Author Archives: Bubbawheat
Superhero Shorts: City of Heroes Incarnate
Superhero Shorts: City of Heroes – Incarnate
Right down in my bio it says that I’m a City of Heroes player, the first superhero MMO, and the best one in my opinion. I’m currently taking a break from it partly because I needed a breather from it, and partly because this blog takes up a lot of free time that CoH used to occupy. One of the best things going for CoH that even those who don’t like the game can’t argue is the game’s community. They are a creative and friendly bunch. There are several players who make machinima videos for the game and one of the best and definitely the most popular is Samuraiko. I had many videos to choose from, but I decided to focus on the one that had the most narrative to it, was tied to the game, and is a pretty good watch by itself. It explores the moment when the lead Hero of the game, Statesman, and the lead villain of the game, Lord Recluse, gain their powers for the first time and become Incarnates.
Robocop
Robocop 1987
This movie wasn’t on my original list of movies to watch for this year, it’s not a traditional superhero movie, and I personally considered it more of a sci-fi movie. But I recently read what was originally intended as an April Fools joke at Fog’s Movie Reviews as one of his Movies That Everyone Should See. He thought that it wasn’t that great of a movie with too much cheese and too much violence, but he wrote the article very seriously expecting the commenters to balk at the movie’s inclusion alongside classics such as Citizen Kane, Big, and Stand By Me. But instead of balking, the comments heartily agreed with the inclusion except for a few outliers who realized it may have been an April Fools prank. It definitely made me want to see it, and so I did. As I mentioned, I was initially reluctant to include it, but it did spawn a comic book series, and when compared to a superhero like The Punisher, he’s got a better costume, similar firepower, and more of what could be considered super power. So here we are.
Why are there so many bad superhero movies?
I’ve gone back and forth so many times trying to figure out what to write this week. I’ve thought about writing on The Avengers, origins, sequels, and probably a half dozen topics that I’ve since forgotten about. I finally settled on this topic, why are there so many bad superhero movies? There are lots of great superhero comic books, and comic books are a visual medium, so you would think that moving from one visual medium to another would be easier than say adapting a novel, right? And yet it was so easy to come up with a list of the 33 worst superhero movies, and I can probably think of a dozen high profile movies that didn’t even make that list. The number of really great superhero movies, there are probably only a couple dozen or so, and many of those have only been made in the past few years.
The Spirit
The Spirit 2008
Finally getting around to watching our rental copy of Frank Miller’s The Spirit. It’s funny that I watch and write about all of these superhero movies, but as far as comic book artists and writers I don’t really know all that much. Although I suppose I know a heck of a lot more than the average person, I know exceedingly few compared to a comic book fan. I’m familiar with the name Frank Miller largely due to his work on Sin City with Robert Rodriguez, and then instead of Sin City 2 which seems to be in development hell as it was rumored to be worked on shortly after the release of the first movie and yet seven years after its release there’s still no word on it. Instead Frank Miller went on his own to create another movie very similar in style to Sin City, only it features a classic noir detective character called The Spirit.
Superhero Shorts: Super Powers
Superhero Shorts: Super Powers
In this series I’ve already taken a look at a good spectrum of different videos, a parody, a comedy, a serious video, a new video. This week I’m taking a look at a short series of videos from TheMrMenagerie which showcases various special effects done by himself with a bit of humor added to it in a series called simply Super Powers. Below I’m featuring the first episode featuring the power of fire. And once again I was lucky enough to get a hold of TheMrMenagerie to ask him a few questions which you can read below my review.
The Punisher
The Punisher 2004
I’ve been a fan of this movie ever since it came out, I’m not sure if I saw it in theaters, but if I didn’t, then I saw it shortly afterwards. I have yet to see the extended edition of this movie but I would really like to sometime. Extended editions aren’t always improvements to the movie, I know several times that I watched the extended edition of a movie without realizing it, and I know in the case of Superman: The Movie, it felt like it was too drawn out and I think I would have preferred watching the theatrical version rather than the extended edition. But other times, movies get cut down for other reasons and the extended edition is actually the preferred version, like in the case of Daredevil. But since I already own the regular version of this DVD, I went ahead and watched it tonight instead of watching The Spirit that we rented last night so I could finish up the non-trilogy of Punisher movies. There were a few scenes that I didn’t care for as much as I did when I first watched the movie, but I still enjoyed it a ton more than either of the other Punisher movies I’ve watched this week.
Guns and Superheroes
For a while I was trying to figure out what movies I wanted to fill out the first half of this month with. The last half of the month I’ll be looking at the cast of the Avengers and all the movies that came out featuring the other members before watching them all together in theaters. For a little while I was considering watching a bunch of the worst movies since I had just made the list of 33 of them. But many of those movies are straight to video or TV movies or in one case completely unreleased and made just to keep the rights to the characters. So after watching a couple of the Punisher movies, I decided to watch some more superheroes that prefer guns over their other powers if they even have any. So I’ll be watching movies like The Spirit, The Shadow, and The Phantom. And for this week’s blog, I thought it would be a good idea to look at how guns affect the superhero dynamic in general.
Punisher
Punisher 1989
It was Sunday morning, and I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep. When I got up I realized that Jena had made her way into our bed at some point during the night. I’m a very heavy sleeper by the way. Considering how little my wife enjoyed Punisher: War Zone, I decided to let her out of watching this movie which by my understanding was just as bad of a movie and just watch it by myself downstairs while they slept. This was on my list of 33 of the worst movies, but when I watched it, it didn’t seem that bad to me. I mean, it wasn’t a great piece of cinema by any means, but it was a solid if fairly generic 80’s action movie. And as I looked through some of the trivia, I was surprised that this has the second highest body count of the three movies at 91 kills, War Zone comes in first at 97, and the Thomas Jane version comes in at a paltry 45. This also has the benefit (or possibly detriment) of having a few brief nude scenes, but then half of them are of Dolph Lundgren.
Punisher: War Zone
Punisher: War Zone 2008
I’d like to take a quick moment before starting this review to talk about video rental stores. Many people say they’re a dying breed, and many big chains have shut their doors for good, but at least here in the midwest, there’s still one chain that seems to be doing just fine. It’s the same one I’ve been going to since I was a kid and I’ve seen it grow and it still appears to be doing well when other stores are closing their gates. I’m not sure what it is they do right, but Family Video is a great place to go. It’s a lot harder for me to browse around on the internet unless I’ve got some inclination of a movie that I want to see, but my favorite section to browse around Family Video is their large 2 for $1 section that features tons of straight to video classics and B movies. That’s where I found this gem of a movie, sadly they didn’t have the Dolph Lundgren version of the Punisher or I would have rented that one there as well. But anyway I watched Punisher: War Zone yesterday evening and I chased it down with a much better movie called The Expendables. They felt surprisingly similar in certain ways, but where War Zone faltered, Expendables flourished.
Superhero Shorts: Batman Dead End
This week I’ll be looking at my first dramatic Superhero Short as suggested by Ryan McNeely over at 5 Word Movie Reviews on my first edition of this series. Batman: Dead End is one of the most recognized superhero fan films, getting praise from the likes of filmmaker Kevin Smith and comic book artist Alex Ross. It was a labor of love from special effects artist turned director Sandy Collora whose goal was to create a Batman film that captured the look of the comic books as closely as possible. But enough of a backstory, let’s take a look at the film. You can view it at Sandy Collora’s website Collora Studios or watch it embedded below.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 