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.) (read the rest of this shit…)
I don’t know why it took me this long, but I finally decided to catch up with the two Mike Flanagan joints I hadn’t seen yet (not counting the dramas he made during and immediately after college, or the TV series The Firefighter Combat Challenge). He made his entry into horror in 2006, with a shot-on-video-in-one-room short called Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan. Like George Lucas with 
This is a rare event for me, to watch a prequel to a movie I haven’t seen and don’t plan to see. The original OUIJA from 2014 was a PG-13 horror movie co-produced by ghost-merchants Blumhouse and remakers Platinum Dunes, “based on Ouija by Hasbro.” It’s the same writers as KNOWING, which could be a plus, but I didn’t know that until just now. So it didn’t seem like a movie for me, and nobody told me otherwise.
I think it’s pretty widely agreed now that Mike Flanagan is one of the most qualified candidates for a new “Master of Horror,” right? Two others would be Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, but they only have two movies each to go by. Flanagan has more evidence on file. I know it’s a title previously reserved for the guys we read about in Fangoria when we were growing up, and here I’m nominating three guys I’m older than. Time is a bastard. But we need fresh blood. The Masters need heirs.
As a young man I read a bunch of Stephen King. He was my favorite until I decided Clive Barker was more interesting – I don’t know if I was right. The point is I’m just another movie-watching asshole and can’t pretend to be a King scholar. I haven’t read The Shining (1977) or its 2013 sequel Doctor Sleep. I have, of course, seen Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, and like everyone except King and the Razzies voters I think it’s a masterpiece. (I also just realized it’s the first horror movie I remember seeing.)
