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The Return of Swamp Thing
The Return of Swamp Thing 1989
I knew very little about the first Swamp Thing movie, and I knew even less about the sequel which came out 7 years later and the only connection between the two movies are the actor that plays Swamp Thing in the suit and the villain Arcane who supposedly died in the first movie. I would have thought that they would have used the Dick Durock’s voice once again for the Swamp Thing, but for some reason* they chose to hire a voice actor do ADR all of his lines. The tone of this movie is also much more light and comedic. Unfortunately this makes the campy comedy feel much more forced than in the first movie where everyone was taking things seriously. There’s still some cheesy fun to be had, but it’s not nearly as good of a movie overall than the first one.
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Swamp Thing
Swamp Thing 1982
It’s been a while since I watched the Swamp Thing mirror from Marvel Man-Thing, and while they came out in comic book form near the same time, in the movie world Swamp Thing beat it by quite a wide margin. Not only that, but it was directed by horror master Wes Craven best known for the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and yet this is a far cry from a horror movie aside from the creature makeup. It’s rated PG for one thing though it does get away with the brief boob shot that happened once in a while back in the 80’s days of the PG rating. It’s a bit of a monster movie where the creature is a sympathetic/tragic hero, but there’s also a strong villain that he’s pitted against all the while he spends his time trying to protect an instant love-interest. Filled with a bit of cheese, but still a fun movie.
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Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1998
This is one of those movies that I’ve heard about since the start of this site, and not in a good way. This was a TV movie made for the Fox network starring Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury and written by prolific superhero screenwriter David Goyer with as many hits to his name as misses. It has a very 90’s generic action feel to it with a ratio of pithy one-liners to actual action scenes at around 20:1. Everyone on screen really hams it up from the Hoff himself pretending to be the hardest hardass that ever lived, his ex-girlfriend Val who’s just as tough as he is, the over-confident fledgling British recruit, to the always-angry executive who thinks Nick Fury is the biggest mistake that S.H.I.E.L.D. Has ever made. And I haven’t even gotten to the villains yet! The special effects look 90’s TV cheap, the fights look like they were done by actors who have never taken a martial arts lesson in their lives, there is more talk about the threats than there is actual action against any threats, but as usual with these kinds of movies, there is plenty of laughable cheesiness to get some enjoyment out of watching this movie.
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Sparks
Sparks 2014
This is a movie that completely escaped my attention as it made the festival rounds last year and it even played near me in Chicago last April, but I did notice it when it came out on DVD as it appeared at my local Wal-Mart. Since it was a lower budget indie movie I had to look farther into it and contacted the writer/director and got to interview William Katt who is the executive producer and plays the main villain in the movie Matanza which you can view here. But aside from that, it is another different take on the superhero movie. It’s a film noir thriller set in the 20’s & 40’s following the story of Ian Sparks and his descent into the underbelly of the superhero culture. There’s plenty of twists and turns and things don’t turn out quite the way one might expect. It has a bit of a slow start, but once the action starts happening it goes on right through the end.
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Filmwhys Extra #7 Sparks
Filmwhys Extra #7 Sparks
Welcome back to another episode of Filmwhys Raw, I mean Filmwhys Extra. I do plan on bringing back a regular episode soon, but in the meantime I was privileged to have the chance to talk with William Katt who is probably best known as the lead in the 80’s superhero TV show The Greatest American Hero and is now working with writer/director Christopher Folino on his recent film Sparks: The Origin of Ian Sparks which is currently out on DVD, and my review of the movie will be posted soon.
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The 100 Essential Superhero Movies project needs you!
Just after finishing up my last blogathon this past March, I stumbled upon an idea that I really wanted to do for yet another blogathon here at Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights. When I first started this site I had a list of 100 theatrically released superhero movies that I wanted to cover in that first year, and while I did reach my goal of watching and reviewing 100 movies, I didn’t stick to that list because there were some other direct-to-DVD releases that I wanted to watch and in many cases they are just as good and often better than the theatrically released ones. So what I wanted to do was to come up with a list of 100 superhero movies that are essential viewing for a superhero fan up through the end of 2013. This isn’t just a list of the 100 best superhero movies because that might be an easier list to come up with, but these are 100 movies that are important to the category of superhero movies as a whole. Some of the choices are quite easy to make, but I’m down to the last 20 movies and this is where I need your help.
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Graphic Horror: Afflicted
Graphic Horror: Afflicted 2014
Even though my blogathon is over, I like the tag “Graphic Horror” enough that I’ll be keeping it and using it right alongside “Almost Super” for horror movies that aren’t quite superhero movies, even if they are based on graphic novels and therefore included in my big list of superhero and comic book movies. When I saw the trailer and early promotional tweets about this movie I was very interested. It was a found footage movie very similar in style to Chronicle only with a horror twist to it, where these two friends go on a world trip and one of them catches something that starts to make him sick, but then gives him superpowers before taking a much darker turn. There was another element to the story that the PR wanted to keep a secret, but I didn’t go digging into what it was until they decided it wasn’t that big of a secret to keep once it hit its wide release and I found out that the superpowers were brought on because he is becoming a vampire. This actually made me a little bit more interested in the movie because I’m always a fan of vampire movies and I thought this would do for vampire movies that Chronicle did for superhero movies and I think I was right.
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014
This year is reminding myself of how much different the superhero movie schedule is compared to last year when there were about a dozen movies packed between the end of May and the middle of August, while this year has the movies much more spread out closer to one every month with Captain America kicking off the more traditional superhero fare as early as April (as opposed to the few comic book movies like 300 & I, Frankenstein and the few movies with a less direct superhero connection like Robocop and the Lego Movie) and yet this is also more of a far cry from a traditional superhero plot and instead feels much more like a conspiracy thriller along the lines of a dozen or so great movies whose names I can’t recall at the moment. There’s also a bit more of Captain America adjusting to life in the 21st century which I have been wanting to see ever since the first movie. In short, I loved every minute of it. Also, as a warning, I don’t always tread lightly around spoilers, though most of the spoilers I already knew or assumed before seeing the movie.
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Filmwhys Raw #6 Play Ball!
Episode 6 of Filmwhys Raw where my guests are John LaRue from The Droid You’re Looking For and Todd Leibenow from Forgotten Films, and this was my chance to participate in Todd’s blogathon going on right now, the Big League Blogathon and since it was difficult to fit a baseball movie into the focus of my superhero site, I decided that we would spend this podcast talking about any and all things related to baseball in the movies.
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Graphic Horror: 30 Days of Night
30 Days of Night 2007
This Graphic (Novel) Horror blogathon is coming to a close and I’m finally coming around to one of the movies that first came to mind when I was thinking about movies that I should cover. I saw it back when it was still fairly new and quite enjoyed it, but hadn’t seen it since then and have never seen the sequel. I always thought it was an interesting concept for a vampire movie. One of the vampire’s biggest weaknesses was the fact that they couldn’t be out in the sunlight, but in the Arctic Circle there’s a full 30 days of night without any sun, not only that but according to this story the town basically cuts itself off from any other town South of it for the duration of the darkest part of winter so this clan of vampires can essentially feed at will for a full month without any fear of being discovered and stopped by a larger force from outside of town. There are also plenty of great visuals along the way that really had a graphic novel feel to them, whether or not they were actually taken from the pages of the original comic.
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