So good and campy that I had to go ahead with the second one in the franchise. I certainly won’t be pushing any praise on that craptastic third Blade film, Blade Trinity, cause fuck that sucked. No I want to go into the often crapped on, but ultimately pleasing sequel to the breakout hit Blade with the sequel directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Yeah, he ended up making a wildly satisfying flick that gave us more of what made the original fun to watch, but neglected to give us anything in terms of plot, dialogue, or anything else that could have made this flick. But fuck all that, lets get to the Daywalker goodness of vampire hunting.
Oh yes folks, it’s about to get weird here. Today I present to you my lovely readers, a Turkish film of wonderful delights, horrific everything, and a plethora of copyrighted characters and materials to ever grace the screen. Today I am talking a little bit on the Turkish superhero film, 3 Dev Adam (3 Giant Men). This is the famous Turkish movie in which Captain America and Santo travel to Istanbul to over throw the ruthless mafia that is run by none other than Spider-Man himself.
Yep, Spider-Man is the villain here, with some serious looking eyebrows to boot. Now I know you are wondering why he is the villain in this movie and my response is why the fuck not. Come on man, he is a superhero and probably tired of having to save New York everyday, so why not rule the roost in a country that doesn’t have high rises for him to swing on. Heck he even ditches those web shooters in favor of some guns cause sometimes you just need a gun to deal with the two superheroes that are being sent after you. So Captain America (fuck yeah) is there in Turkey without his shield but fully capable of whooping some serious ass and then there is this Mexican wrestler named El Santo who I guess Mexico considers to be there premier superhero. They battle countless, under prepared thugs and frankly it is just a laugh riot to watch this, even without subtitles to clue you in on what is happening.
It’s a pure cheese movie with just pure astonishment on my part that I watched this. I have heard about it, but never really seen it until a while ago. I think it’s just a wild movie, done by a director that was just absorbing all sorts of American pop culture and came up with, well, a movie. This certainly won’t be in anyone’s comic movie cannon, but hey, it’s good for a laugh and utter bewilderment.
I have never actually covered one of these DC Comics releases, I watch them all the time on Netflix and for the most part, a lot of them are pretty damn amazing. The voice work, story coverage and general love of comics is the potent combination to get me to watch these films in lieu of them never being converted to the big screen. I will take what I can get personally in terms of comic book movies and if you haven’t looked through the offerings on Netflix streaming for these movies, you are truly missing out on some awesome comic book viewings. Today, I picked the impressive, although slightly disappointing (story wise) DC Comics release Justice League: Doom which is a loose adaptation of JLA: Tower of Babel.
Fuck Yes! This is the sort of a grimy, pure action film that deserved to be seen by way more people than it got. Dredd 3D, while it didn’t make my end of the year list, it certainly was one of the better action films of the year, right next to The Raid: Redemption. In fact, those two movies are basically the same fucking thing, but one does more shooting and the other is more foot fist action. All I know is, if you are an action fan, this is a must.
I am calling an audible folks, today was supposed to be about Batman and Robin, that god awful shitty pun of a movie, but I needed to talk about this movie, mainly for one particular thing that stood out from this horrific movie. I will get to that thing after the jump but suffice to say that because of my shitty movie watching experience this month, Netflix recommended this movie to me, as if guiding me towards a lower path in life. I did see this movie in the theaters, thinking that a harmless action film based on a comic book series would be at least a bit entertaining.
Well as with predictable results since it is on my shit list, the movie was a terrible, terrible failure. Almost as if some force of nature put a hex on the movie. THAT’S HOW YOU DO A PUN!
Well yeah…I don’t know what to say about this movie. I remember reading Will Eisner’s Golden Age comic and really enjoyed this cult hero in the comic book world, kind of Batman like in a weird way, but also with some wonderful levity to his character. You could liken The Spirit to Dick Tracy in a sense that they have that wonderful pulp feel to the proceedings. A fantastic comic series that you should pick up and read. But if you want to take the cliff notes approach to the series, Frank Miller’s version is pretty much a knock-off cliff notes version of The Spirit. So if you were take a quiz on this movie from a fan of the series, you would fail and probably be bullied for the rest of your life. Nerd cred revoked.
So you are the basically the “it” woman in Hollywood. You won an Oscar for Monster’s Ball, became a Bond Girl, showed your breasts in Swordfish and got mad money for doing that. You are at the top of your game, a proverbial platter of projects that producers would love to have you in and you think to yourself, “comic book movies are in right now, why not do one”. It’s an honest thought, wanting to be in the latest Hollywood movie trend, so you use your status to get a starring role instead of being just that white-haired woman from that mutant movie. Then it happens, you get the role of a lifetime, a starring vehicle as one of comic’s sexiest and complicated hero/villains out there and it is all yours.
The sad thing is, the movie is directed by a guy with one name, Pitof, and saddled with 20+ script writers and the movie is Catwoman, or at least Catwoman in name only.
Someone should have buried this deeper in the kitty litter.
Oh how I want to excise the part of my brain that recalls the Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider, buddy cop comedy, action movie Judge Dredd. One of the most horrible pieces of shit I sat through and make fun whenever I can. How one could take a comic book which is all about glorious violence, done in the most insane way possible, could be distilled into the safest R-rated movie ever. I will never know, but thankfully the movie going audience got the remake it so rightly deserved.
Boy, my hat is off to Joss Whedon, the maestro behind this summers biggest blockbuster. Yes, it is bigger than The Dark Knight Rises and pretty much everything else that came out at that time. It was a giant collaboration and gamble on the part of Marvel Studios to inundate the movie going audience a myriad of of super hero movies that could have started to fatigue the public. Spanned over 5 different movies from the Marvel Universe, the pieces were coming together and and stories were set in motion in each of the proceeding movies to build up to the team-up of the summer. Marvel’s The Avengers was the epitome of the summer popcorn flick and it delivered everything I could have wanted in a super hero movie.
I will spare you a review blurb that uses the title of the movie for a non-clever pun like, “The Amazing Spider-Man is ‘Amazing’” or “Spider-Man spins the Best film of the franchise”. I like to think I am better than that and slightly more clever than most people. I realized that I put this film on my winners list for July Release, but I would like to take back that placement. As far as summer films go, this is one of the bigger disappointments I have seen this summer. Let’s not joke and say that people were clambering for a new Spider-Man installment, except for toy makers. This movie was made because Sony was close to losing the rights of the film if they didn’t do anything with it, thus reverting the rights back to Disney/Marvel. I hate to think that this movie suffered because of those circumstances, but the more I reflect on this movie, the more it seems that it was phoned in from the start and they were playing damage control with all the marketing and tie ins. You know what, fuck it, “The Amazing Spider-Man was Amazingly Bad”. I can’t resist a movie pun.
