Have you ever had a friend, a relative or a pet that disappeared for so long you thought they were dead, and after you gave up hope they showed up again? Or maybe your car got stolen, you figured it was gone for good but then one day the cops called you and they found it on the side of a road somewhere without that much damage? Well, that’s Sam Raimi. He was lost so deep in Spider-land we went through a period of denial, then acceptance, then moved on with our lives in a Raimi-free world and forgot all about him. But all the sudden the intercom buzzes in the middle of the night, we rub the sleep from our eyes and look out the window and holy shit if that isn’t Sam Raimi standing at the gate holding DRAG ME TO HELL in a little cage.

Let’s be fair though. I’m not gonna disavow the Sam Raimi of the 21st century. I don’t blame him for getting bored with what he was doing and making THE GIFT, even if I was kind of bored with what he did in THE GIFT. And I liked his SPIDER-MAN movies, it’s just that seven years of them is a heavy trade for the old Sam Raimi we loved. EVIL DEAD seems like so long ago now that when you hear his name associated with a horror movie (he produces a bunch of them through his company Ghost House) you assume it won’t be very good.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT had some good parts, but there’s not a particularly good track record there. There is no noticeable connection to the O.G. Sam Raimi, the guy with the energetic visuals and goofy dark humor, the purveyor of ultimate experiences in grueling horror and Three Stooges homages. The guy who strapped that camera to that car and drove it through the woods, who made a character swallow a flying eyeball, who had Liam Neeson demand the fucking elephant and blew a hole bigger than a grapefruit through Keith David’s head in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. What happened to the guy who worshipful fans rallied around and cheered on when he got to do SPIDER–MAN and then kind of… forgot about? You see glimpses of that guy in the SPIDER-MANs, but they’re hidden behind the big budgets, the top-of-the-line effects, the demands of the corporation and the iconography and the movie stars and the franchise. Not as much room to fuck around and invent shit when you’ve got all those boxes to check off. So we don’t really get to see all his talents there.

But god damn if O.G. Sam Raimi isn’t back with DRAG ME TO HELL. Written with his brother Ivan just after ARMY OF DARKNESS, this is an old fashioned fun-time horror movie with a tone very close to EVIL DEAD II. It treats its story of a fatal 3-day gypsy curse seriously just like EVIL DEAD did the Necronomicon Ex-mortis. It’s not another fuckin horror comedy. But you will find yourself laughing at all the inventively horrible things that befall the young loan officer Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman.

There’s a great score and arsenal of creepy sounds courtesy of Christopher Young (HELLRAISER), and the old school Universal logo and the way the title slams onto the screen get you ready for business. But the point where I made a positive I.D. on our man Sam Raimi was in the first real setpiece where Christine fights a decrepit, angry gypsy woman in an enclosed space and the two use every dirty-fighting technique known to woman. (My SPOILER favorite: the old lady loses her false teeth but bites Christine in the face anyway.) Just this scene milks more laughter and squirming out of you than most recent horror movies do in their entire running times. And this one never lets up.

Somebody told me DRAG ME TO HELL had “jump-scares” that work, somebody else said it wasn’t very good because it was just a bunch of jump-scares. Both might be valid but I didn’t think about it that way. I don’t think it made me jump, it just seemed to be a movie where everyday reality can at any moment be ferociously invaded by feverish otherworldly visions, demonic apparitions and disgusting substances. It doesn’t build to a crescendo of insanity like EVIL DEAD. It’s more like this young professional is trying to keep a lid on the horror but it keeps pushing its way out and whacking her in the jaw with the lid. The poor girl is trying to get a promotion at the bank, but she bleeds all over her boss. She’s trying to make a good impression on her boyfriend’s parents but she starts yelling at a demon during dessert. She’s not stuck in a cabin in the woods, she’s trying to live her normal life and go to work and everything while this devil keeps circling around her licking its lips.

As horror fans we know that when somebody comes back from the dead there’s gonna be something missing, such as a soul. Maybe it looks like little Gage, but he’s gonna slash your achilles heel with a scalpel, so I was worried there would be some catch here with Raimi. Horror fans tend to be purists, and most of the ones I know are totally racist against any use of CGI. I do think there is one quick grossout gag in the movie that was a mistake to do with computers. We know it’s fake when it’s made out of rubber, but at least you know she really had to have slime on her face. When it’s digital it might as well just be a drawing. The rest of the computery shit I thought was really good though. There’s a scene involving a fly that could not have been done any other way, but looked good enough it had me questioning whether they somehow really did it.

Okay, so the computers aren’t the monkey paw’s curse, so what about the rating? If you’ve avoided this movie it might be because you read it was PG-13, the cursed watered-down rating that has been forced on so many once proud R-rated series. THE EVIL DEAD was pretty damn R (nobody gets raped by a tree in PG-13, that’s the rule), Raimi was once known for his extravagant gore, and there have been almost no good horror movies ever released with that rating. (I like the remake of THE RING, that’s about it.)

But my friends, I don’t know how to explain this, but somehow this one works. It doesn’t feel like “good for a PG-13″, it just feels like “good.” If I did not know about that rating I would’ve never believed it. This doesn’t necessarily need to have a bunch of blood (actually it does have a bunch) and it turns out that inventing new ways to be disgusting doesn’t affect the rating. I would still think it would be a problem though because with a PG-13 rating you can feel safe knowing that certain things won’t happen, certain lines will not be crossed, and that takes the horror out of it.

But take my word for it, lines are crossed in this movie. There are things that happen here that you don’t expect to happen in any movie, let alone a PG-13. There are tricks in the movie I completely fell for. I think it’s one of those decoy PG-13s they put on there to give you a false sense of security just so they can fuck with you. One act in particular – okay, it’s off screen. But it is something reprehensible that you do not ever expect the hero of a movie to do. Especially when the hero is a pretty young blonde.

That brings me to my next point, which is the unexpected cleverness of the characterization in this script. The basic feel of the movie is like a spookhouse ride. It’s about fun. This ain’t MARTYRS. So the characters can just be types if they want to. There are a couple really hatable types in here, and Raimi could leave it at that, but then these characters show another side you don’t expect, and just at the right time to make everything more uncomfortable.

More importantly Christine is subtly different from your standard horror heroine. Most women in horror movies are either idiots or saints. If you look at Laurie in HALLOWEEN, Nancy in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Helen in CANDYMAN, Sydney in SCREAM, Kirsty in HELLRAISER… most of these ladies are goodie two shoes by design, they are supposed to have a purity that gets challenged or corrupted when they encounter true evil or whatever. They find the toughness to survive and maybe kill their attacker, but they’re still good through and through.

Christine might seem the same at first – she was raised on a farm, she’s nicer than everybody else at the bank, she even says she’s a vegetarian and volunteers at a puppy shelter. But the nice twist is that throughout the movie she has moral lapses and temptations that are a little over the edge of what can be reasonably expected. She’s still sympathetic but every once in a while she has a plan that makes you think, “Wait– really?” For example she comes very close to allowing a random old man at a diner to get his soul ripped out in place of hers. And worse.

There’s alot of humor in this going too far, and I think it’s really cool they would give that to a female character. I can see Bruce Campbell doing this stuff but I can’t think of another woman that would.

The other thing about the script that makes it a little better than it might appear on the surface is the classic horror movie morality that (by accident, I think, since it’s an old script) is very timely. The whole story kicks off with her denying an old lady a loan extension, causing her to lose her house. For Christine’s own personal code it’s the wrong thing to do, but she’s under pressure from her asshole peers and wanting to get this promotion, so she tries to be unfeeling about it. Raimi sets it up in an interesting way because the old lady is not very nice (to say the least) and is physically repulsive, coughing snot onto Christine’s desk and taking out her false teeth (which are completely rotted, by the way, even though they’re false). Christine has many excuses not to feel sorry for her, but deep down she does anyway, showing her humanity. And then throughout the movie she can have a combination of fear and guilt.

This goes back to Christine’s moral lapses, too, because she keeps lying and saying it was her boss that denied the extension, even though we saw that it was her own decision. Even while communicating with angry spirits in a seance she tries to pin it on her boss. Some funny shit. But of course she learns her lesson.

DRAG ME TO HELL doesn’t waste its time trying to reinvent horror, and it’s not nostalgic either. Okay, I counted four references to the EVIL DEADs, but it’s not trying to be retro or meta or anything. It’s just reviving an enjoyable type of horror that we don’t get enough of in our diets, and executing that style with flair and supreme skill.

Welcome back and long live new-old Sam Raimi.

[ratings]

But with this review we gotta transport ourselves back to the early 1990 when Raimi was an underdog, a cult director who had done two drive-in masterpieces and one disowned comedy, and here he was trying to break into the post-BATMAN studio game with a movie that was big budget for him but small compared to the movies it was gonna be held up against. It’s kind of like a comic book movie: a super hero origin story, with music by Danny Elfman, and with ‘man’ in the hero’s name. It’s also kind of a horror movie: he’s a mad scientist and a burnt up Phantom of the Opera type freak whose scarring turns him crazy and murderous. But mostly I think it’s like an action movie: it has R-rated violence, he’s getting revenge one-by-one on the criminals who wronged him, there’s explosions and stunts, and one of the screenwriters is Chuck Pfarrer, the ex-Navy SEAL who wrote NAVY SEALS and HARD TARGET.

Future Academy Award nominee Liam Neeson plays Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on a liquid skin substitute for burn victims. When his girlfriend (future Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) discovers proof that her sleazy boss (Logie award winner Colin Friels) is making bribes Westlake gets caught in the crossfire and a gang of criminals blows up his lab with him inside. Everybody thinks he’s dead but his burnt near-corpse winds up a John Doe in a hospital where the doctors take the liberty of giving him an experimental surgery that severes his nerve endings so he won’t feel the burns. The only negative side effects are that he has lost the sense of touch and that he has very sensitive emotions that can cause him to fly into a blind rage with an adrenaline rush that gives him the strength of ten men. Otherwise everything is fine.

Well, I guess the world’s worst ever living burn victim is lucky that he also happens to be the world’s foremost authority on replacement skin. But not that lucky, because he never perfected the formula, the skin melts after 99 minutes in sunlight. At this point, Westlake has a decision to make. He could tell the doctors look, I remember who I am, I’m Dr. Peyton Westlake. I happen to be an expert in liquid skin. Maybe you could help me to perfect it. If not well, let’s see what we can do here. Put me in rehab, help me to heal. Get me a psychiatrist because the healing on the inside will be even harder. Please, contact my girlfriend. I just proposed to her. She thinks I’m dead.

That would be hard work but you would think that’s what you’d have to do. But Westlake is stubborn. Instead he escapes the hospital ODB style, carts his damaged lab equipment to a condemned building and sets up shop. Later he’ll make himself a mask of what he used to look like and go to his girlfriend and not tell her about his burns. But first to get his confidence up he’ll stalk the thugs who attacked him, disguise himself as them and play elaborate tricks to set them up against each other.

When not disguised Darkman has an iconic phantom kind of look – bandaged face, black hat and trenchcoat. And Neeson does a great job bringing the freak out. With the fake Liam Neeson face he’s sensitive and wounded, in the lab out of disguise he loses it, grunting to himself and his cat, sarcastically dancing like the freak he thinks some imaginary oppressor sees him as. I guess he’s kind of like the Hulk, whoes super power is that he has a short fuse. But Darkman’s catchphrase would be “you wouldn’t like me when my feelings are hurt.”

When he does lose it Raimi lets loose with the visuals he was known for back then. Darkman’s world explodes into a psychedelic collage of flames, smoke, the firing of his own synapses and abstract, traumatic imagery, both real and imagined. Then he can toss people around or break the fingers of an unfriendly but otherwise innocent carnival worker. But to tell you the truth the super strength and lack of pain are not that big a part of what Darkman does. He gets more use out of his masks and his deviousness. And he has the balls to impersonate major crime figures while only knowing how to mimic a few phrases in their voices. And there are always unforeseen complications. He keeps coming mask-to-face with the people he’s disguised as, sometimes on accident, sometimes to fuck with their minds, once in a revolving door so nobody knows which is which.

There’s a great action movie type opening, throwing you into the world of two hardnosed crime bosses having a confrontation that turns into a tribute to the HARD BOILED warehouse shootout and involves a machine gun hidden inside a dude’s wooden leg. It’s quite an introduction for the secondary (but most memorable) villain, Larry Drake as Robert G. Durant. That guy was best known for playing a retarded guy on LA Law, so it was pretty cool to see him playing this arrogant asshole who cuts off fingers with a cigar cutter and collects them in carefully sorted display cases.

When the action comes up it’s good shit. There’s lots of jumping across roofs and fire escapes. In my opinion Dr. Westlake was not only a pioneer in skin replacement technology but also in parkour. The showstopping chase with Darkman hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter keeps switching distractingly to greenscreen-type closeups, but still, these days you watch those other shots and you can’t help but be awed. Holy shit, they really did that! Now they’d have some showoffy digital shot with the camera flying through or around the artificial action, but in 1990 they just filmed a real guy hanging off a real helicopter. And there’s a great part where Durant starts busting off explosive shells trying to hit Darkman and doesn’t give a shit that they’re blowing up cars on the highway below. Darkman doesn’t care too much about collateral damage either judging by his decision to hook the helicopter to some poor schmuck’s semi. Luckily the guy doesn’t seem to notice. He doesn’t even slow down when the chopper crashes and explodes.

Let me describe a shot that sort of sums up what was cool about Raimi back then. Darkman and his girl’s boss face off high above the city in the girders of an incomplete skyscraper. The bad guy mentions how many stories they are up, and the camera does a high-speed pan down the (miniature model) structure, all the way down to the ground – where it shows a cluster of rebar spikes sticking out of the ground ready to impale whoever falls. It looks cool and it’s totally excessive because who gives a shit if you get impaled, you just fell down like a hundred stories and probaly bounced off at least 75 different metal girders. Raimi knows the rebar is unnecessary and he knows that we know it’s unnecessary, but we all have an unspoken agree that it should still be shown. Because that’s how we like it.

DARKMAN has just the right balance of cartoonish over-the-topness and serious melodrama to make the phony bits part of the fun. For example I don’t mind accepting that he can scan any flat photograph to make a 3-D model of somebody’s head, and somehow finds the right clothes to wear with the disguises. If you or I were Darkman we would probaly figure out how to do those things too. This is a great movie of its type. It mixes so many of the best types of stories and gimmicks – the tragic monster, the super hero, the master of disguise, the avenger – into such a unique combination. It’s loaded with clever ideas and imaginative visuals, it has an energetic pace, it even has good acting. I like those SPIDER-MAN movies, I even enjoyed part 3 (sorry everybody), but DARKMAN is way more my speed.

[ratings]

For example, there is a black goo that falls from space which just happens to land right in the park where Spider-man is kickin it with his girl. Okay, admittedly the space goo may have been intentionally honing in on Spider-man’s powers, we don’t really know this. So I will let that one go. But when Tom Hayden Church is running from the pigs he just happens to climb over a fence into a science facility where, at that exact moment, scientists are about to do an experiment with sand which turns him into a sand monster. Admittedly, he did say earlier that he had bad luck, so that is sort of explained why that happens. So I guess I can let that one go too. But what about this. Eddie Brock happens to be in a church praying for God to kill Peter Parker at the exact moment Pete is yanking the evil space goo off of his suit up in the bell tower right above, so the goo falls on Eddie and turns him into a monster!? I mean what are the chances of that? The only way to explain it is that God was pissed that Eddie would defile the church with such a bullshit prayer, so He went Old Testament on him. Hmmm, actually I like that. Come to think of it, never mind, there are no coincidences, it’s air tight.

But what about Spider-man’s liberal attitude toward maintaining a secret identity? I know he’s always been kinda bad at it, but here he stands on a roof at a parade in his honor, wearing the suit with no mask. He allows all 3 villains to see his face and know who he is. He sits in the park out of his costume with his girl MJ using a super-spiderweb as a hammock. He even has an entire flying and web-shooting fight through New York City wearing a suit and tie and no mask. Hell, he can’t keep his suit in one piece anyway, and sometimes it turns him evil. I’m not sure why he even bothers anymore. Come out of the closet, dude.

The part comic book fundamentalists will burn the most effigies over, I bet, is where the goo gets ahold of Peter. Instead of turning him DARK and EEEEEEVIL like you might expect it gives him bangs and makes him a prick who thinks women love him. First there’s a scene where he struts around New York smiling at super models, a parody of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. I thought this is like something they’d pull in those corny old Super-man movies. Then comes the scene where, to piss off Mary Jane, he goes to the jazz club and interrupts her song with a piano solo and a super-powered evil chair dance (possibly a mating ritual from the Planet of the Evil Space Goo). Here I thought holy shit, Sam Raimi is trying to get fired from Spider-man. On the DVD it will be Chapter 22: Holy Shit, Sam Raimi Is Trying To Get Fired From Spider-man. I can see why most people would hate chapter 22, but it was so ridiculous and so “what the fuck” that I think I sort of liked it. You really need an evil piano solo to keep the audience on their toes.

Besides, comic strip fans are gonna hate this movie anyway, because it’s so different from the comics. I saw an issue once and in the comics he’s not even human, he’s a little pig named Peter Porker who turns into Spider-ham. I was surprised they never mentioned this in part 1 but geez, it’s been 3 movies now, they’ve had time to explain it. Those guys must be pissed.

The worst part of the movie to me is not a scene, its just one line. After a really fake looking but thrilling fight with his former best friend Harry (now using his dad’s Green Goblin equipment to try to kill Peter) Harry ends up in the hospital. This leads to a useless amnesia subplot, but oh well. The part I hate is when Harry tells his nurse, “My best friends. I’d give my life for them.”

Now, I’m not gonna give it away. I won’t tell you how I was able to decipher this line. But to me, personally, it gave a hint of how the movie was gonna end. And since it’s a good ending, the fitting way to resolve this trilogy, it would be nice to not have it announced 10 or 15 minutes into the damn movie.

But that brings me to what I like. The fights with Goblin Jr. are great. They are not just super hero fighting super villain. They’re also former friends, jealous rivals, and best buds getting pissed and trying to one-up each other. And their relationship changes throughout the movie. It’s not really like any other hero/villain relationship in these types of movies. They even get to team up at one point. Nice to see them pay off what they’ve been setting up in the other 2 movies.

I also liked The Sandman. He’s a cool special effects monster, also a likable lug. Thomas Haden Church in a striped shirt looks so much like a cartoon sailor it’s eerie. I couldn’t figure out if his mouth really looked like that or if it was movie magic.

Also, you got Space Goo Eddie, who is the lamest of the villains but still kind of cool. His motivation for hating Peter is that after he stole Peter’s job by cheating, Peter pointed out that he cheated. Boo fuckin hoo. Some super villains had their dad killed in a fight with Spider-Man, or Spider-Man stops them from stealing money they were gonna use to help their sick daughter. Maybe that’s why they need this guy Eddie: the other two villains are very sympathetic, you need one that’s just a complete dick. But at least he has a giant CGI mouth full of fangs, that’s cool.

They could’ve done a better job writing some of this shit, but I appreciated that they were trying for more. I like that they juggle a bunch of stories, it makes it feel different from the other two. The freshest thing about the movie though is the way it ends. You get the drift there pal, what I mean is HUGE SPOILERS COMING UP. See, most of the comic strip movies, they kill off the villain(s) at the end. That goes for most of the Batmans, the other 2 Spidermans, all 3 Blades I believe, even one of the Garfields. (just guessing.) In this one two die, but one of the two dies helping Peter, the other Peter actually saves but he is such a greedy prick he jumps back into the danger zone and gets blown to dust (actually I’m guessing he’ll be back, but I’m one a them conspiracy nuts). But the third one, the one that lives… Peter actually forgives and lets go. I’ve seen some nerds complaining about this, but fuck those guys. This is a brilliant touch for many reasons. 1. It’s something you hardly ever see in a movie. Usually the bad guy has got to die, or at least get busted. It’s not every day that the hero and villain come to understand each other and make peace. Original is good. 2. It’s actually a better solution to the problem. Sandman really is a well meaning individual. He is a sympathetic character. It is better for the world if he goes and helps his daughter than if Spider-man kills him. 3. (most important) The whole trilogy has been about Peter learning this lesson. He started his career as revenge for his Uncle Ben’s death, but his Aunt Grandma has been trying to teach him that revenge is a dish best not served at all, unless you’re some kind of huge asshole. In this scene Peter learns not to get revenge, he learns that he himself is a big asshole and he can’t exactly go around passing judgment on other people who do the same shit, and also he has just helped his best friend/worst enemy have a Darth Vader Redemption Moment so things are looking a little less black and white right now. So really this is the character and emotional climax of the entire trilogy, so if any of you assholes hated it because you’d rather see yet another villain fall off a building or get impaled, you really don’t deserve the effort these people are putting into these movies. Go watch GHOST RIDER.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this scene is reminiscent of the legendary bar/hand slap game/Cupcake scene from ON DEADLY GROUND (1996, d: S. Seagal). I almost yelled “I NEED TIME TO CHANGE!”

In conclusion, this movie is worse than the other two in some ways and better in other ways. Lots of interesting characters, great action scenes, good emotional climax, some sloppy writing and a weird tangent for the history books. When all is said and done I realize that actually I don’t like Spider-man that much. He’s no Blade. But these are three entertaining movies that fit together pretty well.

Anyway, trilogy done. Sam Raimi, please report to the woods.

[ratings]

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Anyway. This is a picture by Mr. Sam Raimi only it is based on the popular children’s comic strip, “SPIDER-MAN”. If I remember right what that was about was a nerdy kid who gets bit by a magic spider so he puts on a red and blue bodysuit and swings around on webs saving people. This works on account of he now has magic spider powers to climb up buildings, make wisecracks, etc. My internet research indicates that the webs actually did not shoot out of his wrists, as any logical person might assume, in fact they were shot by mechanical laser watches or some stupid shit that Peter Parker invented and this apparently is the building block on which all Marvel Comics are built and should never be altered if Sam Raimi doesn’t want to face a fate similar to that of Salman Rushdie (i.e. years of fear and hiding, followed by a cameo in Bridget Jones’s Diary).

There is a dash between Spider and Man apparently, you gotta be careful with that one on the internet. Again, Salman Rushdie.

Other than changing the web lasers this one appears to be very faithful to the juvenile picture books it is based on and that is where the charm is. It seems to me that most of these funny books are based around outlandish costumes, and at the same time the outlandish costumes cause the biggest dilemmas when adapting to the legitimate artistic medium of Film. I mean do you really want to have a guy wearing that kind of shit or not, that is the big question. In the case of Super-Man they said yes, he’ll wear the exact same thing that he wears in the drawings. And America loved it.

But that was the 1970s or 80s, a simpler time. Then there was Viet-Nam. Well, Viet-Nam had already happened but then there was a series of movies about Viet-Nam. So America was changed forever. I don’t know.

So by the time of the year 1989 and BAT-MAN (1989), nobody wanted to see that kind of dress in public. It made people uncomfortable. People were not as accepting of that kind of alternative lifestyle and did not want anyone dressed like that around their children. We fear what we don’t understand and in the ’89s we did not understand a guy swingin on a rope wearing tights and a cape. One of the biggest concerns by all involved (those making the movie, those watching the advertising) was that it would be like the old tv show from the ’60s, and nobody would take it seriously. Their solution – no bat-man costume, put im in rubber armor. And it worked. Audiences were immediately won over by the gloomy, serious approach, and although the movie is considered pretty boring by today’s lower standards of summer entertainment I would argue that it turned out to be one of the most influential movies of that decade. Even the topic of discussion this evening, SAM RAIMI’S SPIDER MOTHERFUCKIN MAN, by Sam Raimi, fits a bit into the Bat-Man template (spider-man confronting the killer of his guardian, danny elfman score, big showdown at community event featuring large inflatable characters).

THE X-MEN starring 2000 Outlaw Award Winner Hugh Jack-Man as Young Clint Eastwood also took the embarassed approach to costuming. They not only abandoned the colorful costumes from the children’s booklet series but had the characters joke about how asinine it would be to wear costumes like that. The best comic book movie franchise ever, BLADE, features fashion that might be considered eccentric but that at least passes as an outfit rather than a costume, and which is not based on the colorful costumes he apparently wore in the ’70s strips.

But Sam Raimi is an old fashioned gentlemen. He wears a suit and tie on set as an homage to Alfred Hitch-Cock. He creates imaginative horror masterpieces and then claims the inspiration is all 3 Stooges. He swears he really wants to be making boring movies about baseball. He starred in a movie as a manson like killer vietnam vet but he is in a pre-Vietnam film mentality. He is not the kind of guy that is gonna put Spiderman in black leather with some kind of infra-red goggles or some shit like that.

I mean maybe Spider-man is different. It’s hard to imagine what else you could do with him other than put a Spider-man costume on him. So that’s what he did. If you remember what Spider-man looks like, yeah, that’s what you see in the movie. Just, some guy wearing a Spider-man costume.

And I gotta be honest, the costume works, and so does the casting, and the effects. Together, they create exactly the comic book world that Mr. Raimi must remember reading from when he was child, and was able to still read comic books. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and James Franco are all perfect for their characters. It is easy to get wrapped up in the story as Peter Parker discovers his powers, uses them to deal with his nerdy teenage problems, than finds a greater purpose for them.

What really makes the movie work though is all the swingin around. I mean it was pretty cool in Sam Raimi’s THE AMAZING DARK-MAN when Dark-Man was hanging off a helicopter, but now computers can do all this swinging shit. Spider-Man just flops around all over the place, swings and swooshes and floopty floops. He jumps from buildings, kicks people across rooms. He does MATRIXY spider-dodges, and BLADE 2-esque computer jumps. And it’s all spectacular to watch, a real good time at the movies. To be honest it makes Super-Man, flying around in straight lines, look like a fuckin baby. Is that all you can do is fly, you fuckin cape wearin pussy? Spider-Man can flip, and stick to walls, and hang upside down. He has little pointy bug leg things that come out of his fingers, for christ’s sake. Can you compete with that? I don’t think so. Go home Super-Man. You can’t save the day, why don’t you go do a visa commercial with the guy from Seinfeld, asswipe.

You know what in all seriousness though, Christopher Reeve is the real Super-Man. Because he’s in a wheelchair.

Another thing Spider-Man does that most of the other comic book movies don’t bother with, he saves a bunch of people. Gals, babies, you name it. Not just a few cursory establishing heroics, they seem to make up the bulk of his daily activities. But there is a main villain, and that’s where the problem comes.

Willem Dafoe is pretty great as Norman Osborne, a scientist trying to get money from the military, who makes that classic Dr. Jekyll mistake of testing on himself and getting all Hyded up. Next thing you know he’s in a room by himself talking to a mask sitting on a chair that he thinks is telling him to kill people. Which, I mean, it’s time for some therapy there dude. He starts flying around on a magic jetboard wearing green armor and a mask, and throwing bombs at people and laughing. They call him the Green Goblin, I guess because he’s green.

I don’t know what it is but I completely accepted Toby Maguire flingin himself all over the city in a fancy molded Spider-Man costume. I wondered where in fuck’s name he GOT this costume but I had no problem watching him wear it. But then the second you have him standing on a rooftop talking to a guy in green armor, the whole thing seems pretty silly. They make a good joke about it, having Green Goblin lean up all casual and talk buddy buddy with Spider-Man. But until their final showdown (which for some reason reminded me of a scene in the Raimi executive produced HARD TARGET) you have a hard time taking things seriously any time the two costumes are in the shot together. I mean, jesus. Put some real clothes on, people. You can still be evil wearing, say, a hat.

So yeah, the villain is pretty stupid, but when he’s just Norman Osborne he works. His son Harry is Peter’s best friend and roommate. He treats his son coldly but gets excited around Peter because of his knack for science. And of course this makes things uncomfortable between the boys. I mean there are actual characters and relationships in this movie, melodramatic but interesting, and they set up many possibilities for sequels. It’s a good story, good characters, only one stupid costume, and good action scenes.

One word of warning to the hardcore comic strip enthusiasts. The pig version of Spider-man, Peter Porker the Amazing Spider-Ham, does not appear in this picture. He is apparently being saved for the sequel. I enjoyed this picture though thanks.

APPENDIX. RAIMI TOUCHES OF NOTE: Cameos by Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Lucy Lawless. We learn of Peter’s future powers via guided student tour of laboratories (as in Dark-Man). Green Goblin talks to evil version of himself in mirror (as in EVIL DEAD 2: HIS BEST SO FAR). Ends with corny shot of Spider-Man in front of American flag, which I’d guess is how FOR LOVE OF THE GAME probaly ends, but I haven’t seen it.

[ratings]

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