DC Saturdays #21 - Road To Perdition (2002)

As we mentioned on last week's blog, in the years around the millennium, a series of critically slaughtered movies (notably the two Joel Schumacher Batman films and "Steel") had left the film arm of DC pretty much broken and it would be a long time before any further film tie-ins occurred for any of the group's main characters. However, before the DC universe returned properly with 2004's "Catwoman" (a film so bad it's a wonder it didn't send the company back under for another seven years but more on that when we come to it), we did get a few "are they or aren't they?" films from DC spin-offs. Next week we'll be looking at "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" which didn't start out as a DC title but joined the franchise around the time the movie came out which makes it just about worthy of qualification in my opinion. Before that though came two other titles, 2005's "A History of Violence" and 2002's "Road To Perdition", both based on titles from DC offshoot Paradox and both very different from the rest of the DC canon.

We won't be covering the art house film "A History Of Violence" on this blog because the writers weren't actually even aware of the comic book's existence when the film was written (they based it on the novel that came afterwards) meaning it's not really a straight tie-in as such but "Road To Perdition" is pretty much directly based on the comic mini-series of the same name and so just to say qualifies here. When it was released in 2002, this tale of a fugitive Irish mafia hitman and his son on the run from the mob was widely acclaimed and even saw Tom Hanks add yet another "Best Actor" Oscar to his extensive collection. Let's see how it's held up in the intervening 16 years...

The film is set in 1931, the height of the Depression, in Illinois and is based around the story of gangster Michael Sullivan (Hanks) who works as a hitman for his adoptive father John Rooney (Paul Newman) along with his stepbrother and Rooney's biological son Connor (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig). The film opens with Sullivan, his wife Annie and their two sons Michael Jr and Peter attending the wake of McGovern, one of Rooney's associates. However, McGovern's brother Finn uses his speech to make some pointed remarks about John causing Michael and Connor to cut him short and escort him to his ride home. Afterwards, John advises his boys to go and see Finn the next night to discuss his grievances.

Unbeknownst to Sullivan however, Michael Jr stows away in the back of his car as he and Connor are driving to their rendezvous. The previous night, Michael Jr and Peter had been discussing what their dad's job actually was and the former decides to find out. When the car reaches the brewery where the meeting is taking place, Michael Jr sneaks up to the door and watches the discussion through the crack in the middle.

However, the conversation breaks down and Connor's temper gets the better of him and he shoots Finn with Michael gunning down McGovern's two hitmen before they can draw their guns. Escaping from the brewery the pair find Michael Jr and swear him to secrecy.

The next day, Connor and Michael are summoned before Rooney's board with the former being made to apologise, much to his anger, by John. Afterwards, he takes Michael to one side and apologises properly before asking him to visit a speakeasy to conduct some business for him that night. Meanwhile, Michael Jr, still upset over the previous night's events, ends up getting into a fight at school and is kept back to do detention.

Sullivan heads to the speakeasy and hands the note to its owner Calvino. When Calvino suddenly draws his gun, he realises he's been set up and quickly dispatches the speakeasy owner and his henchman. Getting back in his car he floors it home, arriving at the same time as Michael Jr arrives home from school but they're too late - Connor has been to the house and shot Annie and Peter dead. Realising that they're wanted men, the pair go on the run.

Driving through the night to Chicago, Sullivan visits Frank Nitti, a conduit between Rooney and Al Capone and asks him if the Chicago mob boss is looking for men at the moment. Unfortunately Nitti is aware of what's happened back in Rock Island and is unable to help him. After Michael leaves, we see Nitti speaking to John and Connor in the back room and the trio reluctantly agree to put a hit out on Sullivan.

The hitman they recruit is Harlen Maguire (Jude Law), a crime scene photographer by day who lives a double life as a mercenary by night. Not realising he's in trouble, Sullivan opts to head to a town called Perdition on the coast (hence the film name) to leave Michael Jr to live with Annie's sister Sarah. He calls her after Annie's funeral but unbeknown to him, Maguire has infiltrated the ceremony and manages to trace the call by dialling the operator.

Maguire catches up with Sullivan a few hours later at a diner on the highway. The pair initially make conversation but, realising something's up, Sullivan escapes through the toilet window, slashing Maguire's tyres on the way out to stop him chasing them.

Angry that his old associates are still trying to kill him, Sullivan comes up with a scheme to get back at Rooney by holding up a series of banks (using Michael Jr as his getaway driver) and forcibly withdrawing the mob's assets from each one with the intention of using the money as a trade-off to get them to reveal where Connor is hiding so he can go round and finish his business by killing him. Does his plan succeed? Ah-ah, only so many spoilers I'm giving for this one...

"Road To Perdition" is a bit of a funny one - certainly it's very unlike pretty much anything else we'll cover in this blog. Critically acclaimed at the time, it's since become a bit of a Marmite film with some claiming it lives up to the hype and others writing it off as a disappointment. Me? I thought it was decent enough. Hanks, Law, Craig and Newman are all as good as you'd expect here and the plot is certainly gripping enough with a few unexpected twists and turns thrown in. The only slight problem is it sometimes feels as though the characters aren't as clearly defined as you want them to be and the interaction sequences feel a little stunted in places, especially between the Sullivans. But while it's not quite an all-time classic it's still an enjoyable big screen epic to waste a couple of hours to and I'd certainly give it a moderate recommendation.

The film did well enough at the box office and, ever so slowly, DC films started to crawl out of the woodwork once again culminating with 2005's "Batman Begins" which properly announced their return to the silver screen. However, as we'll see from the next set of reviews, unfortunately we've got a few misfires to deal with between now and then...

FINAL RATING: 🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫🔫 (7/10)

CURRENT DC FILM TABLE

1. Batman Returns (1992) (9/10)
2. Batman (1989) (8/10)
3. Superman (1978) (8/10)
4. Superman 2 (1980) (8/10)
5. Batman (1966) (8/10)
6. Road To Perdition (2002) (7/10)
7. Batman Forever (1995) (6/10)
8. Superman 3 (1983) (5/10)
9. Swamp Thing (1982) (5/10)
10. The New Wonder Woman (1975) (5/10)
11. Superman and the Mole Men (1951) (5/10)
12. The Flash 2 - Revenge Of The Trickster (1991) (4/10)
13. The Flash 3 - Deadly Nightshade (1991) (4/10)
14. Wonder Woman Returns (1977) (4/10)
15. The Flash (1990) (4/10)
16. Wonder Woman (1974) (3/10)
17. Batman & Robin (1997) (2/10)
18. The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) (2/10)
19. Superman 4 - The Quest For Peace (1987) (2/10)
20. Justice League of America (1997) (2/10)
21. Supergirl (1984) (2/10)
22. Steel (1997) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: Back to the "proper" superhero films with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...

(Delayed) Marvel Mondays #41 - Punisher: War Zone (2008)

QUICK NOTE: Apologies for falling a bit behind with this blog again - due to being away on holiday I just haven't really been at home for long enough to watch a film and write the review up. I'm currently doing a catch-up job with both DC Saturday and Marvel Monday so expect to see a few updates in the next few days as we get ourselves back up to speed. Starting right about.....now.

"Punisher: War Zone" represents the third and final Punisher film to date and is probably one of the most notorious Marvel commercial flops of the last decade, making less than a third of its budget back. Made in conjunction with Lionsgate, it was meant to launch the "Marvel Knights" series of darker more adult-oriented films but the idea was quickly abandoned although I s'pose you could argue its spirit lives on via the blood and guts approach of the Marvel Hells Kitchen serials (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and most recently the new Punisher series itself).

The genesis of the film was an awkward one - it originally started life as a sequel to the 2004 Punisher film starring Thomas Jane but the production quickly got bogged down in difficulties leading Jane to walk out on the series and the film to turn into a reboot. British actor Ray Stevenson would sign on for the title role with another Brit, Dominic West from "The Wire", playing his nemesis Billy "Jigsaw" Russotti. As with both of the other two Punisher films, despite getting mediocre reviews, there are a group of die-hards who swear by it so let's see how it bears up...

The film is set five years after the first Punisher film (although Castle's backstory is rewritten here to make it more consistent with the comic books - his family was killed in a botched Mafia hit in Central Park and since then he's been on the road for extremely bloody vengeance). It opens with veteran Mafia don Cesare discussing a potential smuggling deal with one of his henchmen Billy "The Beaut" Russotti who wants to use his warehouse facilities to help a group of Russian mafiosi smuggle a chemical weapon into New York.

Cesare refuses to back Russotti who leaves the house in a huff with his men just as the host and his guests are settling down to dinner. However, their meal is rudely interrupted by Frank Castle - cue the blood and guts. I should point out by the way that this film ratchets up the violence even further than the 2004 one did and is most definitely not for the squeamish. Unfortunately therein lies its main problem - lord knows I've seen enough violent Marvel stuff in recent years but there comes a point where you can over-saturate it to the point where it stops being entertaining and crosses over into just being downright depressing and "War Zone" just blunders over that line without any subtlety whatsoever. Shame.

We find out that Castle has an agreement with the local cops who are happy to let him wreak his vengeance on the criminal fraternity as it makes their lives easier. One of the two cops who've been staking out the house, Saffiotti, tips him off about Russotti heading for the docks before punching himself in the nose to make it look to his partner Soap as if he's been ambushed by the Punisher.

Russotti and his goons, Ink, Pittsy and Donatelli, head for a bottle plant at the docks where they reach an agreement to do the deal with the Russians given that everyone else in their familia has now been shot. We also find out they've got a group of drug-addled parkour-obsessed goons led by the dreadlocked McGinty who work as their underlings. However, when Castle arrives, it's time for the villains to scram - Ink and Pittsy escape while McGinty and his crew do a runner across the rooftops. However, Russotti and Donatelli are left inside with Castle shooting the latter and the former being knocked into a glass crusher which Frank switches on before walking away. However, upon hiding behind Donatelli's body he realises that Donatelli was an undercover FBI agent trailing Russotti's gang.

This leads Castle to have a crisis of confidence and initially he visits Donatelli's widow and daughter to try and pay them some financial compensation but they give him short shrift and turn him down. Crestfallen, Frank tells his associates Microchip (his tech nerd helper) and Carlos (a former crim who's now crossed over to the good guys' side) that he's getting out of the vengeance game for good and leaving town. However, when they tell him that Russotti survived and is likely to come after the Donatelli family, he realises he's got a job to do to protect them.

Russotti, meanwhile, has been busy planning revenge. Although he survived, the resulting surgery has left him so badly disfigured that his face has several stitch lines in it leading him to take the new name Jigsaw. His first move is to re-recruit Ink and Pittsy and bust his cannibalistic brother Loony Bin Jim out of the local asylum (where he eats the guard who's been tormenting him's kidneys - yuck) and head to the Donatelli household to look for the money he believes the agent stole from him.

Meanwhile back at the police station, Donatelli's old FBI partner Budiansky has turned up and requested to be assigned to the Punisher Task Force. Which, as we find out, only consists of Soap who we saw on the raid earlier. The Punisher himself, meanwhile, is off tracking down Jigsaw's gang one by one starting with McGinty. When he hears news from the cops that the parkour gang have just robbed a convenience store, he promptly heads to the rooftops, blows two of them up with a missile before kneecapping McGinty. Once he's got the information he needs off him, he pushes him off the rooftop to be impaled on some railings...ouch!

Budiansky and Soap have also been alerted to the robbery and the former gets into a fight with Castle and eventually apprehends him. Castle warns them that Jigsaw and his gang have headed over to the Donatelli residence. A police car is duly dispatched there but Jim quickly offs both of the officers when they enter the house. Realising something's up, Budiansky heads over there himself but is quickly apprehended by Jigsaw when he threatens to shoot the two hostages. Leaving Ink and Pittsy to guard the prisoners, Jigsaw and Jim go to search the house. However, Castle persuades Soap (who's been trailing him for a few years and has gained a grudging respect for him through his case) to let him go and breaks into the house, punching Ink so hard that he caves his skull in before blowing Pittsy's head off with a shotgun and escaping with the Donatellis. Budiansky radios the other cops who promptly turn up and arrest Jigsaw and Jim.

However, the Russotti brothers manage to negotiate a deal with the FBI to gain diplomatic immunity by grassing up the Bulat brothers, who they were due to do a deal with over the chemical weapon meaning that when Jigsaw and Jim turn up to seal the deal, the Rooskies quickly find themselves cuffed and carted off in a helicopter.

Now freed and with their money returned to them, the Russottis decide to finish the job by getting vengeance on Castle. They manage to locate his hideout midway down a subway tunnel leading to Jim kidnapping the Donatellis again as well as critically injuring Carlos with an axe while Jigsaw heads to Microchip's house and kidnaps him as well as killing his vegetative mother. Castle returns to his lair to find Carlos bleeding to death there and agrees to put him out of his misery.

The Russottis hole up in an abandoned hotel and recruit a motley collection of hood thugs, Yakuza and Irish gangsters to protect them. Realising he has no-one else to turn to, Castle goes back to Budiansky and Soap and strikes a deal with them to help him. They approach the remainder of the Russian gangsters who Jigsaw was initially doing a deal with and strike a deal whereby they attack in the ground floor leaving Castle clear to enter the building further up. After the expected bloodshed, Castle takes on Loony Bin Jim and beats him up to the extent that he goes scurrying off back to Jigsaw.

Jigsaw and Castle have their big confrontation in the hotel's penthouse suite with Jim holding a gun to the Donatellis' heads and Jigsaw doing the same to Micro forcing Frank to choose. Instead though, Frank shoots Jim dead leading Jigsaw to do the same to Micro. Castle and Jigsaw then have their big climactic (well not that climactic to be honest) fight which ends with Jigsaw being impaled on a metal rod and thrown on a fire. Afterwards, Castle returns the Donatellis to Budiansky to keep them safe and heads off for a drink with Soap, stopping only to blow the head off a mugger who threatens the cop en route. The end.

I know I seem to say this after every Punisher film but good lord that was grim. I see what Lionsgate were trying to do here but as I said earlier, by upping the ultraviolence quota at the expense of the plot, it makes "War Zone" a real slog to get through. Eventually the nonstop bloodshed stops being cool and just becomes boring and depressing and it really makes the latter stages of this film difficult going. Not even because of how violent it is, just because you end up thinking "oh...more people getting their heads blown off by shotguns. Right. Sigh...here we go again..." To be honest, while none of the three Punisher films are exactly classics, I would say that this one just to say takes the award for being the worst of the three. It's not especially terrible but it's depressing and dull enough to be below average, that's for sure.

As we mentioned earlier, "War Zone" bombed horrifically at the box office and the Punisher promptly returned in-house to the MCU, first appearing as a character in season 2 of "Daredevil" before being given his own series. Although still incredibly bleak, it did at least mark a step up from the movies with Jon Bernthal portraying the role well and enough of a plot to back up the carnage. Similarly, although the Marvel Knights series died a death here, the general premise of a series of darker and more adult-themed Marvel visual material did eventually come to fruition with the Hells Kitchen serials on Marvel. And, funnily enough, we will be seeing Ray Stevenson again on Marvel Mondays in a very different role as Falstag in the Thor films. As for "War Zone" though - I guess hardcore gorehounds may find something to watch here but a combination of a thin plot, below-par acting and overdoing the bloodshed to the level that it just becomes repetitive mean that this one can be safely skipped.

FINAL RATING: 💀💀💀💀 (4/10)

CURRENT MARVEL FILM TABLE

1. Iron Man (2008) (10/10)
2. Spiderman 2 (2004) (9/10)
3. Spiderman (2002) (9/10)
4. X-Men 2 (2002) (8/10)
5. Men In Black (1997) (8/10)
6. X-Men (2000) (8/10)
7. The Incredible Hulk (2008) (7/10)
8. Blade 2 (2001) (7/10)
9. Blade (1998) (7/10)
10. The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988) (6/10)
11. Spiderman 3 (2007) (6/10)
12. Fantastic Four - Rise Of The Silver Surfer (6/10)
13. The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (1989) (6/10)
14. The Punisher (2004) (6/10)
15. Conan The Barbarian (1982) (6/10)
16. Elektra (2005) (6/10)
17. Conan The Destroyer (1984) (6/10)
18. X-Men: Last Stand (2006) (6/10)
19. Blade Trinity (2004) (6/10)
20. Men In Black 2 (2000) (6/10)
21. The Incredible Hulk (1977) (5/10)
22. The Fantastic Four (2005) (5/10)
23. Doctor Mordrid (1992) (5/10)
24. The Punisher (1989) (5/10)
25. Doctor Strange (1978) (5/10)
26. Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998) (4/10)
27. The Fantastic Four (1994) (4/10)
28. Punisher: War Zone (2008) (4/10)
29. Hulk (2003) (4/10)
30. Red Sonja (1985) (4/10)
31. Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979) (4/10)
32. Spiderman (1977) (4/10)
33. Ghost Rider (2007) (3/10)
34. Bride of the Incredible Hulk (1978) (3/10)
35. The Death Of The Incredible Hulk (1990) (3/10)
36. Man-Thing (2005) (3/10)
37. Return of the Incredible Hulk (1978) (3/10)
38. Spiderman: The Dragon's Challenge (1979) (3/10)
39. Howard The Duck (1986) (2/10)
40. Captain America (1990) (2/10)
41. Captain America (1979) (2/10)
42. Generation X (1996) (2/10)
43. Spiderman Strikes Back (1978) (2/10)
44. Daredevil (2003) (2/10)

NEXT WEEK: The X-Men series continues to go down the tubes quality-wise with Wolverine Origins...

Throwback Thursday: DC Saturdays 1-20 - A Recap

As you can probably guess from the last three DC Saturday entries in this blog, 1997 was not a good year for DC film tie-ins (in fact if you consider that Marvel still weren't really out of the woods in terms of making the transition from B-movies to big budget blockbusters, it wasn't a good year for comic book movies as a whole). There were no less than three DC tie-ins released that year and pretty much all of them sucked - "Justice League of America" was a low-budget joke that looked as though it was made in the mid-'80s rather than the late '90s, "Steel" went about as well as you'd expect an generic action film with Shaquille O'Neal in the title role to and "Batman & Robin" pretty much killed off the Batman film franchise for close to a decade.

In fact, it wasn't just Batman films - after "Steel", DC wouldn't release another film until 2002 and even then "Road To Perdition" certainly wasn't a superhero film - you'd have to wait either another year until "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (which is a bit of an is-it-isn't-it case as we'll see when we come to review it) or 2004's "Catwoman" (shudder) for one of those.

So now seems as good a time as any, especially as we've officially got 20 reviews in the can (plus the one bonus) for this series, to take a look back at DC's film output in the 20th century from 1951's "Superman And The Mole Men" right up to "Steel" which we reviewed last week. From the good to the bad to the out-and-out absurd, let's take a look back at what we've seen so far...

21. STEEL (1997)

Take a snore-inducingly generic '90s action film by numbers which is basically a low-rent cross between "Luke Cage" and "Iron Man", add a hopelessly lost Shaquille O'Neal, a man who really should never have left the basketball court for Hollywood on this evidence, in the title role and cram him into the ugliest looking superhero outfit known to man. Congrats, you've just come up with the worst film on this list and if you look at the competition down here, that's quite some achievement for this utterly boring misfire. Avoid at all costs.

20. SUPERGIRL (1984)

If Superman 3 showed that the wheels on the Man of Steel's franchise were wobbling slightly then Supergirl is where they well and truly came off. Despite a promising cast (Peter Cook, Peter O'Toole, Faye Dunaway), this film is comprehensively sunk by an abysmal script, terrible acting and a plot with more holes than a Swiss cheese. You can only begin to imagine what this all adds up to but suffice to say don't bother watching it, you'll only feel like a terrible fool if you do.

19. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA (1997)

Twenty years before the DCEU Justice League film stunk up cinemas worldwide came this ultra-low budget straight-to-TV movie which was supposed to kick off a Justice League television series that thankfully got nixed. Looking like it was made in 1987 rather than 1997, poor special FX, clunky dialogue and a plot which blunders over into outright silliness (and not in a good way) make this attempt at a "Friends" style "superheroes as housemates" series starring the Flash, Green Lantern, Fire, Ice and the Atom a total turkey.

18. SUPERMAN 4: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

By this point the Superman wagon had comprehensively crashed and burned with directors and producers dropping like flies and Warners cutting the budget for the fourth film by two thirds. The net result was a badly edited film which had plot holes galore, a lousy script and despite being the most recent of the four films actually looks the most dated. So bad it put Superman on the cinematic backburner for two decades.

17. THE RETURN OF SWAMP THING (1989)

Did anyone really ask for a Swamp Thing sequel? With original director Wes Craven long since moved on to bigger and better things, Anton Arcane and his green nemesis return for a second outing with Heather Locklear and comic B-movie veteran Sarah Douglas dragged along for the ride. The result is a hideously bad B-movie which plays it for laughs and misses by a mile every time. Avoid like the plague.

16. BATMAN & ROBIN (1997)

Yes, I'm surprised it's not rock bottom of this pile as well but at least the fourth Batman film veers over into "so bad it's actually funny" territory in places. However, it's still an unmitigated disaster with the garish neon visuals only matched by the ultra-dumb cartoony script. Add in to the fact that they have a hopelessly lost George Clooney as the Caped Crusader (and we thought Val Kilmer was bad), an amazingly even more lost-looking Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl (this film pretty much killed her previously promising acting career stone dead) and a monosyllabic Arnie as Mr Freeze ("Let's kick some ice!") and the picture is depressingly complete. Chris O'Donnell as Robin (another whose career was pretty much sunk by this film) and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy both at least put in a valiant shift but there's little they can do to stop this film crashing and burning horrifically. So awful it essentially put the Batman franchise on ice for almost a decade.

15. WONDER WOMAN (1974)

DC's first attempt to bring Diana Prince to the big screen was unfortunately a total flop - in fact, "Wonder Woman" plays out more like a bad '70s Marvel film with lots of padding, a thin plot full of holes and next to no action. Future long-stay TV actress Cathy Lee Crosby does her best in the circumstances and Ricardo Montalban is reasonable enough as the sleazeball chief bad guy but overall this is massively forgettable.

14. THE FLASH (1990)

Similar to its successors, the first Flash movie (the TV pilot in the States) isn't totally awful but it hasn't aged well with dated special effects, poor acting and a slow plot. After being given supernatural speed by an accident involving a chemical lab and a lightning strike, Barry Allen is on a mission to track down the biker gang who offed his brother. Similar to the '70s and '80s Marvel TV series, it's unfortunately easy to see why this incarnation of the Flash never made it past one series...

13. WONDER WOMAN RETURNS (1978)

Inferior to its predecessor, "Wonder Woman Returns" was the TV film which saw the series rebooted with a new 1970s backdrop and Diana Prince setting off on a new series of adventures with Steve Trevor Jr, son of the original. Unfortunately, as well as not having aged well, this suffers from the exact opposite problem of a lot of '70s Marvel/DC films in that it tries to cram too much into a modest 75 minute time frame leaving a rushed and garbled film with plot holes the size of planets. There's the germ of a good idea here but it just isn't executed very well unfortunately.

12. THE FLASH 3: DEADLY NIGHTSHADE (1991)

The third film in the early '90s Flash trilogy sits in between the other two in terms of quality and is hobbled by pretty much the same problems, namely dated special FX and clunky dialogue. However, after a decidedly forgettable first half the introduction of the violent psychopath Deadly Nightshade as an adversary for the Flash and his partner the original Nightshade helps to perk things up a bit and at least makes this a bit more watchable if you persevere with it.

11. THE FLASH 2: REVENGE OF THE TRICKSTER (1990)

The second Flash film suffers from most of the same pitfalls of its predecessor (wooden acting, a terrible script and some hilariously dated special FX) but is at least partially redeemed by the unexpected presence of Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill as the Flash's nemesis the Trickster who puts on an enjoyably OTT (without being too ridiculous) performance hamming it up in the villain's role. Flash 2 is otherwise pretty much standard low budget chod but at least it's not quite as terrible as some of the other films from this era...

10. SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN (1951)

Arguably the first proper superhero movie of the modern era, "Superman and the Mole Men" is a real oddity in that it plays out more like a chilling morality tale on racism set in midwest America that just happens to have Clark Kent and Lois Lane in it. Given the constrictions of the timeframe though it's watchable enough and at least at a mere 58 minutes in length it doesn't outstay its welcome.

9. THE NEW WONDER WOMAN (1975)

Aka "the one that set up the TV series that everyone's actually familiar with". This relaunch of the Wonder Woman series may be hilariously cheesy and naff in places (especially the ridiculously dated special FX) but at least it's a big improvement on its predecessor in that it at least has some sort of plot to actually get your teeth into. Pretty obvious why this is the version that got picked up.

8. SWAMP THING (1982)

In which a pre-"Nightmare on Elm Street" Wes Craven tries his hand at resurrecting the ailing "Swamp Thing" franchise and just about gets away with it. Simple no-brainer B-movie fun which is only let down by the final fight scene which well and truly blunders over the border from "suspend your disbelief" to "okay, this is just silly now".

7. SUPERMAN 3 (1983)

Yes, there's no denying that it's a huge step down from the first two Superman films but even though the inclusion of Richard Pryor added pretty much nothing to the film and the fact that a lot of it veers over into unwelcome slapstick silliness, "Superman 3" actually isn't quite as bad as a lot of people make out (certainly it's way better than "Superman 4" and "Supergirl" for a start). Like "Swamp Thing", it's pretty much simple no-brainer fun which kills a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon nicely.

6. BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

Although a massive step down from the first two Batman films, rather like Superman 3 this isn't quite the disaster it's sometimes painted as although it's a supremely schizophrenic effort. Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones (yes, that Tommy Lee Jones) make for a fantastically OTT '60s Batman villain style pairing as Riddler and Two Face and Chris O'Donnell puts in an honest shift as the much-maligned Robin. However, Val Kilmer and Nicole Kidman both look comprehensively lost as Batman and Chase Meredith respectively (though less so than George Clooney a couple of years later) as if they're the only ones in the film trying to play it straight. Although Batman Forever just about manages to scrape by as above average, the warning signs were very much there as to what would come next...

5. BATMAN (1966)

Quite simply, the '60s Batman film does what it says on the tin and is a riot of technicolour silliness and enjoyably hammy (without going too far OTT) acting which is pretty much the definition of "so bad it's actually awesome". Yes, it very much isn't the Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan version of Batman but if you want something to put a smile on your face and cheer you up after a miserable day then this will definitely do the job.

4. SUPERMAN 2 (1980)

We reviewed the Richard Donner cut of "Superman 2" in this blog which is probably the better version as it's more of a straight continuation from the first film. Like its predecessor, a proper old-school superhero epic with Christopher Reeve again doing a great job in the lead role, Gene Hackman making a worthy adversary as the slimy Lex Luthor and Terrence Stamp backing them up well as the unhinged General Zod. Add to that a great script with genuinely shocking moments such as seeing a suddenly-human Clark Kent getting seven bells beaten out of him by an obnoxious truck driver and you've got a genuine classic here.

3. SUPERMAN (1978)

The first genuine superhero epic of the modern age and it still holds up well now. It says a lot about "Superman" that even at two and a half hours it doesn't outstay its welcome, covering Superman's backstory nicely while still finding time to give the main plot of the film pitting Christopher Reeve's Superman against Gene Hackman's scheming Lex Luthor enough air time. Funny, heartbreaking and breathtaking all at once, there's a good reason why this has rightfully attained the status of being an all-time classic.

2. BATMAN (1989)

After a long run of disappointing DC films in the mid-'80s, Batman well and truly got things back on track. Tim Burton's dark cinematic direction suits the film down to the ground and with Michael Keaton on good form as Batman and Jack Nicholson well and truly stealing the show as the deranged Joker, this film definitely raised the bar for both superhero films and comic book tie-ins.

1. BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

It was always going to be difficult to top the first Batman film but fair play to Tim Burton, he very much managed it. With a more measured story featuring the Penguin (an excellently vitriolic Danny DeVito) emerging from the sewers and running for office while demonising Batman, it seems like an oddly prescient film in this day and age. Add in Michelle Pfeiffer doing an excellent femme fatale turn as Catwoman and you've got a dark masterpiece which still holds up as the best pre-millennial DC movie.