he's lost along the way. He's ambushed by perennial B-lister Kraven the Hunter - who's totally off his tits on jungle herbs - and subsequently blasted with a rifle and buried alive. This is only the third or fourth worst thing to happen to Peter Parker that afternoon. Kraven then dons a copy of Spidey's black suit (this takes place after the original Symbiote storyline - fans just loved the look so much that Peter for some reason keeps wearing a spandex replica of the alien parasite that almost killed him) and proceeds to beat the sauce outta street thugs so badly he puts them in traction. In his quest to prove himself superior to his foe, Kraven hunts down and single-handedly subdues the cannibalistic serial killer Vermin, whom Spider had previously only beaten with help from Captain America. Spider-Man awakes after TWO FULL WEEKShave passed and PULLS HIMSELF OUT OF THE GRAVE in an iconic moment. Spidey reunites with Mary Jane and then confronts Kraven, who is so mentally gone by this point he refuses to fight and instead siccs a captured Vermin on him. Kraven witnesses a weakened Spidey get his ass kicked by Vermin and only intervenes when it's obvious even to his depressed, drug-addled mind that Spidey is not so much fighting for sake of vengeance or self-defense as he's fighting to keep everyone else in NYC safe from Vermin possibly escaping. In one last morally uneven move, an utterly deflated Kraven unleashes Vermin back into the streets of NYC before leaving a confession for the police to find and blowing his brains out with a hunting rifle. A heavily roughed up Spider-Man is left to track down and capture Vermin on his lonesome. Which he of course does. Then he goes back home to his wife. Kraven is subsequently buried right next to the grave he dug for Spider-Man.
He's home.
The synopsis does this tale an injustice. The plot itself is good. It's the execution that makes this one of the all-time great comic storylines. There isn't a single panel wasted across all six issues and all of them are gorgeously rendered by Mike Zeck, Bob McLeod, and letterer Rick Parker. The persistence of rain, sludge, and lightning in this storyline is perfectly utilized as are the small little rat and spider motifs. Every character servers a purpose both narratively and - in a rare move for a superhero comic - symbolically as well. Spider-Man, Kraven, and Vermin compliment one another in poetic ways.
Kraven is the man who believes himself to be a beast; a man not unlike the Conan the Cimmerians of latter fiction who feels constrained and defeated by the modern world and its trappings, wishing to exercise control both over it and himself by flaunting the savage part of himself. He is a man who wishes to be a beast and wishes to see others as such. He fails in this endeavor and is broken by it as that is simply not the way the world works and his fellow men are not how he wishes them to be. Defeated, unable to accept that he has been wrong about the world and unwilling to change his mindframe to match, he takes himself out like a coward, falsely believing there to be dignity in it.
Vermin is a beast that was once a man. A monster not unlike a Gollum who's more pitiable than fearsome. He also probably eats babies not unlike a Gollum or a sasquatch. Much like Kraven he's ill-equipped to fit into society. However, whereas Kraven merely believes himself to be incapable of fitting in with the modern day and longs to be more of an animal, Vermin is that wish come back upon itself. He was a man. He became a beast. The world terrifies and confuses him - as it does Kraven - but the tiniest bit of his humanity still wishes to connect with his fellow man. But he cannot. He is a monster. A beast. Something whose very nature is functionally antithetical to the civilized world. He is the inverse and extreme of the Hunter. Still, though he is captured and constrained, it never once enters his mind to kill himself. He's an animal. An animal only wishes to live, by any means necessary.
Spider-Man is our protagonist and, as is fitting, possesses what the antagonists do not. He is not a beast. He does not perceive himself as being a beast. He is a man, through and through. In the most poignant moment of the entire storyline, as Peter is dragging himself out of the grave with nothing but the love of Mary Jane to carry him through the fear, he mocks the very idea that he's some mythical spider being - he's just a man who is doing what he thinks is best the best way he knows how. There is no spider; there is only Peter Parker, human being. Kraven's failure to understand this - how any man would wish to simply be a man with a wife and normal responsibilities - is what defeats the antagonist in the end. Peter's ability to not be cowed by fear and to think two steps ahead is what allows him to capture Vermin in the end. And his reward for all this? To go home to his wife. To be Peter Parker, human being, loving husband, for one more day. And that's honestly the best any of us can hope for in this life.
Just a shame that nobody in Marvel Comics has apparently read this storyline and we've been dealing with interdimensional spider totem crap and multiverse theory for the last twenty-odd years.
I could go on and sing the praises of this book for hours and not properly relay just how amazing this storyline is. This is not so much a superhero saga as it is a poem in the form of one. Every line, panel, page break, and box format is constructed in such a way as to nail home the overarching themes of confinement, fear, and, ultimately, the triumphant love between a normal man and his wife. Absolutely essential reading both for Spidey fans and people who are looking for a happy medium between dark subject matter and nuanced execution.
Why yes, there are several collected graphic novel reprints.
QUOTES
"There is no Spider-Man. He's a mask. A myth. A lie. Oh, sure, it'd be great if putting on a costume could miraculously change the man underneath. But it can't. I'm not Spider-Man. I'm just... Peter Parker." - Spider-Man, giving us the real shit
"yum. yum. yum." - Vermin, after eating some poor chick
"All these years you've misunderstood me. You thought I was larger than life. You thought I was magic. You thought I was madness. Some creature that crawled and spun and hid in shadows. That mocked and tormented and reveled in darkness.Idiot! There is no spider! There's just me! Just a normal guy - who got tapped on the shoulder by fate. Just Peter Parker: That's my weakness. That's my strength." - Peter Parker, reiterating for those who didn't get it
"I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid. Yes, I am. But there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong - as long as I don't turn back. As long as I do what's right." - Spider-Man, defining heroism
