Blog Archives
Madame Web
Madame Web
Weirdly enough, this has been one of the movies that I missed during the hiatus on this site that I’ve been most wanting to watch for a long time now. There’s just something about a universally disliked movie that scratches that itch and makes me curious about whether it’s actually bad, or if it’s just mediocre, or if it’s decent with some serious issues. And more often than not, I tend to like most movies that people think were bad. I enjoyed Morbius for the most part, so I was very curious to see where I landed on this movie. Outside of the general vibe, I kept myself pretty much in the dark about what the movie was actually about. I have vague memories of Madame Web appearing in the 90’s Spider-Man cartoon but I don’t really remember anything specific. I even forgot that she was blind until Cassie gets blinded at the end of the movie. I also kind of remember hearing about how the three Spider-Women don’t ever actually get any real scenes as their Spider-personas. But this movie really was a complete mess. It never really made sense as to why this was a story that needed to be told, as someone with zero Spider-verse comics knowledge there was very little for me to grasp onto for any of these future personas outside of Madame Web herself, the villain is ridiculously over-powered yet completely incompetent when it comes to anything involving Cassie, and no one has anything resembling a three dimensional personality.
Read the rest of this entry
Just Super
Just Super 2022
I’ve been waffling on where to direct my superhero movie watching now that I’ve caught up with all of the MCU and DC home streaming releases so I was just scrolling on my Disney+ watchlist to see what’s the shortest movie I had on my list for a nice quick and easy watch. I still have some of the Sony Marvel movies and the Toxic Avenger, but then I saw that I had this movie tucked away on my list and it was only an hour and fifteen minutes long so I decided to go with it. Based on the poster, it looked like one of those extremely low budget animated movies that are often marketed as a mockbuster to fool grandparents into thinking they’re buying Finding Nemo or Ratatouille but end up with Ratatoing, though this doesn’t feel like it’s ripping off any specific superhero movie, just jumping on the superhero trend in general. It’s also originally a Norwegian film that was dubbed into English though all the names are actually kept the same rather than being localized so we get the main characters Hedvig and Leif who are a part of a superhero heritage similar to the Phantom only here it’s Super Lion. As it is a family movie it has the overarching message about being yourself rather than trying to be something you’re not but as a film it wasn’t all that entertaining.
Read the rest of this entry
Joker: Folie á Deux
Joker: Folie á Deux 2024
This movie falls into a weird space in the DC films continuity. It was released well over a year after James Gunn was hired as the head of the DC films division and a year before the first fully James Gunn produced DC movie Superman, but it’s not a part of either the DCEU or the DCU, instead it’s an Elseworlds movie following the outside of continuity Joker movie from five years earlier. And this movie even goes further from that premise, shifting from inspired by Taxi Driver and the King of Comedy into something that keeps that same tone but throws in a musical reality into the mix. It’s something that’s really bizarre to describe that doesn’t seem to be catering to the fans of either genre. The musical numbers don’t fit very well with fans of the dark and gritty style of movie, and the dark and gritty style of the majority of the film doesn’t mesh well with typically bright and cheery musicals. I found the film rather fascinating, especially with the thought in my mind that it’s pretty much impossible to find the line between what’s actually happening in the world of the movie and what’s happening entirely in Arthur Fleck’s imagination.
Read the rest of this entry
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
Shazam! Fury of the Gods 2023
While I have already technically watched the other 2 final movies of the DCEU which came out in late summer and December of the same year as this film which was originally released in March. This is MY final DCEU catch up movie and while it had its ups and downs, I don’t think there was ever any movie that I actively disliked. There are many of them that have some serious issues, but also every single one of them had something that I enjoyed in them. This was the follow up to the very fun Shazam! movie that mixed a lot of immature humor that came from having a 14 year old playing an adult superhero mixed with some pretty dark horror-esque monster imagery. This sequel basically copies that same structure despite the fact that it’s been four years and while Billy Batson is nearly 18, he still basically acts like he’s still 14. The villains were trying to be a mix of scary and sympathetic that didn’t fully work, but I do love me some Greek mythology references and the film did make me laugh out loud a fair number of times so it wasn’t a bad film at all in my book.
Read the rest of this entry
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom 2023
I’m back catching up with another DC movie in my much smaller backlog, at least if I don’t count all of the animated movies but that’s a topic for another day. I actually remember practically nothing about the advertising for this movie. The only thing I really remember about it was that it was a hero/villain team up a la Blade 2, Thor 2, and plenty of other sequels that I can’t think of right now. I absolutely did not remember anything about Aquaman’s baby which is basically the entire opening. I also remember the walking back of Amber Heard’s role in the movie after the media fallout from her trial, and that was really felt while watching. There was a whole lot of dumb stuff on display, and I thought that Aquaman himself felt a lot more childish than I remembered from the first movie, but what pulled me through was the chemistry between him and Patrick Wilson as his brother slash archnemesis Orm.
Read the rest of this entry
The Crow
The Crow 2024
I was browsing on Threads and I saw a call out for a podcast guest to come on and talk about the recent Crow remake over on the Stew World Order podcast. I’m a big fan of the original Crow and hadn’t gotten around to seeing the new remake just yet so I agreed to watch it and come on the show to talk about it (we recorded a couple days ago as I’m writing this but the episode won’t air until around August 2026). Now in general, I’m perfectly fine with the concept of remakes. I don’t think it diminishes the original and on a rare occasion it can actually improve upon the original. Or at the very least, be its own separate entity so despite all the negativity I had heard about this movie when it first came out, I thought I’d give it a fair shake and see how it stood on its own terms. It went for a very different tone, this is much more of a serious, grimdark interpretation of the Crow story. I didn’t agree with most of the changes, but by the end I was invested in how the story was going to turn out and I enjoyed myself throughout most of the watch. Now, I do think that this is a deeply flawed movie that has several serious issues that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a remake, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.
Read the rest of this entry
Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle 2023
I’m back to my superhero movie catch up and since I finished the MCU, I decided it was time to move onto DC going back to 2023 which was a busy year for DC and I missed all 3 movies that came out that year which were also the last Zack Snyder era of DC movies before transitioning to the James Gunn era. I decided to start with Blue Beetle which is the only of the three which isn’t really connected at all to the rest of the Snyderverse aside from a single name drop about Superman. Instead, this is a full blown origin story that reminds me a lot of a much better version of Max Steel though I’m also aware that even this version of Blue Beetle pre-dates that character, let alone the Ted Kord version. The overall tone of the movie felt like it was taking a page out of the Marvel playbook with a similar mix of action, comedy, and a bit of drama. But there’s a reason why that works and it works just as well here. They also get a lot of mileage out of this being a primarily Hispanic story with Jaime’s family all being Hispanic as well as Ted Kord’s daughter Jenny and even the henchmen of basically the lone white person in the movie Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon.
Read the rest of this entry
The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold
The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold 1958
It’s a nice but occasionally weird change of pace to swap back and forth between catching up on some of the newest superhero movies and going back to some of the earliest ones that I have yet to review here on this site. For my latest venture, I looked up the final of two Lone Ranger movies that were made with the stars of the TV series. This is now the fourth Lone Ranger movie that I’ve watched for this site and It’s pretty close to the worst along with the 1980’s movie. I went back and read my review for the first of these Lone Ranger movies and I have to say that this felt less respectful of its representation of indigenous people. But besides that, the movie took forever to really get going as the story really didn’t make any significant progress until the final half hour of the movie. And similar to the first movie, the best part was when the Lone Ranger went undercover, this time as a Southern gentleman bounty hunter. I watched the movie streaming on Plex, but it’s not something that I would easily recommend.
Read the rest of this entry
Invisible Avenger
Invisible Avenger 1958
Now that I’ve caught up with the MCU movies, I decided that I wanted to watch something a little more random before catching up with either the Sony Marvel movies or the DC movies so I went back to the beginning of my giant, chronological list of superhero and comic book movies and wanted to watch the Missing Lady, but when searching on where to watch it, nothing that came up was a free streamer, so I went down to the next one which was available to watch for free on Tubi, and it was only a 60 minute movie which was a plus. Like many Marvel movies in the 70’s and 80’s, this was actually created as two pilot episodes for a Shadow TV series before editing them together to form a movie. And as far as I can tell, this was produced during a dry spell for Shadow content as the Radio drama ended in 1954, the comic strip in 1949, and the last film was back in 1946. This is notable for including his ability to become a literal shadow as taken from the radio drama which makes this the first Shadow movie to be much closer to a superhero movie. As for the actual content of the film, it feels like a typical low budget noir drama with nothing too complicated in terms of plot and fight scenes that consist of a couple weak punches, there were a couple killings though one was off camera and none of them had any blood.
Read the rest of this entryCatman in Lethal Track
US Catman: Lethal Track 1990
Over this past weekend I tried my hand at a twelve hour superhero movie marathon. But not just any superhero movies, I chose some of the worst that I happened to still own having bought them to review right here on this site. While I didn’t quite make it twelve hours, we did manage to watch seven movies going nearly eleven hours. And as luck would have it, the first movie that we watched was this one. This is a movie that I’ve had on my big superhero movie list since nearly the beginning despite still knowing next to nothing about it over ten years later. And yet, when I was browsing some used DVDs and I saw it within the past several months, I just had to pick it up. And technically, it is a superhero movie, or at least 1/3 of it is. The movie cuts back and forth between two completely unrelated story lines. One of them is the Catman story, and I’m guessing that the other is the Lethal Track story. There is zero intersection between the two and the cuts are completely arbitrary. It’s an extremely low budget martial arts film that I’m guessing was filmed in Taiwan or Hong Kong and has a bad English dub that includes a swear word in practically every sentence. But in the context of watching it for a streaming marathon, it was a blast.
Read the rest of this entry
