CLAYFACE is the latest motion picture from the Detective Comics movie universe. It’s set mostly in Gotham City, retelling the origin of one of the great Batman villains, but it’s R-rated horror, and not much like a comic book movie, for good and bad. The good – it stands completely on its own, with none of the little movie universe connections, cameos or credit sequences that people used to demand but now get so mad about. The bad – I’d say it could use more of that heightened feeling of the best movies based on drawings. It doesn’t stand out that much from all the other horror movies that are not based on comic books. But I liked it. It has some clunkiness that will probly draw fire under the heightened scrutiny of comic book shit, but that I can forgive.

Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries, DRAGONHEART: BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE) is an actor on the rise. He famously had a hard childhood on the rough side of Gotham City, but now he’s a popular heartthrob who just got nominated for an Oscar (or unnamed Oscar-type award) for best actor.

(If you know comic books you can forgive that the famous actor Clayface was Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen was a different character, because they combined them so well in the classic Batman: The Animated Series episodes. But if you know Oscars you don’t like that this shows the nominations announced in the middle of the afternoon and not in alphabetical order. Come on guys, that’s not canon.)

Matt goes to a club to celebrate and, feeling on top of the world, leaves with a woman who hits on him on the dance floor, even though his weinery bestest pal Corey (Joshua James, CRIMINAL) warns that that’s Mia Torrez (Joana Ribeiro, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE), girlfriend of “Gotham businessman” (infamous gangster) Markos Szabo (David Dencik, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO).

Who cares? He’s an Oscar nominee! He can do anything. You think Richard Jaeckel went to bed alone after his nomination for SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION? You think Dan Aykroyd worried about whose toes he was stepping on when he was high on DRIVING MISS DAISY? Nah, you feel indestructible! So Matt wakes up naked with Mia and with a circle of (clothed) goons around the room. And one thing that’s spot on in this movie is the casting of goons. A variety of dudes with old timey cartoon faces combined with modern styles. Each has a different shape, different size, different bad hair cut. They hold Matt down while Szabo brutally slashes his face with a straight razor, leaving him looking like a monster.

There’s no signs of a Batman in this Gotham City, only the conditions that created him. The police won’t charge Szabo due to lack of evidence, and Matt loses his civil trial due to bribes and threats, plus they make him look like a sex creep. His agent (Nancy Carroll, F1) drops him via snail mail, he blows his savings on surgeries that don’t help much, he ends up back in the slums from whence he came, hiding behind a plastic mask and hoodie, still causing whispers everywhere he goes. Back to where he started except way worse off.

The clay comes from Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie, MICKEY 17, I LOVE BOOSTERS), a pioneer in an experimental nano-tech treatment he reads about in a magazine. She wants to cure diseases, not save a movie star’s good looks, and she tries to turn down his offer to illegally use him for human trials. But she’s at the end of her funding, she’s already done a little experimenting on herself, and I think there’s a little attraction there, both to the guy and the notoriety. She makes a bad decision. Many bad decisions are involves in origin stories.

After many rounds of injections and gradual improvements, they miraculously bring back Matt’s pretty face. The two of them grow close, causing tension not only because she’s engaged but because her fiancee Jon (Max Minghella, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL) is a Gotham PD homicide detective. So if any clay-related homicides were to occur…

Which gets me to the clayface. Against the doctor’s advice, Matt jumps right back into movie star world, wanting to show up the former friends who abandoned him in his time of need. He makes a big splash showing up uninvited to a premiere, but has to run off when his face starts melting. It’s one of many parts that remind me of DARKMAN (which this is definitely not as good as, but how many movies are?).

I don’t think they necessarily take too long getting to the clayface, but I do think the buildup is a little too generic. On paper it may sound interesting to show the gradual steps of this super villain origin, but when you hold it up against the forty-some minutes of Batman: The Animated Series’ Feat of Clay parts 1 and 2 you can see that the economical version is simply better. The power of animation ends up making a simple version feel deeper than a more detailed and grounded version.

When he starts dripping, though, the movie gets cooking. I get annoyed by the modern enthusiasm for the term “body horror,” but it definitely applies here, and not in the “it’s like Cronenberg” way. As Matt experiences the transformation of his flesh there are some imaginatively disturbing gross-outs. Like the scene where his eyelids grow back together on a plane and he has to try to cut them with scissors in the bathroom during extreme turbulence. It’s okay because he discovered after face planting in a basketball game that his wounds can instantly heal – even the blood he drips returns to the source. But I personally don’t like putting blades next to my eyeballs.

He doesn’t know how to control this, and he’s famous, so there’s the constant threat of some paparazzi or random phone-haver witnessing one of his public monster incidents. And Szabo is still around and compromising people close to him, including his manager Frank (Eddie Marsan, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED). So it shifts from a THE FLY type monster tragedy to a DARKMAN type revenge saga as he accidentally discovers how to stop having disturbing things happen to his body and start doing disturbing things with it. And also to combine his abilities with his acting skills to infiltrate a gang.

I don’t think I’ve seen Rhys Harries in anything before, so I was surprised how readily I accepted him as a movie star. He looks like a pretty Willem Dafoe. And he’s good. He has a face that can work as too-good-to-be-true and as haggard and weird, even before the aid of the special effects makeup, which is very good. (Hair & makeup supervisor: Emmy Beech.) There are a few parts where his face morphs into somebody else that I thought were a little hokey looking, but otherwise the digital FX are also very effective. It’s low budget for a comic book, high budget for a horror movie, and since it plays mostly as the latter, that’s an advantage.

I need to bring up one thing that I might have to delete because it might be completely off base. One of the aforementioned gaggle of cartoonish goons is a greasy long-haired latter-day-Gerard-Depardieu-looking motherfucker called Sal. I thought there was something weird about him like he was a guy under latex makeup. Then he ends up being the thug who Matt disguises himself as during an important infiltration scene. This made me wonder if in fact he’d been played by Rhys Harries. But I didn’t catch that on the credits and IMDb doesn’t have all the character names listed and I can’t find anything to confirm or disconfirm this speculation. So let me know if you’ve heard anything. I’m probly off my rocker but it would be cool if they went through that trouble.

Also I guess there’s something weird where Aaron Paul played his father in scenes that were cut and at one point his face turns into him so it’s weird? I didn’t notice, maybe because I didn’t watch Breaking Bad and it’s been a while since NEED FOR SPEED.

I’ve heard other critics who seem more concerned than me with this as a piece of the DC Universe. It didn’t seem to me like it was trying to establish anything. I will say that if the Gotham City in the next Batman movie isn’t at least 80% more expressionistic than this one I would be disappointed. It is living up to James Gunn’s promise that his DC Universe would feature movies totally different from each other; this is not the candy-colored world of his SUPERMAN. But channeling some of that feel into a horror movie would be something different. I’m old fashioned, I still think comic book movies should be expected to have more visual style than other movies. This should stand out more. It could benefit from more atmosphere and style.

But I think once the Clayface abilities kick in it’s fun enough to recommend. It’s also a movie that asks many important questions, such as “What is this song that I recognize from STEP UP 3?” (“Beggin’ [Pilooski Re-Edit], Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but STEP UP 3 uses a cover by Madcon released the same year as the remix.)

The King of Streaming Horror TV Fright Master Mike Flanagan (DOCTOR SLEEP) previously pitched a Clayface film for other iterations of the DC universe, and developed an earlier version with Matt Reeves. When James Gunn took over he was sold on it. Flanagan wrote the screenplay but couldn’t direct due to THE EXORCIST: MARTYRS and Carrie. Instead it’s directed by James Watkins (EDEN LAKE, SPEAK NO EVIL remake), who brought in Hossein Amini (KILLSHOT, DRIVE, SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) to rewrite, and I get the impression they kinda abandoned whatever Flanagan wanted to do. I kinda suspect he woulda made a stronger movie than this, but Watkins’ okay movie plus Flanagan’s great Carrie show (unless the last episode turns me against it) is a positive outcome.