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My 2013 Superhero Movie Roundup
2013 has been a pretty good year for me, I caught most of the releases that I wanted to catch, found quite a few hidden gems here and there, caught up on plenty of classics, and started a brand new podcast that’s been going swimmingly. I’m going to avoid taking another look at some of the worst movies this year, instead of giving them more attention, I prefer to focus on the positive and the negative will eventually fade away. I’ve got a top 10 list of superhero and comic book movies and while I might have a couple that you would expect, I imagine that most of the list will be a bit of a surprise.
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Hentai Kamen
Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero 2013
What better way to bring in the Christmas spirit than to talk about an asian movie about a superhero who wears a pair of panties as his superhero mask and dresses like Borat was way too modest. Really though, this is a superhero spoof movie that’s much better than the awful Superhero Movie while going through a lot of the same types of conflicts and story beats, except in every case it turns it into something so ridiculously sex-related that it becomes absolutely hilarious. I’m sure some people won’t get the joke, but I thought that the level of seriousness this movie treated a superhero with a pair of women’s panties on his face was just the right amount of absurdity and obscenity to make me laugh hysterically through most of this movie.
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Captain Battle: Legacy War
Captain Battle: Legacy War 2013
Continuing on in my quest to watch all of the 2013 releases I can get my hands on, and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to what I would easily call the worst superhero film of 2013, and I’m not talking about Iron Man or Man of Steel like some people might claim. No, I’m talking about an actually bad movie. This movie looks worse than most fan films I’ve covered on this site. The special effects look like they were done on a trial version of After Effects, with page wipes straight out of Windows Movie Maker, and make up that looks like it was done with magic markers. The movie attempts a story that’s much too big for the special effects or acting abilities of those involved. And on top of that, while it is based on an actual comic book, the timing of it is a cheap rip-off of Captain America, complete with a Red Skull analogue with the aforementioned red magic marker special effects makeup. It has plenty of moments of enjoyably bad moviemaking, and a handful of T&A, but for the most part it was simply a boring mess of a movie.
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Legends of the Knight
Legends of the Knight 2014
It’s not so rare these days to find interesting projects looking for funding on Kickstarter, it is a bit more rare to find projects that actually catch my own personal interest. But when I heard about this project, I was happy to make it my first Kickstarter donation, giving $10 so I could get a digital download when it became available. This is a project by Brett Culp which takes a different look at Batman. It doesn’t look at the character himself, but instead takes a look at the impact that character has had on the world itself through a handful of people and their inspiring stories of how they take one part or another of Batman’s philosophy or his story as a whole and use it to improve their own lives and the lives of others. It is a documentary which takes a look at about a dozen people across the country who all have a strong connection to Batman in one way or another. Through a series of interviews and plenty of Batman artwork and children dressed up as Batman, we get to see a slice of these people’s lives and how Batman has made their lives better. You can view the trailer and find out more information at their official website.
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Is Marvel’s strategy a bad thing for superhero films?
The other day I came across an article whose argument was basically that the Avengers have ruined the Hollywood concept of a superhero movie. Essentially, the fact that all of the lead up movies to the Avengers were all connected-yet-separate and then there’s this big movie that tied them all together which became a huge thing. And now it’s happening everywhere. DC is doing it by bringing in Batman, Wonder Woman, and who knows who else in the second Man of Steel movie, Sony is doing it with Spider-man with two more sequels in the works and they just announced that their two spin off movies are about Venom and the Sinister Six. Even Fox is getting on board with The Wolverine teasing Days of Future Past which connects the First Class franchise to the first trilogy and have already announced Age of Apocalypse in 2016, not to mention the fact that they’re also supposedly tying the Fantastic Four into that universe somehow. The question is basically asking if the days of the stand-alone superhero movie are gone and these movies are becoming more like comic books, only a part of a much bigger whole that will only end when the money stops. Not only that, but it’s becoming the only model, and that’s a bad thing. Personally, I think it’s a good thing and for more reasons than just getting more superhero movies, which I’m all for too.
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The Wolverine
The Wolverine 2013
I’m one step closer to watching all of the 2013 superhero and comic book movies of 2013 and this is one that I’m really disappointed that I missed out on in theaters since I’m a big X-Men and Wolverine fan though I’m not about to do any sort of X-Men marathon again any time soon. This is Hugh Jackman’s sixth turn at playing Wolverine, at least if you count his brief cameo in First Class and at least three more on the way with Days of Future Past coming out next year, Apocalypse announced for 2016, and another solo Wolverine movie very likely it seems that Hugh Jackman will be playing Wolverine until he is too old to pull off the mostly ageless mutant. This time around he’s put in Japan which is part of his origin story though this movie has it take place after the events of The Last Stand. He is brought there so a business tycoon named Yashida who used to be a soldier and was saved by Logan at Nagasaki during the atomic bombing. He is now dying and offers Logan an opportunity to relinquish his healing abilities and die a natural death. Things expectedly go sideways and Logan is left to protect Yashida’s granddaughter named Mariko while his healing abilities have been taken from him. Reminding me a bit of 2 Guns, there’s some good character interactions but it’s mixed with a heavily convoluted plotline. And I’d also like to note that I did watch the unrated extended edition for this review.
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Iron Man and Hulk: Heroes United
Iron Man and Hulk: Heroes United 2013
It’s the start of December, nearing the end of 2013 and this is the last superhero movie release of the year. It’s also the first straight-to-video release from Marvel using CGI animation rather than the mix of traditional and CG that they’ve used for their past releases. It ends up looking much better than many of the cheap and/or old CGI cartoons of past home video releases and TV shows, but it’s still quite obviously far from the level of a theatrical release and the cheapness of the animation does show. It also felt like it’s aimed at a younger audience with a lot of humor that tends to focus more on slapstick and childish attitudes. Even the voice work has an air of cheapness that doesn’t quite capture the essence of either of the characters. There are some fun moments in the movie enough that I don’t regret watching it, but it really felt a lot more mediocre than I was expecting in more ways than one.
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Am I Getting Tired Of Superhero Movies Yet?
It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these more free flowing blog posts and one that’s been rattling around in my mind for a while is the question if I’m getting tired of superhero movies yet. I’ve been doing this site for almost two years now and superhero and comic book movies make up around half of my overall movie watching nowadays more or less. There’s often the theory that they are all pretty much the same kind of movie, a sci-fi fantasy action movie with a hero in a costume and half the time it’s essentially the same origin story, especially when they keep rebooting the franchise every few years. So what is it that keeps me from getting bored with superhero movies, or am I actually getting bored with them, hence the frequent lack of actual movie reviews around here for stretches at a time. The short answer is no, I’m not tired of this blog, these movies, or anything else surrounding it.
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Filmwhys #18 The Mexican and Thor the Dark World
Apologies for the delayed post, but I’m excited to bring a slight change-up to my normal Filmwhys format. Instead of having my guest introduce me to one of their favorite movies that I’ve never seen, I decided it was time to share one of my favorite non-superhero movies to my guest that they’ve never seen. And this time around my guest is the Vern from Vern’s Video Vanguard and a few other sites and I ask him why he hasn’t seen the Mexican, one of Gore Verbinski’s earlier movies before he went on to direct the Pirates of Caribean movies with Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and a really sweet looking classic pistol. And we both watch the current theatrical release Thor The Dark World.
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Book Nights: Super Born: Seduction of Being
Super Born: Seduction of Being
by Keith Kornell
I was initially reluctant when I got an e-mail asking me to review a superhero novel, I was even more reluctant when I read the initial synopsis for it mentioning the main character as a single mom and a review blurb calling it “hypersexualized”. I also don’t own an e-reader which made me turn down a previous offer at reviewing a superhero novel, but even with my doubts they were still willing to send me a physical copy of the book. It was a rough start, I wasn’t fond of the overly sarcastic humor nor the frequent talk about sex which wasn’t helped by the cover that looked like I was reading a cheesy romance novel. The science mumbo-jumbo was equally over-specific and absurd, and the characterization of the superheroine main character felt like it was written by a man who was not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination. I soldiered on through the rest of the book was rewarded with much of the same, but underneath all of that there was an interesting plot that kept me wanting to know how it was all going to end up.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 