DC Saturdays #13 - The Flash (1990)

This week on DC Saturday, we've got a bit of an odd one as we encounter the Flash for the first time. Of course, in recent years the man sometimes known as Barry Allen has returned to our screens both in his own TV series as part of the DC Television Universe (good) and, played by a different actor for some reason, in the recent "Justice League" film (erm, not so good).

However, way way way before that, Warner Bros made a Flash TV series which ran for one series in 1990. Unfortunately, viewing figures weren't good and it never made it over to Britain. However, we did get three TV movies released on VHS (the first being the pilot and the second and third being two episodes each put together a la Marvel's Spiderman TV series from the '70s). Today we're taking a look at the first one with the second and third following in the next couple of weeks. After that, we can go back to "Batman Returns" I promise...

The programme begins with a biker gang, the Dark Riders, roaming the streets of Central City. We find out that they've been causing so much trouble that citizens are afraid to go out at night. A couple of cop cars turn up to try and apprehend them but the bikers lob some glowing green bombs at them to blow them up (Note - whoever was in charge of this thing, they really like their explosions as we'll see as this film goes on).

Meanwhile, forensic scientist Barry Allen is at his older brother Jay's birthday party with his extended family including his mum and dad and his girlfriend Iris. While Barry works behind the scenes for the police, Jay is an officer on the beat and is clearly his dad's favourite. We also find out that Iris has started working at an art gallery and is due to have an exhibition displayed.

Barry ends up being called to the city armoury which the bikers raided earlier in the evening. He and his assistant Julio gather some evidence and take it back to the lab for processing. However, by the early hours they still haven't got anywhere and Julio decides to take a rain check. Bazza, however, is persistent and decides to stay on only for a bolt of lightning to hit the building and send him crashing into a shelf full of chemicals. Julio luckily had only just got to the exit and manages to run back in and save him.

At the hospital, Barry makes an unexpectedly quick recovery a la Captain America, the Hulk et al and goes back to his job where he discovers that a police-affiliated company called STAR Labs are interested in getting in touch with him. As they don't exactly have a good reputation though, he decides against it. However, his relationship with Iris is well and truly on the rocks as she feels things are going too fast and breaks up with him. Feeling down, he takes his dog out for a walk only for it to break free and run after a baseball that some kids are playing with. Barry goes to stop it but ends up hightailing it into a bush at ridiculously fast velocity and collapsing.

Barry ends up getting the chance to put his skills to use again the following night when he realises he's late to go to Iris' art exhibition and talk to her. Running for the bus, he again goes into hyperspeed mode and this time ends up running into the sea. Bearing in mind that the nearest beach to him is 30 miles away, he decides that this is probably the cue to seek some help. As for the hyperspeed sequences...well, the screenshot above should tell you all you need to know about the quality there...

The help leads him to STAR Labs where he makes contact with Tina McGee who it turns out is the sole scientist behind the operation (we find out it was originally a joint venture with her husband who passed away the previous year after an experiment went wrong which led to the bad rep the lab has got since). Tina does a few tests on Barry and realises that as well as superhuman speed of up to 500mph, he's prone to exceedingly low blood sugar levels after his hyperspeed episodes which he counters by eating ridiculous amounts to get his body back on track.

Meanwhile, Jay Allen has been promoted to the head of the counter-terror group assigned to take down the Dark Riders who Barry has discovered are led by Jay's one time police partner Nicholas Pike who was a crooked cop dabbling in gun-running. Jay managed to uncover him and the pair ended up having a motorcycle chase which ended with Pike falling off his bike trying to escape and being scarred on his face. Pike has managed to escape from prison and is now plotting his revenge. We discover his ruthlessness when a member of his gang attempts to double cross him and ends up tied to his bike which is then laden with explosives and sent down a sewer tunnel (again with the explosions...)

The Dark Riders sabotage Jay's press conference outside the police station and shoot at him and his team. Swearing revenge, Jay takes off down the motorway after them but is stopped by a girl whose car has broken down (this as it turns out is Pike's girlfriend Lyla) only for the car to blow up and Pike to appear and shoot him.

Seeking revenge for his brother, Barry creates a superhero costume to become The Flash. He tails a group of the Riders led by Lyla who are delivering supplies to Pike and uses his superhuman speed to knock them off their bikes with all of them being arrested. Using some DNA gained from Lyla he deduces that the Riders' base is at a local reservoir and heads over but the bikers have long since fled. However, they've left behind details of their plans to bust their captured brethren out of jail and raise an army to descend on Central City and sack it. Always good how villains leave really useful information like that just lying around, eh?

Barry informs the police of the plans and the scene is set for a showdown. The Dark Riders bust into the jail and free the prisoners but the police are waiting outside. A shootout ensues with the bikers coming off best to begin with but Flash uses his super speed to get close enough to drop tear gas bombs into the air ducts and take the bikers out. He then pursues Pike down an escape tunnel where, despite a mid-fight fatigue attack, he ultimately beats him by throwing him into an electric generator (which surprisingly doesn't kill him!) then tying him up for the police to arrest. The film ends with Barry agreeing that despite his earlier reservations, life as a superhero isn't so bad after all and, having reconciled with Iris, joining up with Tina to form a new crime-fighting force.

The main problem with "The Flash" is that it just feels a bit too low-rent for its own good. I'm not sure how much of that is due to its age (though in all fairness, it's still a step up from the '70s and '80s TV movies we've covered for both Marvel and DC in this blog) and how much of it is just down to plain old bad acting (the spirit of Joey from "Friends" is definitely conjured up at least once in this film) and a plot which is a bit on the sluggish side (the action sequences are okay but they're very widely spaced apart). Either way, I've seen worse but this definitely isn't a classic and it definitely lags way behind the more recent Flash TV series.

The scariest thing though? We've still got another two of these things to go before we can go back to the superior quality Batman stuff. Pass the matchsticks and black coffee, I think I might need 'em...

FINAL RATING: ⚡⚡⚡⚡ (4/10)

CURRENT DC FILM TABLE

1. Batman (1989) (8/10)
2. Superman (1978) (8/10)
3. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
4. Batman (1966) (8/10)
5. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
6. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
7. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
8. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
9. The Flash (1990) (4/10)
10. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)
11. The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) (2/10)
12. Superman 4 - The Quest For Peace (1987) (2/10)
13. Supergirl (1984) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: The second part of our Flash trilogy as he comes up against the Trickster...

Marvel Mondays #33 - Man-Thing (2005)

By the mid-noughties, the generally accepted ethos was that comic book tie-in films were no longer a dirty word, regarded to be solely the preserve of nerds, and studios were finally cottoning on to the fact that you could make a big budget film from a Marvel title and actually make some money out of it. Sometimes they worked (X-Men) and sometimes they didn't (Hulk) but the general theory was the same - the days of Marvel films being low-budget low-rent affairs like they were in the '70s, '80s and '90s were very much a thing of the past.

Almost. In 2005, one last low-budget Marvel film managed to sneak out past the quality control in the form of "Man-Thing". It was made by Lionsgate, the same company who did the "Punisher" remake starring Thomas Jane a year before, and was pretty much only ever intended as a straight-to-video release anyway but the production was fraught with difficulties due to it being shot in Australia leading Marvel to fall out with Lionsgate and to bring the rights for the characters they'd originally given to them (as well as Man-Thing and Punisher, Lionsgate were planning films based around Iron Fist and Black Widow but these never got off the ground) back in house. The film slipped on out the Sci-Fi Channel to very little fanfare and was pretty much swept under the carpet afterwards with Marvel vowing that they'd be much stricter who they gave the film rights to their characters to afterwards. Let's have a look and see what all the (non-)fuss was about...

The story begins with a young sheriff, Kyle Williams, being transferred from New York to the backwater town of Bywater in the Florida Everglades. Within a few hours of arriving he quickly realises that all is not what it seems here as the body of Billy, a local teenager, turns up at the morgue with horrific wounds. We actually see Billy and his girlfriend Sarah (former Aussie glamour model Imogen Bailey who is pretty much the only person in the cast whose name I even vaguely recognise) in the film's intro sneaking off from a party into the swamp at the edge of the town to have a quick bout of nookie in a canoe which is where the Man-Thing appears and gets Billy. Sarah survives but, as we see later in the film, has been driven mad by the experience.

Williams and his deputy Fraser don't have much time to dwell on things, however, as they're called away to a disturbance at the new oil refinery built on the edge of the swamp near the town where a group of protesters have chained themselves to the diggers claiming that the plant is being built on sacred Indian grounds. The plant owner Fred Schist and his son Jake turn up and explain that they've not broken any laws by building the refinery so Williams and Fraser attempt to break up the protest peacefully. However, one of the protesters, a schoolteacher called Teri Richards, kicks Fraser in the love spuds when he moves in to arrest her sending him sprawling into a puddle leading her to be arrested.

Kyle interviews Teri at the station where she explains that the Schists bought the plant from the local Seminole Native American tribe led by chieftain Ted Sallis (who disappeared shortly afterwards - a change from the comics where Sallis was a local scientist who injected himself with what he thought was a Captain America style super serum but basically turned him into a big shambling half-man half-plant being) and his second-in-command Renee Laroque who has fled into the swamp and is living there as a fugitive and ever since then, strange things have been afoot with bodies showing up left, right and centre in the swamp (backed up by Fraser who's had to pick up most of the bodies), most of which have plants growing out of them. Williams releases her without charge and over the next few days becomes acquainted with some of the local characters in the town including photographer Dave Ploog who's been trying to photograph the Man-Thing for weeks, shaman Pete Horn who's taken over from Sallis since his disappearance and local redneck gator trappers Wayne and Rodney Thibadeux who we later find out are working as the Schists' hired goons.

After the murder of one of Schist's security guards by the Man-Thing (again, discovered with a tree growing out of his body) and the discovery of the previous sheriff's body in the swamp with all four of his limbs hacked off, Williams and Fraser decide to set off into the swamp to track down Laroque to see what he knows about these events. However, the Thibadeux brothers are also dispatched by Jake with instructions to murder Laroque and make it look like an accident. En route though the Swamp Thing intercepts them and offs them both.

Williams and Fraser arrive at Laroque's house but nobody's home. Williams goes across the swamp to look for him while Fraser notices Ploog out trying to get a photo of the Man-Thing and goes to find him. Williams eventually ends up getting caught in a trap of Laroque's and the pair talk with Laroque explaining that he helped Schist to buy the lands but Sallis was against the sale. As a result, Schist murdered Sallis and dumped his body in the swamp where he has since been reborn as the Man-Thing. Only when the Schists are driven from the swamp will the killings stop which is what Laroque is currently trying to do.

Williams eventually frees himself and sees Fraser across a clearing but before they can talk the Man-Thing appears and kills Fraser by impaling him on some branches. Williams is woken up by Ploog who managed to take some very blurry photos of the Man-Thing. Angered, Williams tells him to stay away from the swamp.

The next day Kyle goes to interview both Pete Horn and Fred Schist with Teri tagging along for the ride. Horn tells him more about the Native American mythology surrounding the grounds before setting off into the swamp himself to "put an end to things" after Kyle and Teri have gone. Schist meanwhile turns decidedly unfriendly when Kyle asks him about Sallis and advises him to keep out of his business if he knows what's good for him. Oh yeah, also Kyle and Teri suddenly become a couple at this point with no preamble at all. Good old plotholes eh?

The net result of this is that everybody heads into the swamp that evening to try and sort things out - Horn believes that sacrificing himself to the Man-Thing will stop its rampage (he does and it doesn't), Laroque heads in to blow up the oil well, the Schists also head there to kill Laroque and Williams goes in to try and get some answers and hopefully keep some law and order. Teri stays back at the office but gets a message from the coroner at the morgue that an autopsy on the previous sheriff shows that he was actually killed by a bullet from Schist. So obviously she decides to head into the swamp to warn Kyle because, y'know, that message is worth putting yourself in mortal danger for when you could just call the guy on his mobile or similar.

Kyle encounters Ploog in the swamp aiming to get more photos of the Man-Thing but soon afterwards, the cameraman makes the mistake of disturbing the Schists who think he's the Man-Thing and shoot him dead. They then split up with Jake running into Laroque who bludgeons him to death with the blunt end of his machine gun!

Kyle meets up with Teri and she offers to take him to the burial ground (helpful only letting on now that she knew the way there!) but they're pursued by the Man-Thing the whole way. Upon arriving at the site they witness a confrontation between Fred Schist and Laroque with Schist shooting and wounding both Williams and Laroque before the Man-Thing turns up and kills him by pumping his body full of oil!

Kyle and Teri desperately try to fight the creature off but bullets don't hurt it and it's only destroyed when Laroque blows up the oil rig (with himself still on it) setting the creature on fire and then returning it back to the depths of the swamp. Kyle and Teri just sort of leave and that's the end of the film. No aftermath scene, nothing, finito.

It's not really any surprise that Marvel were so quick to disown "Man-Thing" as it isn't a good film by any stretch of the imagination. Its one saving grace is that it's actually very well shot with some great "Blair Witch Project" style atmospheric effects and cinematography but the characters are very poorly defined so you just don't really end up feeling any connection to any of them which just makes the whole thing a bit dull and it quickly becomes a "monster in the swamp" film by numbers. The whole thing just passes in an hour and a half without you really feeling anything which is arguably worse than it being a watch-through-your-fingers-terrible film. Unsurprisingly although the film rights for the character have now reverted back to Marvel's ownership, there haven't been any attempts to resurrect it for either a film or series. On this evidence, it's difficult to see that changing any time soon. To be honest, probably the nicest thing I can think to say about it is at least it isn't quite as bad as DC's "The Return of Swamp Thing"...

FINAL RATING: 👾👾👾 (3/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Spiderman 2 (2004) (9/10)
2. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
3. X-Men 2 (2002) (8/10)
4. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
5. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
6. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
7. Blade (1998) (7/10)
8. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
9. The Punisher (2004) (6/10)
10. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
11. Elektra (2005) (6/10)
12. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
13. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
14. Blade Trinity (2004) (6/10)
15. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
16. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
17. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
18. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
19. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
20. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
21. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
22. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
23. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
24. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
25. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
26. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
27. Man-Thing (2005) (3/10)
28. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
29. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
30. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
31. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
32. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
33. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
34. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: The Fantastic Four return after an 11-year absence. Bigger budget, still not a great film unfortunately...

DC Saturdays #12 - Batman (1989)

As you can probably deduce from the last few entries on the DC Saturday part of this blog, by the late '80s the company's stock in terms of film tie-ins was falling fast. The Superman series had crashed and burned ignominiously with the dreadful Superman 4 and attempts at spin-offs (Supergirl) and other DC characters being brought to the big screen (Swamp Thing) had had limited success. Safe to say that the release of Batman in 1989 pretty much changed all that.

The last time we caught up with the Caped Crusader was way back in 1966 with the film version of the Adam West/Burt Ward series. Although often knocked for its light-heartedness, it's still the version of Batman that I grew up with meaning I've always had a bit of a soft spot for it. However, it's safe to say that compared to the darkness of the original comics, it's really a different beast altogether. Following the cancellation of the TV series in 1969, the popularity of the character was on the wane throughout the '70s and although there was periodical talk of a new Batman film, it took until the late '80s for things to come to fruition with Tim Burton directing and a cast including Michael Keaton as Batman, Jack Nicholson as the Joker and Kim Basinger as Bruce Wayne's love interest Vicki Vale. The film was a huge critical and commercial success and would go on to spawn three follow-ups - again, a parallel could be drawn with the Superman films from a decade earlier with a solid first film, a second one which successfully built on the reputation of the first, a third where they changed directors and things started to wobble a bit before flaming out completely on the fourth one. But we'll deal with those in the weeks ahead - today, we're looking at where it all began way back in 1989...

The film starts with a couple of muggers attacking a couple walking their son home from the cinema (possibly a false start to make you think we're dealing with Batman's origin story here). As they're sharing out the loot on a rooftop they're surprised by the appearance of Batman who beats them up, leaves them for the cops to collect and tells them to warn all their accomplices that he's around.

We're quickly introduced to a few of the main players in this film - at a conference the mayor announces that he's setting up a new crimefighting task force led by Commissioner Gordon and Gotham's top lawyer Harvey Dent (the future Two-Face). The crime syndicate are led by Mob boss Carl Grissom and his second in command the psychopathic Jack Napier. We see Napier in action early on talking to his mole in the police force Eckhardt and roughing him up when he tries to put him in his place. Earlier, Eckhardt dismisses questions from a press reporter Alexander Knox who is working with photographer Vicki Vale to try and get an exclusive on the mysterious "Batman" much to the amusement of their colleagues.

However, there's trouble at the top in the Mob as Grissom and Napier are both having an affair with the same moll Alicia (Jerry Hall). Angry, Grissom sets Napier up to clear out the safes at one of his front companies, Axis Chemicals, on the premise that the police are about to make the link between the two. However, it's a set-up and Grissom phones Eckhardt with a tip-off instructing him to go in and kill Napier.

Meanwhile, Knox and Vale have been invited to a party at local millionaire Bruce Wayne's mansion and are planning to try and ask the police some more questions about Batman there. Instead though, they end up talking to Bruce himself who asks Vicki out on a date. However, he has to leave abruptly when his butler Alfred informs him that Commissioner Gordon has had to leave the party urgently to deal with a break-in at Axis. This is obviously Bruce's cue to change into Batman and go hunt some no-goodniks down.

Gordon's arrival throws things into confusion as he orders Napier to be taken alive (whereas Eckhardt is under orders to shoot to kill from Grissom). In the event, with his men outgunned, Napier shoots Eckhardt dead then attempts to escape via the roof exit only to be cut off by Batman. After a struggle, Napier ends up knocked off the walkway into a huge vat of chemicals. However, after everyone's gone, we see a hand emerging from the depths.

Napier ends up visiting a plastic surgeon to have his face restored but he's left with white skin, green hair and a permanent rictus grin. He rechristens himself the Joker and his first act is to bump off all those in the mob who've crossed him. Grissom is the first to be paid a visit and shot before another leading member who's got reservations ends up being fried to a skeleton by Joker's high-voltage electric hand buzzer ("Oh I got a live one here!...")

Bruce and Vicki, meanwhile, have become a couple but Bruce's secretive personality is already causing worries for Ms Vale. She tracks him down to a meeting outside Gotham Town Hall where another mob boss is holding a press conference upon inheriting part of Grissom's estate. This, of course, is the cue for Joker to appear at the head of a group of guys dressed as mime artists and stab said mob boss in the neck with a giant quill pen. Ouch.

Joker has also noticed Vicki and become infatuated with her, inviting her for a date (while pretending to be Bruce on the phone) at the Gotham Art Museum which is the cue for a cool sequence where him and his goons turn up and trash the place to the strains of "Partyman" by Prince. Luckily Batman turns up to rescue her and they escape in the Batmobile.

Meanwhile, the Joker's plan is taking place - he's developed a deadly laughing gas called Smilex which he's hidden in various substances around Gotham with the result that people are literally dying of laughter, collapsing with the same rictus grin that the Joker has as we see when he uses it on a newsreader. His masterplan is to hijack the Gotham City 200th anniversary parade by throwing free money to the citizens before flooding the streets with Smilex to cause a massacre. Can Batman get it together to stop him? Well, I'm not giving away any more spoilers, you'll have to watch and see for yourself...

Although if I'm honest it has dated a little bit since I first watched it as an 11-year-old when it was released on video rental (ah, there's a heartwarmingly nostalgic phrase for you) and it's easy to place as an '80s film rather than a modern one, Batman is still damn good and just to say pips the first Superman film to go top of this list. Burton deserves a lot of credit for how he handled this project, deftly balancing it between the cartoony '60s version of Batman and the darker comic version and it's easy to see why this is the film that arguably cemented his reputation as one of the leading lights of gothic style films. Keaton and Basinger are good in their roles but this is very much Jack Nicholson's film - his wonderfully demented turn as the Joker really is a total scene-stealer every time and the amount of killer one-liners he has ("Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?") is brilliant. Don't get me wrong, Heath Ledger was similarly awesome in the role in the very different "Dark Knight" film 15 odd years later but for me, Nicholson really is the ultimate Joker.

As mentioned earlier, Batman was a huge box office smash and the series would go on to be one of the big film franchises of the early '90s. It'll be interesting to chart its rise and fall in the weeks ahead but in the meantime, if you haven't seen this film then you really should.

FINAL RATING: 🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇 (8/10)

CURRENT DC FILM TABLE

1. Batman (1989) (8/10)
2. Superman (1978) (8/10)
3. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
4. Batman (1966) (8/10)
5. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
6. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
7. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
8. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
9. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)
10. The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) (2/10)
11. Superman 4 - The Quest For Peace (1987) (2/10)
12. Supergirl (1984) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: A quick detour from the Batman saga as we look at the first in a trio of early '90s Flash TV movies...